It is arguable that the twentieth century's immersion in mass warfare has altered the meaning of pity. Where pity in the Aristotelian sense used to be one of the terms attached to the plight, the rise and inevitable fall, of the hero, then, the argument would run, in times of general slaughter there are no more heroes; indeed, there are no more names. The ‘tomb of the unknown soldier’ stands as testament to this, as do so many war memorials where assigned names are followed by an unspoken rubric which seeks to cover all those other nameless dead – dead, indeed, who may well have been not only nameless but literally bodiless, considering the rapid evolution of weapons of mass destruction from the First World War onwards, forwarded relentlessly ever since by the efforts of the military/industrial complex.

There is, of course, a recent counter-argument, and it is emblematised in the UK by the people of (now Royal) Wootton Bassett, a small country town which happened to be on the way between the incoming bodies from battles in the Middle East and their final resting-places, and where thousands of men, women and children came to see it as their duty to mark these memorials of death in their own fashion of silent mourning.