By Adam Boulton, Editor At Large

This weekend's national ceremony of remembrance in Whitehall will be different. The Queen will not lay a wreath of poppies at the foot of the Cenotaph. Instead Her Majesty will look on from a balcony of the Foreign Office as her son, Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, stands in for her.

There are sound practical reasons for the change, headed by the age and frailty of the 91-year-old monarch.

In recent years changes have been made to shorten slightly the amount of time Elizabeth II has to stand out in the cold November air. The number of wreath layers has been cut and UK political leaders have been told to make their tributes simultaneously rather than one after the other.

This year's change symbolises more than that.


Image: The Royal British Legion has now commoditised the annual Poppy Day appeal with a host of brand items

In 1975 the American literary critic Paul Fussell published a book titled The Great War And Modern Memory, which explored how experiencing the First World War influenced the culture of the 20th century. Those who lived through that war are long gone. Forty years on it is the memory of living through the Second World War which is slipping from the public consciousness.

The Queen is the last British monarch who lived through the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, the Holocaust and a live existential threat to the people of her kingdom. She was a 19-year-old young woman on VE Day and had famously "done her bit" as a land girl and driver/mechanic on the home front.

Prince Charles and almost all of the rest of us do not share that experience. Yet the Second World War remains the defining image of the British national consciousness in the way that cowboys and the Wild West provide the mythology for Americans.

Fawlty Towers' "don't talk about the war" episode was so hilarious because the Brits still can't stop doing it. Just look at the debate on both sides during and since the EU referendum. Or just ask Ken Livingstone, who has a particular severe infection of Hitlerisis having being born in London in 1945.

Image: The Queen will not lay a wreath of poppies at the foot of the Cenotaph this year

As the actual memory of that war recedes, so the mythologising about it increases.

For years the nation paid its respects at the solitary and striking Cenotaph memorial to "The Glorious Dead" and at village and town memorials.

Recently specialised monuments have sprung up: to women killed in war next to the Cenotaph, to animals on Park Lane, to the Battle of Britain on the Embankment and to Bomber Command on Piccadilly. And to just about every war touched organisation at the National Arboretum. It's hard to say no. In one Sussex village I know a rival to the traditional war memorial was set up this year marking the centenary of the First World War.

Similarly the Royal British Legion has now commoditised the annual Poppy Day appeal with a host of poppy brand items ranging from cushions and aprons to brooches.

There has undoubtedly been a resurgence of patriotism with renewed loss of British lives in limited wars such as the Falklands, Afghanistan and Iraq. Though the scale of the casualties was a fraction of those in the two World Wars or the Korean War. The Americans set the pace for patriotic badge-wearing after 9/11 and each autumn wearing some sort of poppy becomes more de rigueur here.

The reality is that most of us in the UK today don't remember what war is like and wearing your poppy with pride sometimes feels like an uncomfortable easy option.

Nobody can blame the Royal British Legion for trying to raise funds.

Yet it remains a sad fact that ex-service personnel have an above average incidence of disablement mental illness, unemployment and homelessness. Thanks to initiatives such as Prince Harry's Invictus Games official awareness of the national obligation towards veterans may be slowly increasing.

Laurence Binyon's poem For The Fallen was published in the Times in September 1914 at the height of the patriotic fervour at the outbreak of the Great War. Its lines still ring out every November at the Armistice Day Commemorations:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

The reality is that most of us in the UK today don't remember what war is like and wearing your poppy with pride sometimes feels like an uncomfortably easy option. The Queen's modest dignity gets it right.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

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