The 11th hour of the 11th day struck at the Cenotaph in London, not in grand formal pageantry, but in a moment of heart-stopping pathos, absurd and infinitely touching.
"The poor old sod," a woman in the crowd murmured fondly, breaking the two-minute silence as Henry Allingham, the oldest man in England at 112, frail as one of the winter leaves whipping past him on a sharp wind, a bishop kneeling at his feet and an anxious young air force officer stooping over him, struggled to rise from his wheelchair to lay his own wreath in memory of the fallen he has never forgotten.
He gave up the attempt and sank back, still and pale as a statue, as the wreath was gently prised from his fingers and laid beside those already placed for Harry Patch, 110 and wearing just a dark suit when men half his age were bundled up in overcoats, and Bill Stone, a mere 108, who joined with gusto in the singing.
In most years the main commemoration of the day the guns were finally silenced after five years of carnage is held on Remembrance Sunday. This year, all over Britain and in all the countries which joined the war to end all wars that proved merely the scene-setter for so many more, the 90th anniversary of the 11th day was celebrated with a particular poignancy: it is unlikely that any of the veterans will survive for another major anniversary.
A ceremony was held at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, and a new memorial commemorating members of the Household Cavalry and Royal Armoured Corps who have died since 1945 was dedicated at Bovington in Dorset.
In London, the three men represented the army - Patch, who fought at Passchendaele, is the last survivor of the millions of British soldiers who fought in the trenches of the western front; the navy - still training Stone when peace was declared - and the air force, of which Allingham is the last surviving founding member.
At the time of the first Armistice Day their survival was already against the cruel odds which reaped the fields of their friends and comrades, yet they have lived to celebrate the 90th anniversary, along with Claude Choules, who joined a ceremony near his home in Australia. He was born in Worcestershire in 1901, witnessed the surrender of the German imperial navy at the Firth of Forth in 1918, and later emigrated to join the Australian navy, where he saw active service - like Stone, who was torpedoed twice - in the second world war.
Only last week, another of the tiny group of veterans was lost. Sydney Lucas, the last surviving conscript, signed up into the Sherwood Foresters at 17 and also emigrated to Australia. He died aged 108.
At the Cenotaph, the solemnity of the formal ceremony, conducted by the forces' bishop, David Conner, and attended by the prime minister, defence secretary John Hutton and the Duchess of Gloucester, along with the bands of the Royal Marines, the Grenadier Guards, the RAF and the London Welsh choir - and thousands of members of the public, highly indignant at being railed off 75 metres along Whitehall from the monument - was interrupted by spontaneous applause as Allingham, Patch and Stone were wheeled in line on to the street. The bishop greeted them as "three very remarkable veterans", and added: "We are privileged to have them with us."
He added a defiant message of hope to his sombre sermon: "We can be grateful for the seemingly indomitable
nature of the human spirit, for the vision of life's good possibilities, for the persistence of hope, for much patience and much courage shown and for friendships and alliances that have been forged within and have outlasted the harshest of shared circumstances."
Before the ceremony, Allingham, who like many of the veterans waited half a century before speaking to anyone of his wartime experiences, said of his lost friends: "May they never be forgotten. I can't describe what they mean to me." Stone described himself as "one of the lucky ones".
Patch, who would raise a hand to dash away tears as the crowd joined in the hymn The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended, said: "Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims."