Ninety years ago today, shortly before 11am, Private George Price, of the 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade, 2nd Canadian Division, stepped out of a house he had been searching outside Mons while pursuing German forces. A single shot was heard. Private Price half turned and collapsed in a comrade's arms. He died at 10.58, the last Allied casualty of the First World War.

Is it invidious to spell out the fate of one soldier in an attempt to illustrate the sacrifice of so many from nearly a century of conflict? If remembering one entailed forgetting others, then perhaps. But it does not. On the contrary, a lesson absorbed by relatives, historians and schoolchildren alike in the long lifetime since the first Armistice Day is that it is only through the remembrance of individual lives - and deaths - that some sense can be extracted from the numbing statistics of modern war.

Nearly a million Britons lost their lives in four years on the Western Front. Another 382,000, excluding civilians, died a generation later during World War Two. In all, that war left some 25 million dead on its battlefields, and six million in its concentration camps. Since 1945 there has been only one year - 1968 - when no British servicemen or women has been killed in action.

“We will remember them,” the poet Lawrence Binyon wrote, but he did so as a forecast, not an exhortation: those words were first published, in The Times, only one month after the start of the First World War. The scale and horror of the slaughter that followed have seemed at times to defy suitable remembrance. Surviving veterans, of both world wars and those that have followed, are often the least likely to talk about them.

Yet the poet was right. “The glorious dead” are remembered with three unchanging words on the Cenotaph, but, 88 years after its unveiling, they are remembered with undimmed and if anything growing admiration by the public. This is partly because of how wars are remembered in 2008, and partly because of why.

As the survivors of the world wars have reached the natural ends of their lives, the histories of those wars have been endlessly reappraised. Stories of tactics, leadership and heroism will live on, but as the framework for an ever-more nuanced narrative of ordinary people confronting extraordinary circumstances. The seminal work of Paul Fussell started this shift in emphasis in the 1970s. A profusion of popular history projects has followed. For today's schoolchildren, among them the thousands who bought poppies and lined Whitehall on Sunday, the struggle against fascism consisted of Churchill's oratory and the courage of The Few, but also of infantrymen's stories of hunger and exhaustion from the Forgotten Voices series, and the rationing and evacuation experienced by their grandparents; at the Imperial War Museum, they can practically experience it themselves.

The paradox of history is that with the passage of time, the sacrifices honoured today can be remembered more vividly, not less. But what they teach succeeding generations also changes. Since the unveiling of the Cenotaph in 1920, wars have acquired the capacity to extinguish not just lives but civilisation. That is why the Second World War produced a wholesale reorganisation of Western Europe intended to preserve peace in perpetuity, not just a balance of power; and why the true rationale for modern wars such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan is that by creating the conditions for democracy they may yet limit the scope for future conflict.

War is not glorious. But those who have died so that others may live in freedom and peace will always deserve what Mr Binyon called their country's “proud thanksgiving”. Ninety years hence we will still remember them.