Andrew Vine: A moment of silence that will unite the generations

And for the two minutes’ silence of Armistice Day, he will think of the great-grandfather he never had the chance to meet, for he fell during the Allied landings in Italy in 1943.

The rest of the boy’s family will think of their relative who gave everything too. Observing the silence is an act that unites the family even though they are apart at schools, factories or offices, and somehow makes that long-lost soldier feel close by.

It is heartening that a teenage boy – and his classmates – should join the act of remembrance, and do so not because they are instructed to observe the silence, but because they want to.

In time, it is likely that he will tell his own children of their great-great grandfather, show them the photographs that he has been shown by his parents, and explain why taking a few moments to remember him and all the other brave men and women who have fallen in the service of their country is important.

And in doing so, he will consciously or otherwise be emphasising that the remembrance commemorations are about having a grasp of history and a sense of continuity about our country.

Remembrance is not just about the past. It is about the present as well. The men and women of the services who were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan in recent years will have experienced the same dangers and feelings that a young soldier under fire felt on an Italian beachhead 72 years ago.

The sense of continuity that is so much a part of Armistice Day – as well as the heartfelt commemorations at The Cenotaph and war memorials around the country on Sunday – was underlined by this year’s poppy appeal by the Royal British Legion.

The appeal is always thought-provoking, but this year’s has been even more moving than usual because of its use of images of service personnel from today juxtaposed with those from the First World War.

They were photographed in black-and-white in the same formal poses as the men of a century ago, and placed side-by-side, the images are strikingly similar. There is the same resolve in the subjects’ eyes, and the same shadow of suffering on the faces. If by some miracle the sitters could meet and shake hands across the gulf of 100 years, they would immediately recognise kindred spirits.

Some challenges never change. The servicemen and women of today wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan will do their utmost to make the best of the rest of their lives, just as those shot or gassed on the Western Front had to.

Over the past decade or so, the public has increasingly grasped that remembrance belongs to today, and the observance of the moment when the guns fell silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 has become more widespread.

Images of Union Flag-draped coffins arriving back in Britain from the battlefields of our own time have driven this desire to pay our respects, but there has been another factor at work too.

That is the growth in families researching their own histories, as public and service records have become so much easier to access on the internet.

Suddenly it has become possible to trace the course that previous generations’ lives took with far less effort or expense than previously, and the result is that families have gained a deeper understanding of how war touched them.

This in its turn has prompted an increase in the number of visitors to the graveyards and battlefields of Europe, where it is now common during school holidays to see several generations from families paying their respects at the grave of a relative most of them never knew.

The number of visitors from Yorkshire to such sites of pilgrimage is likely to increase still further in the New Year now only weeks away, because 2016 marks an especially poignant anniversary for our county.

In July, it will be 100 years since the battalions of volunteers known as Pals from Leeds, Bradford, Barnsley and Sheffield went over the top on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and were decimated.

Later in the year, Hull will recall how its own Pals met a similar fate in a subsequent battle for the same few hundred yards of by then blood-sodden territory.

We do not have to wait until the New Year to pay the Pals our respects. We can and should do so tomorrow, remembering also all the others who sacrificed so much on the trail of battlefields stretching from the past into our own times.

Like the teenage boy remembering the great-grandfather he never had the chance to know, we should bow our heads, fall silent, and think of them all, known to us or not.