Reconciliation and possibility

This story about Britain’s last WW1 soldier has a key them:   reconciliation is possible:

To the strains of the “Last Post,” and in the presence of soldiers from armies that had fought as both friend and foe, the funeral was held here Thursday for Harry Patch, the last British survivor of World War I living in this country.

Pallbearers carried the coffin of Harry Patch from Wells Cathedral on Thursday in Wells, England.

Born in June 1898, Mr. Patch died last month at the age of 111 at a nursing home in this southwestern cathedral city, where thousands of people lined the streets in densely-packed rows and applauded as his coffin passed by, draped in the red, white and blue Union flag.

Soldiers from Britain, Belgium, France and Germany marched alongside the coffin in a token of Mr. Patch’s increasing desire as he aged for reconciliation both with his own memories of the trenches and with his erstwhile enemies.

“Too many died,” he said, late in life, of the estimated 900,000 Britons killed in the conflict. “War isn’t worth one life.” He called war “the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,”

To have soldiers of the former enemy marching at his funeral!   Imagine Afghanis marching at the funeral of Canadian veterans in 80 years.   And vice versa.

That is the world we certainly would wish for, no?   And what if we were to work back from that premise to the near future?   What does it say about how we will end this endless debacle?