That social and cultural changes would somehow diminish these men in the eyes of history. Even that their activities would someday been seen as politically incorrect. Cast in bronze, they stand proudly in Lochaber, their keen eyes lifted to the hills. The plinth is plain. But on it I would have written the message that nobody grows old by merely living their allotted span.
People grow old by abandoning their ideals.
Yet we remember a challenge to spiritual endurance and the awareness of a common peril endured for a common end. That is the only way to come through a shattering experience and enshrine the memory of those brave men who did not return. It seems to me that they were in fact fighting that greatest of evils, war itself. That to them their role was to finish the job as quickly and as cleanly as possible. To prevent the protracted war so beloved by politicians and manufacturers.