The official web site of A.H. Lloyd

This morning I got up – and as I've done every year since 1991 – played "Taps" at precisely 11 a.m. to mark the end of World War I.

For 17 of those years I've been uniform, carrying on a family tradition of sorts.

I've played "Taps" at the funerals of both of my grandfathers, rendering them final military honors for their service during World War II.

I will likely play it for my father, who was a reservist during the 1960s. 

My father's grandfather was a bugler during the Great War, seeing combat duty in France and later serving in the Army of Occupation.  He wrote an account of his military service and I was interested to see that he and I visited some of the same places in Europe during our military careers. 

People today have lost much of their sense of history.  Ours is a generation with an obsessive compulsion about the present and the near-future.  We forget the past and ignore the future.

But the past continues to shape our future and it's crucial to look back to where we came from to have an idea of where we might go.

In a lot of ways, we're still working out the problems that emerged a century ago.  The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the resulting chaos in the middle east, the legacy of colonialism in Africa and even the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in China are still driving events.

Three generations after my great-grandfather marched in the victory parade for the War to End All Wars, they're still with us.