There are moments when a connection between the past and the present, fraying for decades, finally snaps. As a child in Britain in the late 1960s, I remember the old men from the Western Front marching past the Cenotaph, the survivors of Ypres, Passchendaele, and all the other killing fields. As the years passed, their ranks thinned, then dwindled to a handful in their wheelchairs. Then there was no one.

Sadly, another fading of the guard is well underway, as the veterans of the Second World War march into their nineties and beyond. On Thursday, Vera Lynn, Britain’s “forces’ sweetheart,” died at the age of 103. For Brits, she was the last great living symbol of “the war,” as so often it is still referred to, a conflict that needs no other identifier, a reflection of the grip it still has on the British psyche — for good, or some say, ill.