After the two minutes’ silence, the prayers and the sermon remembering lives sacrificed and innocence lost, two soldiers whose bravery entitles them to wear the Victoria Cross walked along the nave of Westminster Abbey.

Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry and Trooper Mark Donaldson, two of the nine living servicemen to have been decorated with the highest award for valour, carried a wreath the size of a lorry wheel from the High Altar to the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. The wreath was not heavy, Lance Corporal Beharry said. The burden was carrying a symbol of more than a million subjects of the British Empire whose lives were cut short by the First World War.

As the Service to Mark the Passing of the World War One Generation came to a close, Irene Beharry congratulated her nephew for not dropping the wreath. He replied: “It was close at the end.”

If he is a symbol for the bravery of those who fight to protect their country, he is also a reminder of the suffering that war inflicts. A scar runs from ear to ear over the top of his head where he was injured by a rocket-propelled grenade, but the only clue to his psychological injuries is in the shine of his shoes. He began polishing them at 7.30pm on Tuesday evening and finished at 1.30am. He then started preparing his dress uniform.

“I don’t really sleep,” he said. “I still suffer post traumatic stress, so a sleepless night is a big, big problem for me.”

The service, which was attended by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, senior politicians and the heads of the Armed Forces, was arranged after the deaths this year of the last surviving First World War veterans who lived in Britain. It was the first time that Lance Corporal Beharry had worn his Victoria Cross. “The day means so much to me. I’ve worn a replica lots of times, but this is the first time I’ve actually worn the original,” he said.

The Lance Corporal in 1st Battalion, Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, attended the Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in Central London last year, when he accompanied Harry Patch, the last Tommy to have fought in the trenches.

“After escorting Harry Patch and the two others last year, it’s an honour to wear the medal on their behalf. I think it [the service] was amazing. I would like to see many more like this because [with] the current situation today, history is going to repeat itself again. The guys who we are remembering today paved the way for people like me. Without them I couldn’t be standing here.”

The soldier, whose injuries do not allow him to return to a combat zone, became the first person for more than two decades to receive the Victoria Cross after he displayed exceptional courage in two ambushes in al-Amara, southern Iraq, in 2004.

His role in the memorial service came after the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, delivered a sermon that recalled how a generation was traumatised by “having seen friends butchered hideously in huge numbers in front of their eyes”. He said: “The brilliant glow of the Edwardian autumn, about which so much has been written and imagined, gave way to the cruellest winter conceivable.”

One of the youngest participants in the service was Victoria Newark, who was asked to escort the wreath after she won an essay competition set by the Imperial War Museum. She said that the hardest part was walking fast enough. “I have slightly shorter legs [than the soldiers carrying the wreath]. They didn’t want to shuffle along, so in rehearsal they said, ‘faster, faster’.”

Outside, after Last Post had been sounded, rain began to fall on the Garden of Remembrance outside, where rows of wooden crosses mark the lives that were taken.

Moments earlier Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of Defence Staff, quoted from Laurence Binyon’s poem, For the Fallen. “They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old:/ Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn./ At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,/ We will remember them.”

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