A few houses away from me, a young man died. Sergeant Sutton from the London Regiment was killed in 1918. He was 22, the son of Harry and Rebecca. A couple of doors down, a 19-year-old died. An Irish family who lived nearby lost Private Patrick Joseph O’Brien. On the next road, the neighbours at Nos 72 and 74 each lost a son. Rifleman Claude Arthur Ashby died a month before the war ended. He was 17.

It’s a very middle-class thing never to have known anyone in the army, and I can’t imagine my current neighbours’ kids joining up. But 17? God. I saw a picture once of a soldier who had wet himself in terror under bombardment. A frightened child. So many frightened children. So long ago. A pointless war. I remember learning about the poetry that taught me not to fall for “the old lie” and all that, and so I don’t wear poppies. One of my daughters once answered an exam question on the causes of the first world war with: “It’s like they were all dressed up and had to find somewhere to go.” I got what she meant. The arms race already under way between the major powers meant a war was inevitable. Only this was no party, but mass slaughter. So, no glorifying the military-industrial complex for me. Remembrance is a private act, not a public display. Terrible wars are happening right now that no one thinks can end. I know these arguments well, for I have made them. But I was wrong.

If war is a refusal to learn, I now begin to confront my own refusal. The act of remembrance is significant because forgetting is what destroys us. The process of understanding what Europe was, and what it can be, is poignant now for all sorts of obvious reasons. A fundamental shift has happened, too, about the way we emote in public. There remain solemn acts of private grief, but the collaborative efforts organised by Danny Boyle, the faces washed away in the sand, or Jeremy Deller’s work in which silent soldiers appear in normal life, or the wire ghost soldiers standing in a cemetery; these things move us. Peter Jackson’s film They Shall Not Grow Old, which I thought might be gimmicky with its colourisation, astonished me because I recognised these lads, their faces, their bravado, and I recognised that war is about piss, shit and blood, and shooting someone whose intestines are spilling out because you want to put an end to their suffering. The film brought home not bravery, but frailty. We are just small bodies and minds, barely held together.

Frailty, not strength, is difficult to discuss. Indeed, we have seen a lot of petty political point-scoring that depends on some macho idea that certainty is strength. It is possible that the opposite is true. War depends on insecurity dressed up as conviction. Should Tony Blair, the warmonger, be at the Cenotaph? What was Jeremy Corbyn doing in an anorak? Who does most for veterans? Don’t you care about Yemen? One does not end conflict by shouting about how war is wrong. It is ended by diplomacy, compromise and talking to the enemy. That’s what got me. The ordinary men getting on with German soldiers, praising their bravery. To see piles of your mates’ body parts and then to see the enemy as someone just like you. The opposite of “othering”. This was remarkable. Humbling. I saw that there is something greater than the need to be right and strong and that is the place from which peace is made. To have your heart twisted in barbed wire and still remain open. That is the victory I now can see is worth commemorating.