I have just had the strange experience of listening to the two minutes silence from the Cenotaph on Radio 3.

Not quite silent. The whispering sound of wind and the cries of disrespectful gulls echo in the predictive emptiness; the bells of Big Ben sounding more portentous than usual at the start, bringing to mind Wilfred Owen’s bitter question: “what passing bells for these that die as cattle?”

Remembrance requires forgetting all that, so the “shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells” can be fired up again.

A muffled shot from a heavy gun marking the hour when they all fell silent in 1918, but, now, seeming to be a warning. In imperialist countries, we are always “between the wars”; though the next one really could be “the war that ends all wars”, because it will end us.

The Last Post at the end seeming to be played for all of us in advance of the Great European War that the top brass – like General Sir Roly Walker, a man whose name sounds like an ambulatory aid for the elderly – have in mind, in which we will “lose our children”, and ourselves.

The only future lies in resisting.