Afghanistan's daily agony means that Remembrance Day is now very much a sorrow for this generation.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Armistice Day, as it used to be called, which began it all. But it is a fading memory, guarded quietly by a handful of the very old who looked upon it as wondering small children.

As I watched Sunday's annual homage to the dead, though, I was unusually and vaguely uncomfortable about the pomp; for everyone knows today's British soldiers have been short-changed in Afghanistan - in their number, - and sent to do a nasty, difficult job with only second-best gear.

In the light of recent controversy, a cynic could call Sunday's traditional strut and glitter a confidence trick, for all its tender moments.

What price the fanfares, the whited helmets, the massing of the great and good in Whitehall, when the lads are sent to the Front - insofar as there is a Front in the desert of Helmand - with body armour so poor they could not wear it? With snatch Land Rovers designed in the 1970s to nip round the corners of back streets in New Lodge or the top of the Shankill, but found in the open wastes of Helmand, to fold up like silver paper above a roadside bomb? With the Ridgebacks, which have better armour, held up because there were no aircraft to fly them to the battlefield? With soldiers having to spend up to £1,000 of their own money on better boots, body armour and other gear? In the face of all this, some of the generals have been speaking out. Their relations with Number Ten are at an all-time low. None have actually said it, but they might well ask whether Prime Minister Blair, before he committed British troops to Afghanistan, should not have satisfied himself that the Army's Lynx helicopters could fly in the heat and thin air of the high-altitude battlefield to which he was consigning them.

It was found - too late - that they could not. The Lynx has had to be withdrawn. So now British troops are reduced to one helicopter for every 700 troops on the ground (the Americans have one for every 200), meaning that more patrols have to travel on the sand. This is costing lives.

The sorry tale seems to be repeating the carelessness, if not - so far - the deception, of Iraq, when British forces were committed on a fraudulent prospectus and before their political masters had succeeded in pinning the Bush administration down on what the post-conflict plan for the territory was. Did they try? If they had, they would have found there was none.

One of the first British soldiers to die there, Sergeant Steven Roberts, was ordered to give his body armour to another soldier because of a shortage of equipment.

When he died, Sergeant Roberts was clad in makeshift armour which he had made by stuffing pieces of padding into his fatigues and sticking them together with masking tape. The pathologist declared at his inquest that this cost him his life.

There is also the matter of the conditions under which these gallant men and women live in barracks in the UK. Tales of rat-infested lockers, mould-covered bathrooms, overflowing drains and soldiers sleeping eight to a room, point to crass mismanagement.

Ministers admit to 'chronic under-investment' but Gordon Brown was Chancellor - with unparalleled control of government spending in all departments, including defence - when this scandal was allowed to develop.

He must have known the problems existed when he acquiesced to Blair's decision to go to war. Both were present at the Cenotaph on Sunday. Truly, we live in an age of no shame. The Army at the moment is smaller than it has been at any time since it was cut by half after Waterloo in 1815. That is something this island knows all about. In those years there were actually more Irishmen than English in the Army. As it is, the current rundown will pose problems for the new government.

It will be on the wrong side of public opinion.The drain of continual losses in support of a campaign nearly two thirds of citizens now think unwinnable, will be politically difficult; even more so if the Army is to stay in Helmand - as senior officers hint - for another five years.

The Prime Minister's argument that its current role is rendering the UK safer is rejected by many, including some in his own party. In fact they would maintain it is making things more dangerous.

The Government's peril lies, at one extreme, in the grievous price of its chosen policy, depicted nightly on the television news, and at the other, in the general mystification of the people as to what the conflict is about.

The political damage will accrue when puzzlement turns to anger.