This Remembrance Sunday will be unusually poignant. In July the last British soldier to fight on the Western Front, 111-year-old Harry Patch, died. For the first time, there will be no one at the Cenotaph who fought in the First World War.

The ceremony, and others up and down the country, will be resonant for another reason. The conflict in Afghanistan has made the British public aware afresh of the human cost of war. Until fairly recently British servicemen killed overseas were buried where they fell, in war cemeteries overseas. Now the dead are returned to the UK. The price paid by British troops in faraway conflicts has, literally, been brought home to us.

A few years ago some questioned whether Remembrance would continue to be relevant. Iraq and Afghanistan have answered that. Sadly, Remembrance has a future, as current victims of war are added to the long roll of those who went before.

An unlikely hero emerges from the early history of Remembrance in Britain: Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army on the Western Front from 1915. Haig remains a controversial figure, his victories in 1918 needing to be put in the balance alongside the Somme and Passchendaele. I must declare an interest here: I am completing a biography of Haig that is moderately sympathetic to the man.

For long, Haig has been seen as a blunderer, a version portrayed by Geoffrey Palmer in the TV series Blackadder Goes Forth. But at his death in 1928 he was a national hero, and a good deal of his popularity stemmed from his championing ex-servicemen. To the annoyance of both Lloyd George, then Prime Minister, and Buckingham Palace, he refused to accept a peerage until some basic provision had been made for them. His evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into pensions caused a scandal for its forthright denunciation of the hardship caused to soldiers’ families by official meanness.

The millions-strong community of former soldiers, sailors and airmen recognised a man who, despite his status, was prepared to fight for them in a land failing to live up to the politicians’ promises of being “fit for heroes”. The British Legion was formed from a group of competing veterans’ organisations and did much charitable work. Haig became its president.

The legion began the annual Poppy Appeal, which merged with the existing Cenotaph ceremony to create the Remembrance rituals we know today. But Haig has been quietly dropped from modern Remembrance. The poppy no longer bears the words “Haig Fund”.

As Remembrance Sunday 2009 approaches, the parallels between Afghanistan and the Western Front, attritional campaigns seemingly without an end in sight, are uncomfortably close. Veterans face problems of reintegration into society. Some suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The wounded have colossal challenges.

No less than in the 1920s, war veterans deserve better treatment than this society, and government, gives them. It is ironic that Douglas Haig, once reviled as a “butcher”, set the standard for compassionate leadership of the ex-service community.

Gary Sheffield is Professor of War Studies at the University of Birmingham