“WHY can’t nations pursue peace with the same vigour with which they pursue war?”

Vera Brittain tirelessly campaigned for peace between the wars. Her experiences as a nurse in the First World War were powerfully re-imagined in the recent film version of her autobiography Testament of Youth. They captured the spirit of those who survived the horrors of that conflict and the despair with which they witnessed Europe’s inexorable slide into the second.

I was moved to tears when I first read her autobiography a few years ago and each Remembrance commemoration brings it powerfully back to mind; this year more poignantly than most.

The League of Nations, established in a wave of optimism in 1920, proved itself incapable of preventing war through negotiation and arbitration.

It lacked teeth to enforce its sanctions and censures and those that dissented (Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan) voted with their feet.

Have successive international institutions like the United Nations proved any more successful?

It is as sad as it is ironic to see the millions of pounds being spent by protagonists on both sides of the debate about whether we should be ‘in or out’ of Europe. The very freedom we have to debate our membership of the European Community was paid for by the bodies buried in France, the sailors who never came back from sea and the arimen who never returned from their missions.

Yet the failure of the EC to deal with the refugee crisis on its borders is not wholly due to the complexity of the issues facing its neighbours in the Middle East. It is made considerably worse by various governments’ lack of resolve and resource.

So while Europe debates the subtleties of Britain’s full, partial or nonmembership, the spirit of cooperation and mutual responsibility between European nations that the EC was set up to foster and foment is disintegrating in the face of a refugee crisis.

We send military ‘advisers’ and ‘observers’ to central Europe in order to curb Russian expansion.

We find it harder to send humanitarian aid to support the dispossessed women and children who have become unwitting victims of superpowers’ struggle for oil supremacy in the Middle East. The statistics and even the photos of those who die trying to get to Europe are no longer headline news.

A civilization is judged not by its highest cultural achievements but by the way it deals with those within its midst who are aliens and outcasts.

I cannot be alone in feeling that the greatest tribute we can pay to those who gave (and continue to give) the ultimate sacrifice for their country is not simply to remember them in silence, but to make sure that others will never be required to make it again. That we learn from the mistakes of the past.