We cannot put faces to names on the granite ...or recall their voices

THIS week marks the 75th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation, in the same year that has seen the deaths of the l ast men I personally knew who served in the Second World War, and in the same month that we marked the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe.

It is sobering to be reminded how rapidly that titanic struggle for national survival and the very ‘cause of Christian civilisation’, as George VI observed in his most celebrated wartime broadcast, now slides away from living memory.

And striking, too, as such occasions are marked in our own day, how solemn they have become. As late as 1995, the VE Day thanksgiving was really rather a romp, with spam fritter competitions, Bob Hope over from the US to crack the funnies, Vera Lynn and her blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover, and the Queen Mother, i n radiant yellow, speaking bright, wise words from the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

The fact is that those who fought, and those who feared for them, have largely gone, and taken that wry, impish spirit of the Blitz with them. You have to be in your late seventies to have any memory of Hitler’s war, and pushing 90 to have borne arms in it. Rites of remembrance are now darker because they are no longer, really, for the veterans, but for those who mourn for them, and their generation.

For a new generation, it is hard to understand just how near and recent the Second World War still was – a quiet, earnest pall over the land – when those of us now in our forties were children. When I began school, in 1971, it had been over for just 26 years. It was nearer to us then than the Falklands conflict is to us now.

We put up so meekly with the melodramatics of Edward Heath’s government of the day – power cuts, shortages, threats of petrol rationing, queues, inconveniences, states of emergency – because we were largely still the same biddable wartime people, all self-consciously in it together, and respectful of lawful authority.

My grandfather and three of his brothers had fought in it. So had the fathers of several of my classmates. Our headmaster had served in the Royal Navy. So had our formidable PE teacher.

ATIMID, somewhat ineffectual modern languages teacher had been in the RAF, was taken prisoner, escaped, was recaptured and tortured by the Gestapo – and in 1983, without warning or fuss, took his own life.

So many from my parental island of Lewis served in the Second World War. One village, North Tolsta, had a higher proportion of its menfolk under the colours than any other community in Britain. I cannot think of any significant action in the conflict where I did not personally know anislesman who had been there.

My grand-uncle was on HMS Ajax when she chased the Graf Spee i nto Montevideo. My grandfather was on HMS Glasgow when she pursued the Bismarck. His minister once told me of his own memories of Dunkirk – how he had watched helplessly as a paddle steamer, laden with troops, had been bombed and sunk. Norman Smith, who died only a few months ago, had fought at Anzio... and so on.

And how readily we forget the remoteness of the recent past. Far into the 1980s, many eminent in public life were thoughtful veterans. Nearly half the members of Margaret Thatcher’s first Cabinet had fought. Three – Lord Hailsham, Lord Soames and Keith Joseph – had been wounded. Angus Maude had been a prisoner of war. Four – Lord Carrington, Francis Pym, Willie Whitelaw and Soames again – had been decorated for gallantry. Denis Healey, Donald Stewart and others on the Opposition benches had served. And, vague and wussy as he might seem, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, bore the Military Cross for signal heroism in 1945, rescuing one of his men from a blazing tank, knocking out heavily defended German gun positions, and being among the first British soldiers i nto Bergen-Belsen.

That gave Runcie real authority when he spoke, in contrast to the low esteem with which such ecclesiastics are generally regarded today. And when Tony Blair came to power, in still more striking contrast, his Cabinet did not contain a single man who had ever worn uniform.

It is easy, now, to look back and see how the war stamped the older adults of my boyhood. Their values, outlook and bearing were coloured by it, be they veterans of battle or teachers whose careers had begun in the late 1930s and who had seen pupils pass forth to serve and, in not a few instances, die.

They detested indiscipline, coarseness, flippancy and frivolity. They were incensed by the least waste of food. ‘Clean plates!’ my grandmother used to bark. ‘Clean plates...’

They dressed formally, wore a tie even on Saturdays. You did not trifle with such erect, greying figures. But you remember sensing an extraordinary tenderness for children. It was for us, their future, they had fought.

It is hard, also, for a new generation to grasp that, really, the Second World War had not then stopped. We forget that it was only with the reunification of Germany, in 1990, that peace-treaties could be done, orders agreed and the whole thing legally ended.

Young f olk today cannot remember the Cold War – the lingering unease, the stark conviction of so many of my classmates that we would all die in a nuclear inferno. We can clearly remember the air-raid sirens still visible, by crossroads and atop obsolete police boxes, in every British city – and the great panic in Edinburgh, one day in 1986, when they were accidentally switched on.

WE grouse today about what Margaret Thatcher allegedly did t o Scotland’s heavy industry and, a quarter- century after her fall, she remains an extraordinarily demonised figure.

But, as the historian Richard Vinen wrote: ‘Thatcher’s world was dominated by the Cold War. For the whole of her premiership, there really were weapons of mass destruction pointed at London...’

Everything Mrs Thatcher did, even domestically, has to be considered through that prism and, significantly, her premiership did not long survive the Cold War’s end, not l east because, l i ke most of her generation, she had a profound distrust of Germany and Germans.

Today, in all public life, one can think of only two people still standing who served against Hitler – the Duke of Edinburgh and, albeit briefly, the Queen herself. But the Second World War, of course, has enduring resonances beyond their witness, and such as remain of their comrades.

Unlike the Great War, of which our national view seems to have been irremediably warped, the war against Nazi Germany was unambiguously right.

And it was unambiguously won – our foes vanquished, all terrors overcome. The Germans, and i ndeed the Japanese, have never since been a threat to anyone.

Yet we are a different people. We are no longer a land of deference. We gaze at war memorials, nowadays, acutely aware how little choice those young men had – and, perhaps, how little they knew of the realities of battle.

It would be very difficult, today, to enforce conscription – and quite impossible, given the technology of our times, to impose meaningful censorship.

As we cannot now put faces to the names on the granite, or recall their voices, it is harder every year to imagine their world – the hard, physical lives, the cold homes, the dull food, the widespread churchgoing.

Yet is there not envy in it too? – the keen sense of community, the united national purpose, the general and understated decency of an age at once bleaker but more upright than our own.

Yes, our rites of remembrance grow the more austere, more wistful. Because, with each passing year, we grieve less for them than for ourselves.