Anzac Day in Australia today, given all the more poignance by daily reports of bitter fighting in the Ukraine. We are never without war. Despite the two in the last century that were supposed to kill off war forever, the smaller ones happening now are just as terrible.

But today we commemorate the young people who went off, fired by idealism and a sense of duty, to fight and die in the big global conflicts that signified the end of the colonial era. And Braidwood turns out in force to honour its sons and daughters, which is right and proper.

Prominent in its place as you come into town, just on the left at the junction of Wilson and Wallace Streets, the war memorial stands as a dignified, timeless memorial to 481 local men who died in the world wars. There are similar monuments in pretty much every country town in Australia, just like the obelisks in UK market squares and the marble poilus in France.

Visiting the Somme one summer years ago, the collective impact of the memorials and cemeteries everywhere drove home the lasting collective effect of that slaughter on the fabric of Europe to this day. Looking at the 72,337 names on the Thiepval Memorial (just those Commonwealth dead whose bodies were never found), the mind recoils at the scale of it.

When the Last Post rings out and all the local men, women, children and dogs fall silent for a long minute made all the more solemn by the grizzling of a baby and the calls of magpies, it is deeply moving. It brings to mind all my family members scarred by a small, vicious war far away which will never leave us.

The tragedy of people so young going off to die far away, often in horrible ways in terrible pain and fear, can’t be overstated. The waste is incalculable. I can’t think of many causes that are worth that loss.

And then, because they are mercifully out of it, it becomes about those who have to keep on living – the families who will grieve the dead, and those who return home shattered in body and spirit.

For all of them, the deprivation is immeasurable: the lovers they never had, the children they never raised, the careers they never had – doctors, labourers, musicians, builders – all lost, gone before they ever happened.

This is the theme of the best of the poetry that emerged from the first world war – as Wilfred Owen said, “the poetry’s in the pity”: the terrible pity of subjecting numerous nations’ precious youth to unimaginable slaughter for no discernible result.

You can see this in the euphemistic language that comes out at this time. “They gave their lives” – I’m pretty sure no 18-year-old willingly surrenders their life for the greater good. They go off to war not believing they will die. They hope profoundly in the heart of the action that they will make it through. And if they are wounded, they pray and cry to stay alive.

Similarly, we hear of their “sacrifice,” dressing up their loss in pseudo-religious robes. I doubt they contemplated heaven when faced with death; they did not have great nations’ fates on their minds in their last seconds. It is highly unlikely that the greater good somehow comforted them in their pain and terror.

And I cannot believe that any mother who loses their child can really be comforted in their heart of hearts by the thought that it was for King and country, or the fatherland, or the motherland, or the international brotherhood of workers or whatever. Wouldn’t it be so much better to have your boy home and watch him grow up, live life, become a father and so on?

Many of the people we commemorate in these ways were conscripts. They had to go. Perhaps they felt they were protecting home and family. For an Australian at Gallipoli, this must have seemed a pretty abstract concept. The Turks were not trampling across New South Wales.

That’s why I like to look at the individuals’ names on a memorial, and try to think about who they were and what we have lost with their passing.

I don’t know how to reconcile all this with the bigger picture. There are serious arguments about morally-justifiable wars; but as I get older, I start to wonder how many – if any – wars are ultimately justifiable.

It’s terrible when these young, scared peoples’ loss is co-opted for jingoistic ends. It’s distasteful to see elected officials with comfortable homes and safe offices pontificating about other people’s service as a part of their foreign policy manoeuvres.

Commemoration is the least we can do. And it’s all we can do about the wars of the past – that’s part of the tragedy.