Each year they grow old. As their comrades friends and lovers do not. Soon, quite soon the veterans of the first great war - which idiot thought it ever fit or proper to call such an industrial slaughter that - will fade away. All gone.
The queen arrives, last, at this brief service, after the rest of the senior and a growing British royal family have assembled for their sherry. In the Home Office. The Life Guards march, on foot, the only horse power here is firing pistons in a regal collection of cars.
Worth millions.
One phantom motorised carriage after another for each class of duke by rank, no need for whips, Edinburgh, Cornwall, Cambridge, York, Wessex with Gloucester bringing up the rear.
Oh how things change. Odd, how when parliament is opened, by the same firm, there is evidence of the 19th century. In the road. Today horses lurk in smaller streets. Perhaps in case of trouble greater than war.
An old soldier, from the second great war, of the twentieth century, only of course, the other day on TV called himself a silly bugger for crying, tearing up as he remembered his mates. Those blown up limbs dispersed by bombs falling without warning from the sky mown down by machine guns choked to death by mustard gas.
Or some more modern associate.
And there's the thing.
War is a crime. A nasty brutish thing. And now the secret is out. We the people.
Know.
Stories are being handed down. Eighty years more or less at a leap. These campfire tunes, from gods to sons and sons to grandsons and especially our daughters are our aboriginal songlines. This is our folk history. And mark my words they are not myths.
It is striking, how, there are seemingly many more older veterans, this year in wheel chairs.
Those whose bodies were shattered at the time are joined by those whose age and infirmities require a push and a helping hand. And a hand is what everyone gets on remembrance Sunday in London. Echoing down the line.
It is striking, also, the number of young people, boys and girls of 10 or so who join the march off, carrying their parents medals, a likeness, a poppy.
A school term or so on they may sign up to join the other young people, also children here today. To fight. The frighteningly young looking people, un-bloomed, we send to war. And put in harm's way.
War.
This year 2011 is the 90th time there has been a poppy appeal by the British Legion. Blood red petals floated down in the Albert Hall as once again the nation remembers its fallen the dead the never to return. To kiss.
None of this is a glorification of war.
The political class has lost its grip on its cannon fodder. Those who go over the top to fight for oil or commerce and riches in someone else's battle. We are AWOL.
Those like Haigh and Lloyd George and Kitchener. And Blair and Bush who think it is in keeping with their high office to lie to a nation are losing the war. Have lost the war.
On the street, around Westminster and in Whitehall the public meets each year. In November and in ever increasing numbers to remember the time at which the 1914 boys became men. Some of them. Died.
That wonderful white stone bollard dividing the traffic up and down Whitehall was meant to be a temporary thing, a momentary thing, to commemorate The Glorious Dead.
And there it still stands. For The living dead.
This silent, pearl white, constant gravestone stands at the heart of London, its government and all the people of a United Kingdom.
Each year as is proper the public pays its respects. But jingoists beware.
The loving, peace loving people of Britain have begun a great accounting.
