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This remembrance-tide –  bow this deep, wear that poppy – typifies the intellectual poverty of this country: the idea that by putting on a sombre face, wearing a poppy and bowing deep you have done your bit to honour dead and injured servicemen and women.

You haven’t. Of course you haven’t. When the pygmy’s pygmy, David Cameron, tweeted self-righteously about the importance of remembering our servicefolk, what he more honestly could  have written was ‘We must never forget, unless they’re sick, disabled or on tax credits, in which case they can fuck off.’

But that is our country: we must observe the obsequies, be seen to be doing ‘the right thing’, and then all the petty little cruelties we permit in our public life are perfectly OK. We don’t have to think about all those oh-so-hard things, because we bowed at the right angle and that is our duty done to servicemen and women for another year.

Jeremy Corbyn didn’t bow deeply enough, apparently. Christ.

What he did do is dodge some of the freebie VIP troughing in which the likes of Cameron and Blair were indulging – doubtless making polite small talk about their favourite wars over the canapés, having tried Macbeth-like to wash the blood off their hands before eating – to go and actually talk to real veterans. Though the angle he was standing at looked a little disrespectful. Then he went to his own remembrance service in his constituency, just as he has always done, though he doubtless did not walk at the correct sombre pace, the bastard. Then he read the poem Futility, by Wilfred Owen, formerly a symbol of a doomed generation of soldier-poets, soon, no doubt, to become a hated loony left pacifist in the pages of the Daily Mail.

Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, –
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
– O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

That gentle, wistful, poignant masterpiece says more in two stanzas than the pygmy Cameron could manage in a thousand years with his earnest cliches and his PR spin. I imagine Cameron thinks Wilfred Owen plays right back for his ‘favourite team’, Aston Ham.

Vapid cliche. ‘They paid the ultimate price’; they ‘made the supreme sacrifice’; they are the ‘glorious fallen’. No they didn’t and no they’re not. And this patronising nonsense is no tribute to them. These solemnities, these platitudes, were attempts to ease the pain of the bereaved in the 1920s, and nobody can criticise the motivation. But they have become easy get-outs and have stopped us truly remembering.

‘They’ were men and women, effing, blinding, smoking, drinking, some even whoring – men and women of all classes and creeds and none. Some were – whisper it, because we don’t like to acknowledge this often – black or Indian or Chinese.

They didn’t stride nobly into some elegantly lit military sunset, waving with dignity as they ‘laid down their lives’; they died or were maimed, in many cases horribly: blown to pieces, ripped to shreds by machine guns, rendered limbless or blind by bombs, gassed so they drowned in their own vomit. Some bled slowly to death, some had a merciful sniper’s bullet between the eyes, splattering their brains over their mates. Some screamed in fear for their mothers or sweethearts. Some burned to death in appalling agony. Some were so disfigured that not even their families could bear to look at them.

Owen’s better-known Dulce Et Decorum Est addresses ‘the old lie’:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Remember properly, remember history, and you do these people a greater service – you acknowledge their suffering, and you acknowledge what so many of them said: they hoped it would never happen again. That’s the real meaning of remembrancetide, the measure by which your commitment should be judged – not the colour of your poppy or the depth of your bow, but the intensity of your knowledge of the importance of stopping violence in this world.

And even though solemn black-clad politicians and delightful Royal princesses have been obediently wearing poppies and bowing properly and starring in lovely photos in the pages of the Daily Mail for nigh on 100 years, we’re no nearer that aim.