Since the Sixties, we have steadily abandoned what Churchill’s generation would have called the martial virtues: courage, discipline, duty, responsibility.

The very principle of fighting strikes many of us as abhorrent, and the idea of war is almost unimaginable.

Perhaps you may think this is all to the good. When the Prime Minister reads out the names of fallen servicemen in the Commons, it is a sign that we value individual human lives more than we did.

What British leader today would be ready to take a gamble on the scale of D-Day — fearing, as Churchill told his wife Clemmie, that they might wake the next day to face a death toll of tens of thousands?