Their stories will endure, safeguarded by their descendants. One hundred years after the guns fell silent on the western front, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and other relatives of those who fought in the first world war will be among the 10,000-strong crowd expected to march past the Cenotaph in the People’s Procession on Remembrance Sunday.

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Mark Rogers will march for his grandfather Lewis Rogers, a gunner who survived the war, but whose brother Bertie did not. Bertie was one of three of Rogers’s great-uncles who died in the war. “All were young men. As Lewis said: ‘There was no old men there,’” said Rogers, a maths teacher from Solihull.

Julia Knowles will also walk for her grandfather Arthur Hines, a signaller who survived the war and went back to France to find and marry the young French woman who captured his heart in Lille.

She will have in mind a “heart-rending” letter Hines had carried all his life. It was written to him by the grieving mother of a serving comrade who did not come home, in which she consoles herself her son had “died for a great and noble cause”.

Fighting continued up to the moment of armistice, at 11am on 11 November 1918, with some soldiers killed just minutes before hostilities officially ended.

To mark the centenary, the president of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, will become the first German leader to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, a historic act of reconciliation.

Bells will ring across Britain and abroad after the Cenotaph service, to echo the spontaneous outpouring on 11 November 1918, and 10,000 people chosen by ballot, including the descendants of those who fought, will march past in tribute.

“Now the two world wars of the last century are passing from living memory,” said Rogers. “Even this event – the People’s Procession – is driven by the fact that veterans of these wars have all but disappeared. What do we do next? Abandon the march past the Cenotaph at Whitehall, or adapt it?

“I want to march past in the place of those who used to remember their comrades who had fallen; men who knew the men who had died, and were thankful that they had survived.”

His grandfather, from Crowle in Worcestershire, was one of four brothers, all of whom fought. He and Bertie both joined the Worcestershire Regiment and were posted to France in March 1915. By August 1915, Bertie was dead.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mark Rogers, wearing his family’s war medals

Lewis Rogers would go on to survive the Somme and was shot in the ankle during the Battle of Aisne. He rarely spoke of the war, his grandson said. “He used to say: ‘If you were there, you wouldn’t want to talk about it.’” It was bad enough to have a brother killed, he said. “But then to have to come back and tell your mother about it, that was very hard for him.”

Only towards the end of his life did Lewis Rogers open up, allowing his grandson to record his memories. “I asked him whether he ever thought about the many men he must have killed. He replied: ‘I suppose I did. You couldn’t miss ’em. It was like shooting into a wall of cattle.’”

“I think they had to sanitise it, to come to terms with it. It was just doing a job, basically,” said Rogers.

It kindled a fascination with the war for Rogers, who researches local memorials. “Why? Because in war ordinary men do extraordinary things. War opens a window on the soul of mankind, and through that window we see him at both his best and worst.”

Knowles, from Chaldon in Surrey, was so moved by the letter written to her grandfather, who was from West Ham in east London and served with D/181 Brigade in the British expeditionary force, that she recently sought out the grave of his comrade, William Munro Hutchinson, from Bolton.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julia Knowles at the grave of William Munro Hutchinson

The men’s friendship was forged in the war. When Hutchinson died aged 24, Hines wrote to his parents, and his comrade’s mother wrote back.

“It must have meant a lot to my grandfather,” said Knowles, an operations manager at a satellite communications company. “He kept it all his life. But we knew nothing about it until my father died, and we found it in his personal effects.”

Knowles will also celebrate the more “joyous” consequence of the war in that it brought her grandparents together, and the close links she retains today with her French grandmother’s family.

“When I walk in the People’s Procession with my husband, I expect it to be a day of mixed emotions as I will be giving thanks for how my own family has evolved, while also remembering that our lives would not have been possible without the sacrifice of others like William.

“If you read that letter, it is heart-rending. It says that he died for a great and noble cause. If you are a parent, and you lose your son like that, and you have the courage to say ‘he died for a great and noble cause’, that is something, isn’t it?” she said.

Transcript of the letter

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Letter to Arthur Hines from family of William Munro Hutchinson