In the end, it is really only your old comrades who salute you

From Our modest war heroes may be forgotten by the state - but not by the Telegraph by Stephen Glover.

Glover describes the art of obituaries in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph and how they have made a particular point of drawing attention to the deaths of those who served in World War II. The whole piece is worth reading.

Emphasis added.

Sometimes I read such pieces with an aching heart, and always in a state of awe. I love the Telegraph for caring about this vanishing race of men who served Britain when she was still a great power. Of course, it cannot write about all of them. Let me mention my father-in-law, Peter Montague, who died on New Year’s Day at the age of 88. Actually I wrote about him in The Spectator Christmas edition of 1996. He was a young officer in the Honourable Artillery Company seconded to the 2nd Indian Field Regiment who, having been trained in Arctic warfare, found himself in the North African desert at the beginning of 1942. On 27 May 1942 his regiment was part of the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade which engaged the Germans (who had first been mistaken for South Africans!) at the Battle of Bir Hacheim. Six of the regiment’s officers were killed and a further 12 taken prisoner, Peter among them, his face burnt by an exploding petrol tank. He spent the rest of the war in a series of Italian and German prisoner-of-war camps from which he tried, without success, to escape.

I mentioned in that Christmas piece how officers who had served in the 2nd Indian Field Regiment would meet every year in an Indian restaurant in London. After Indian independence in 1947, the regiment was incorporated into the Indian army. It has no premises of its own in this country, nor any regimental memorabilia, and its annual lunches in that dingy restaurant, some of which I was privileged to attend, have been the only commemoration of its wartime role. Even in 1996 time had reduced the numbers to 10 or 11. Now the survivors have dwindled to perhaps two or three, and the lunches have been stopped.

They taught me that, in the end, it is really only your old comrades who salute you — and perhaps the Daily Telegraph. Certainly you should not depend on the gratitude or continuing interest of the state. A few years ago Peter went to look up his war records in some government archive and found that according to officialdom he had not existed. Happily the Honourable Artillery Company has a better memory.

When I read these obituaries in the Daily Telegraph, I think how very young these old men were then, and how frightened, despite their courage, they must sometimes have been. Those of us who have never been in a battle can never know what it is really like. As he lay delirious on the verge of death, Peter was back in the desert of more than 60 years ago, shouting orders and warnings, gabbling about Germans, and sometimes striking the air. This is the world that is slipping from us. Every week, every day still, these old men are dying, but the source is inexorably diminishing. There will be fewer and fewer such obits in the Telegraph. And one day, not so very far away, there will be none at all.