Time passes ... and great wars fade

Have you ever had breakfast at the Luderitz Nest Hotel? Your answer is probably "No", as Luderitz is a remote seaside town in a distant corner of Namibia, where the great desert of Namib-Naukluft meets the cold Benguela current, surging up the coast from South Africa.

If you do ever make it there, as I did a couple of years ago, I suggest you have some of the delicious oysters in the ground floor restaurant - and take a look out of the wide picture windows.

These windows afford a splendid view of Luderitz's German-colonial townscape, which is a surreal parade of Gothic steeples and gingerbread houses, occasionally drowned by moving dunes. The windows also offer a perfect overview of the little peninsula that juts out from Luderitz's waterfront.

I was reminded of that view when I watched this week's rituals and services in commemoration of World War 1.

What struck me about the services was not how beautiful, eloquent and respectful they were - though they were - but how surprisingly desiccated and unmoving, how lacking in resonance, despite all the poetry.

I realised why I wasn't moved. It is because World War 1 is at last departing from our collective memory. It no longer speaks to us as it did. As the last eyewitnesses have died, it is belatedly shifting into the history books.

This doesn't mean we will ever forget it. There will always be people fascinated by the horrors of the trenches. But will we continue to treat the Great War as this grand national trauma, something uniquely abominable which still pierces our souls? I think not: time dulls everything.

Consider the Cromwellian Civil War. That killed 3.6% of England's population (compared to 2.6% of the populace in World War 1) but we do not remember it, emotionally, do we? It is not lodged in our consciousness. We do not hold a sombre minute's silence for the dead of Edgehill and Marston Moor.

So what has this to do with the Luderitz Nest Hotel? The fact is, the windows of the hotel's restaurant gaze onto the scene of a holocaust: at the centre of the view is Shark Island (now a peninsula) where the Germans first concentrated and then exterminated an entire African race, the Witbooi, in 1905.

Yet this dress rehearsal holocaust is now so forgotten and disregarded that hoteliers feel able to build restaurants with nice views of the extermination camp, and no one particularly cares.

But surely this could not happen to THE Holocaust?

Last year I went to Berchtesgaden, and the beautiful new Intercontinental Hotel on top of Obersalzburg mountain. When this hotel was being built, a few years back, there was a modest outcry, as it seemed the hotel was sited specifically so that tourists could enjoy the same view Hitler enjoyed, in his "Eagle's Nest" retreat . Yet the hotel got built and no one seems that bothered any more .

The same process of emotional corrosion will, I think, eventually remove even the Holocaust from our list of conscious traumas. Because there's only so much grieving you can do, for so many decades, before human nature takes over.

Of course this is terrible, in some ways. But it is also how we, as humans, have managed to survive. We draw a line, and we move on. Just as we are already moving on from Verdun, and the Somme, and that sad little peninsula in dusty Luderitz. - ©The Daily Telegraph