The general public prefers their war heroes to be dead

The first British bombing-raid of World War 2, on the Admiral Scheer battleship at Wilhelmshaven, resulted in the first RAF deaths of the conflict, with eleven of the twelve Blenheim aircrew involved losing their lives. Just one crewman survived, and he then endured six bitter years as a prisoner of war. His named was Larry Slattery, an Irishman.

He returned to Ireland in 1945, to his home town in Tipperary, where he lived in a single room above a shop, speaking to no one, ever. His face could occasionally be seen staring out of his unwashed window. He died alone in the 1960s.

The RAF rightly honours the 11 men who perished at Wilhelmshaven, as the first of the 55,000 men who were to lay down their lives in the service of Bomber Command. But how many Larry Slatterys were there, across the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, whose lives had effectively ended during the war, who endured the rest of their days tormented by demons, but whose names are on no memorials?

Remembrance Sunday has too often become an excuse for a grisly and maudlin sentimentality about a 'lost generation', or 'lions led by donkeys'. The day serves as an excuse for any cliche about war, about man's inhumanity to man, and about the futility of armed conflict.

Yet the single, inalienable truth is that a society that is not able to defend itself against threat from the outside will sooner or later go the way of the Arapaho and the Pawnee; and once a society has armed itself in self-protection, the chances are that, sooner or later, it will be drawn into conflict of some kind or other.

The original purpose of the poppies was to make work for men maimed in battle

If war is a commonplace human activity, so too is compassion: yet true, enduring, adult compassion towards the maimed of war is one of the most strikingly absent features about how British society has responded to the aftermath of war.

After all, the original purpose of the artificial poppies was to give employment to men who had been maimed in battle. These broken men were still made to work to survive. The British never even had the French tradition of reserving seats in public transport for veterans mutiles par la guerre.

In fact, it could be said that the British preferred it if all their Larry Slatterys skulked in their solitary bedsits, and gibbered in the cold and dark. It was in this ignoble tradition that some parents earlier this year protested at the presence of maimed servicemen swimming in a leisure centre in Bedfordshire.

Their appearance, it was alleged, would frighten the local children. No doubt these parents are this weekend proudly sporting their poppies, while their children are participating in gruesomely winsome school projects about the Somme and Third Ypres.

But the dead of Picardy and Flanders are now long dead: and we today, moreover, are unfortunate enough to live in interesting times. There will not be a year for at least a decade to come in which a soldier will not regularly be seen walking backwards down the ramp of a transport plane at Brize Norton, steadying the forward movement of a Union Jack-clad coffin, home from some foreign field.

What we do not see are the other boys coming home without eyes or legs, the young girls returning with mutilated faces, or the physically intact soldier whose mind was fried in some single searing event that is otherwise invisible to history. The fate of such victims is usually reported in the news, and then forgotten, in that single, disposable phrase, 'and three other soldiers were injured',  or some variant thereof.

Shrapnel does its damage gouging great tracts of flesh and bone from the body

War is the condition by which the people of Britain must get used to living. That is it: the ugly, unending truth, stretching into the indefinite future. This means death: but the dead are dead, and are gone. The returned wounded must make what they can of their lives - and that might not be very much. 

For shrapnel does its damage by gouging great tracts of flesh and bone from the human body, which it does not always then kill. Simon Weston, Welsh Guards, has done a service to all injured servicemen, and to society as a whole, with the courage he has shown, living with only his burnt-out husk of a face. But there will be more Simon Westons, more Larry Slatterys, coming home from Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else?

A mature nation must not hide these casualties, but instead, treat them publicly, with open respect and compassion. For to revere the long-dead, while stigmatising the maimed living, constitutes a particularly degenerate form of ancestor-worship: it is an utter hypocrisy, and one which merely makes poppycock of the poppy. ·