THE people who fought for this country in the last war are now all old age pensioners. Hardly anyone survives who fought in the First World War. Even to have done National Service, you have to be over 60.

As it is more than half a century since the end of the Second World War and Britain has not lost large numbers of people in conflicts since then, I would have expected interest in Remembrance Day to have waned.

One of the first jobs I ever covered when starting as a reporter back in the Sixties was the Remembrance Sunday service at the war memorial in Kensington. Traffic drowned most of the ceremony and did not stop for the two-minute silence. The hymns were sung half-heartedly and music was provided spasmodically by a few bronchial bugles.

On seeing and hearing this sad ceremony, I thought Remembrance Sunday was doomed. Even ten years ago, it was spluttering towards what looked like an inevitable demise as the number of ex-Servicemen and women dwindled.

But, something has happened to change attitudes in the last decade and I am not sure what it is. There will be far more people at ceremonies up and down the country this Sunday than ever there were in the 1960s.

What's more, there will be ceremonies all over the place today at 11am on Remembrance Day itself. They will mark the exact time when the worst conflict in the history of the world ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Back in the Sixties there was a widespread feeling that Remembrance services in some way glorified war. Perhaps it was because so many people attended still wearing the uniforms of conflict. It led in the Eighties to a brief fashion for pacifists to wear white poppies, enraging those who stuck to the traditional red.

But now people gather together in silence, or stand on their own as I shall probably be today, to remember the millions who died. People will do it in their own individual ways whether they are members of CND or whether they have a long Services tradition in their families.

Another change of attitude, evident in sophisticated Western countries such as Britain, has been an increasing reluctance to commit people to the risk of death in war. I think this started more than 30 years ago in Vietnam, the first conflict to be televised, where everyone could see on their screens what was going on and many did not like it.

In the Falklands War of 1982, the number of casualties was small, especially on the British side, but apart from one well-remembered headline in the Sun of Gotcha, the attitude towards the deaths, even of enemy personnel, was one of sadness.

It was even more marked in the Gulf War of 1991, while earlier this year in Kosovo, the Allies managed the remarkable feat of achieving their military results without losing a single casualty.

But I wonder what the long-term implications of this distaste for body bags will be. One can be optimistic and say that it could lead to one of the longest periods of peace ever.

However, if a new Hitler emerged today, prepared to fight a dirty ground war to further his awful aims, what would our reaction be? Would we be afraid to retaliate for fear of fatalities?

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.