Far from diminishing, the national appetite for remembrance seems to grow. The centenary of the start of the First World War was always likely to be special. But public responses have far exceeded expectations. Nothing has displayed that better than the extraordinary artwork created at the Tower of London, and the size of the solemn crowds it has drawn. The Tower filled its medieval moat with a river of scarlet ceramic poppies, one for each of nearly 900,000 men killed while serving in the British and Dominion forces between 1914 and 1918. Millions of people have visited the Tower to gaze in awe and grief at the scale of the human suffering it made visible.The war, it seems, is still with us. The scythe of war cut a vast swathe through society at the time but also afterwards – the a