What's the next generation going to do?
Mea culpa. I've not been here for too long.
So far as the next generation is concerned, I'm not too worried. The regeneration of interest in 'Remembrance' has, it seems to me at least, been most marked in recent years. A couple of things have helped (and I'm taking purely about the UK here). The Iraq and Afghanistan Operations have made a huge difference in public awareness; a bloody reminder that infantry operations = deaths in action. But also, a decade before that, WW1 was introduced into the GCSE History syllabus and schools started visiting Ypres and the Somme. (No complaints - built a business up out of it). Added to this is the 'Family History on the Internet' explosion and investigations into who GreatGrandad was and why he never came home.
Generally I take the view of my old History Prof - 'You can't have History until the're all dead. 'Till then it's bl00dy journalism.' Now, of course, they all are. Bless them. And the Last Fighting Tommy has gone.
The net result is that there has never been more interest in the work of the CWGC and local War Memorials. In the twenty years that I have been attending the Remembrance Day service in my own village the numbers present were steady at 20 or 30 until say seven years ago. Last November we had nearly 300 and ran right out of Service sheets. In the pub afterwards a number of people made the point that it was their children that had been the catalyst in their attendance.
It's quite worrying. You can spend time in the Public Bar of the Bell grumping about 'the youth of today' and how hopeless they are and 'We're Doomed I tell you, Doomed'. Then you get a phone call from a 13 year old asking whether you know where.....etc. Completely demolishes your defences.
I hope that also goes some of the way to answering also the the 'War Memorial awareness' issue that was raised. Trouble is, that the larger the town/city, the more that the population has changed. Places that had a relatively small footprint and a homogeneous population in 1920 nowadays simply don't. And many of the present inhabitants of that old footprint area neither know nor care. That's not an immigrant-bashing theme, in many places the population is simply rootless, just a place to live whilst you're trying to make a life. Been there, done that.