ARMISTICE Day. We will remember them. Of course. But will it do a scrap of good? No.

One of the two greatest poets of that war, Siegfried Sassoon, mentor to his rival for the top spot, Wilfred Owen, certainly believed we should remember. In ‘Aftermath’ written in the year following the Armistice of 1918, he urged: "Swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget."

And yet he took the harshest of views of the most prominent symbols of our remembrance – the war memorials. Faced with what he called the “intolerably nameless names” of the 55,000 missing British dead from the Ypres battlegrounds, engraved on the Menin Gate, he reflected: "Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime/ Rise up and deride this sepulchre of crime."

Closer to home, he pictured the Prince of Darkness: "Standing bare-headed by the Cenotaph:/ Unostentatious and respectful. Silently the Devil offers his own prayer: ‘Make them forget, O Lord, what this memorial means…’ The Prince of Darkness to the Cenotaph bowed./ As he walked away I heard him laugh."

Obsessed before the war with hunting and cricket, Sassoon never forgot the horror of the war, in which he served gallantly. He wrote anti-war poetry for the rest of his long life, dying in 1967, aged 81.

The advent of nuclear weapons saw him imagining “man unfuturing his future, self-assigned to suicide through the secrets he stole.” The sound of a warplane one day brought the thought of what he called "the ultimate atrocity": "Who knows? – but if from that machine should fall/ The first bacterial bomb, this world might find/ That all the aspirations of the dead/ Had been betrayed and blotted out…"

The aspirations of the dead were for peace. The other day on BBC Radio 4 I heard Lord Richard Dannatt, a former Chief of the General Staff – the professional head of the British Army – insist Remembrance Day was necessary to prevent repetition of the horrors it recalls. But of course within 21 years of the Armistice the world was at war again. And British troops have fought in many conflicts since then.

No war, however, is like the last. There will never again be trench warfare as in 1914-18. And for all its much-chronicled military confrontations – D-Day, El Alamein, the Battle of Britain – the Second World War marked a major shift, by which the greatest number of casualties were civilians.

In conflicts of the future, certainly the nuclear or biological forms that alarmed Sassoon, that gap will expand. War is getting worse. Indeed, as the events in Sharm-el-Sheikh demonstrate, it now percolates everyday life everywhere.

Remembrance shows a proper respect for the dead, but so far it has achieved nothing. Perhaps our Remembrance needs shaking up. Maybe in place of “at the going down of the sun and in the morning,” we need something tougher.

In his poem ‘Ex-Service’, Sassoon voices “derision from the dead”. He pictures their swindled ghosts crying from shell-holes in the past, "Our deeds with lies were lauded/ Our bones with wrongs rewarded…/ dud laurels to the last."

Remembrance should make us feel uncomfortable at our failure to honour the dead by not ceasing to fight among ourselves - now with the prospect of consequences far more ghastly than those of the war that bred Remembrance.