Remembering well

Extraordinary how potent cheap drama is. The latest season of Downton Abbey, which ended on Sunday, pulled off a rare double in its interpretation of the first world war — making you laugh one second at the wooden acting and the clunky script; the next second, making you cry at the suffering and tragedy. But Downton tears are comforting, almost pleasurable: the tears you cry for Brief Encounter or Love Story. They’re not the agonising tears cried by mourners in Royal Wootton Bassett, their bodies contorted with acute physical grief.

There are different degrees of sadness over death in battle. The grief we feel on this Remembrance Sunday for the first world war dead may not be Downton Abbey sadness-lite; but it is still remote, secondary mourning, far removed from raw, Royal Wootton Bassett grief. The 65 million people who fought in the Great War are all dead. The last surviving combat veteran, Claude ‘Chuckles’ Choules, of the Royal Navy, died in May, at 110; although the last non-combat veteran, Florence Green, from King’s Lynn, also 110, an officers’ mess steward in the Women’s Royal Air Force, is still alive. And the last people directly affected by the first world war — even if they never served in the forces — are disappearing too. You’d now have to be at least 92 to have had a parent killed in the War, even if you were in utero on Armistice Day.

Of course the rest of us can still be sad for those who died, and pay respect to them; as we will this Remembrance Sunday, given an extra charge by the unprecedented striking of the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of the century.