For those of my generation, born in the midst of the Second World War or its immediate aftermath, it always seemed right to call the one that came before The Great War.

We grew up feeling we owed it a special reverence.

For I could see even veterans of the Second World War looked back in awe at the sacrifices made by those who endured the trenches of 1914-18.

It seemed both the bravest of wars, and the saddest. Nothing was ever the same after it.

It was called The Great War because, before it came along, no one had literally ever seen or imagined a conflagration on such a global scale.

Also, because it killed so many and threw the whole world into such historic upheaval that people truly dreamed that it would be the "war to end all wars."

A colours guard marches away from the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France in November 2008. (Reuters)

It should have been that, of course, but it wasn't.

Still the Allies' lofty hopes, a blend of fierce patriotism and budding internationalism, gave that First World War near mystical poignancy, particularly when it was coupled with the squandered lives and the failed peace that followed.

It was a war that our shaken societies looked back on, even after its successor, with a particular glow of pity and humanity that still moves us generations later.

So many undone

"I had not thought death had undone so many," a figure in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland muses after that First World War.

I think of the line whenever I pause at a 1914-18-memorial plaque in almost any small Canadian town and count the list of dead youth.

There you can grasp how almost every community was ravaged by sorrow during that period and how such communal pain flowed into the greatest national grief that this country has ever known.

Tomorrow, national ceremonies will use the recent passing in February of the last veteran of that war — John Babcock, who lived to 109 — as well as the anniversary of Canada's victorious Vimy Ridge battle, to honour all First World War veterans and mark the end of an era.

It's a fitting honour and, for me, it's still hard to grasp that we're now quite alone with just our thoughts on The Great War. The voices that could tell that story first hand are now all gone.

A connection is broken and I'm sure many of us feel lessened because of it.

On Flanders fields

It's been a few years since I interviewed a few of the last, very frail veterans of 1914-18, but over the decades I felt that I had always been connected to them and was fortunate enough to get to know a great many.

John Babcock, the last surviving member of the First World War until his death in February 2010. Shown here on his 108th birthday in July 2008. (Reuters)

When I was growing up in the 1940s and early '50s, they were still young enough to be heavily involved in my world.

They were the senior teachers, the courtly elders in the community, the neighbors and friends of my parents and the grandparents of many of my friends.

By the time I was first learning the names of sports heroes, I could easily list a score of First World War names, such as Flanders, Ypres, Picardy, Vimy Ridge, Passcheaendale, the Somme. They just seemed part of our lives.

Living in Britain for a bit in the 1950s gave me the chance to visit these sites repeatedly on family vacations. I've been dropping in on Vimy whenever I can over the past half-century or so.

Later, as my interest in history and military affairs expanded, I would seek out the vets whenever I could.

Contrary to the stereotype of the silent veteran unwilling to speak of the past, I found most opened up freely if you were prepared to listen and seemed keen to understand.

Haunted by memory

They were all kinds, of course. Some loathed war and everything to do with it and they were quick to denounce governments as warmongers by nature.

Others felt their efforts had been undermined by great waste and saw only the shameful sacrifice of lives by inept senior officers.

Still, I would say the vast majority were deeply proud of having endured this life-defining experience in Canada's name and were also proud of their regiments. To a man they were profoundly attached to the memory of friends they'd served with and the unique camaraderie they had shared.

Of course, those who had been right in the front lines were haunted by memories.

One man, a doctor, told me about listening helplessly at night to a wounded soldier trapped on barbed wire in no man's land. His jaw had been shot off, yet he was still trying to call out to his mother.

"So many dying would cry out for their mom's like that, their last cries," he said, adding with force: "I don't want you to ever, ever believe books or films that make war look anything but horrible."

Trust the poets

Overall, I have to say, these stories left me with no illusions about war, a gift that would serve me well much later when I worked as a reporter in combat zones.

The greatest war reporters, I've always felt, were the poets of 1914-18 and I know that many who experience combat still turn to them.

When I was covering the 1982 Falkands War between Britain and Argentina, I was struck to learn that so many Brit paratroopers and marines carried small volumes of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon with their kit.

These poets seemed to nail the full range of wonder, horror and pity, especially pity, of war.

Also, those like Edmund Blunden, in describing the fighting around Ypres, were able to see with fresh eyes the inhuman pounding of industrialized war as we've since come to know it.

"A whole sweet countryside amuck with murder/ Each moment puffed into a year with death/ Still wept the rain, roared guns…"

A war imagined

Those of us in the media used to feel, I think, that the 1914-18 war would recede from us and largely fade from mention with the passing of the 20th century.

But it still resonates, just as Gettysburg still does in the U.S. nearly 150 years after that Civil War battle.

The Great War is forever part of us and we read about it, still make films about it and can find much Canadian pride in its battles.

In his sweeping history A War Imagined, British historian Samuel Hynes, writing at the beginning of this new century, concludes that the 1914-18 war so profoundly changed our culture, myths and imaginations that we are still dealing with its reverberations.

"The First World War remains a powerful imaginative force, perhaps the most powerful force, in the shaping not only of our conceptions of what war is, but of the world we live in," Hynes wrote. "Our world begins with that war."

So, I for one am very happy to be honouring the memory of John Babcock and all those other, now departed veterans.

It's an important moment. We are now left without any of them around to bear witness as we still deal with the aftershocks of a conflict that so sharply defined their generation — and perhaps all those that followed.