WE are in the season of poppies once again. On Thursday morning, I shall conduct the Service of Remembrance at The Old Bailey and recall all those who fell in the World Wars, and, especially, the three members of staff there who died when the court building was hit in a bombing raid, in 1943. And next Sunday, our church will host the parade for the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. It is moving beyond anything you can merely put into words.

We stand at the war memorial at Holborn Circus. When I say “we” I mean serving soldiers, cadets and the sadly diminishing number of veterans. We hear the Last Post on a solitary bugle and the timeless words: “Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”

Then we march the quarter of a mile to church and hold the service of remembrance itself – the place packed, great hymns such as O Valiant Heart and the ancient prayers which alone can do justice to the weight of the occasion.

I heard a fascinating programme on the radio this week and it was about soldiers and their music. It seems that there are three sorts of martial music. First, of course, there are the stirring marches, the drum and the bugle and the sound of men marching. But there is another kind of music – the songs of love and enforced absence from those they love. The classic of all these songs must be Lilli Marlene which we pinched from Rommel.

I can remember my dad singing it to me when I was a boy, and not long after he had been de-mobbed:

“Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate,
“Darling I remember the way you used to wait,
“T’was there that you whispered tenderly,
“That you loved me,
“You’d always be,
“My Lilli of the Lamplight,
“My own Lilli Marlene.”

It’s astonishingly moving. And it is not sentimental.

Sentimentality happens when the emotion being expressed is fake – when the emotion is not worthy of what is being said or sung. But the wartime songs of love and loss do match the emotion felt. Men were thrust into strange lands, miles away from their loved ones. And they might be killed tomorrow. That is not sentimental. That is heartfelt. What else should they sing in such a situation? Lilli Marlene is perfect – and both sides knew it.

There is another sort of army music. It is bored, fatalistic and downright scurrilous.

These are the songs such as “Why are we waiting?” Soldiers will tell you that most of what passes for warfare is hanging around waiting for orders, smoking, trying to sleep.

In these songs the trooper expresses his frustration and resignation, literally, as it were, “Sod this for a game of soldiers!” There are the songs about sleeping with the Sergeant Major’s wife. There are the others about Hitler’s having only one ball and Goering having two but both very small.

So soldiers’ music reminds us that military service is glorious, full of love and longing, fear and death – but also full of tedium, exasperation and deadpan humour. In other words, all human life is there. In the annual remembrance season we give thanks for that life, for those who lived it and those who gave their lives for us.

There is no better verse to describe this than: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”