By Peter Caddick-Adams

Every night at 8pm sharp the bugle sounds the Last Post and as the notes echo round the Portland Stone arch, your eyes are drawn upwards to the names carved on the memorial. There are more than 50,000 of them.

At the Menin Gate in Ypres, memories of the First World War remain raw.

Nearly a century later, British troops still serve overseas and occasionally make the supreme sacrifice for their country. They have no Menin Gate in a corner of a foreign field. These days, we bring our war dead home.

As we pause to remember those who fell in the Gulf conflict, it is worth considering that the way we remember the fallen has changed a lot since the two World Wars.

Roll of UK casualties

When the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission was set up in 1915 by Fabian Ware it agreed on the principle of no repatriation of the fallen. Servicemen and women would have uniform headstones, irrespective of rank or background, in war cemeteries close to where they fell.

This, it was felt, would avoid favouring the wealthy, whose relatives could afford to repatriate bodies or erect ornate headstones, as in earlier wars.

Due ceremony

Since 1967, the next of kin of those who died while serving overseas have had the option to have the remains repatriated. After the Falklands conflict of 1982, several families of the 252 servicemen killed chose this option.

In that war, all the battle dead were initially buried with due ceremony, then subsequently some were returned home at the request of their next-of-kin. This reflects the American tradition of offering relatives the choice - in both world wars about one third of those killed remain buried overseas, while two-thirds were returned to the US.

The best-known US military cemetery is at Omaha Beach, where the film Saving Private Ryan opens. Those Americans who are repatriated can be buried in military cemeteries, which are to be found near most American towns. Some contain the remains of American soldiers dating back to the 1862-5 Civil War and anyone who has served in the military, and their wife or husband, also has the right to a plot in such a cemetery, not just those killed in battle.

British dead from WWI are buried in Iraq. Their countrymen who fell this year were brought home

With Operation Telic (the British operational codename for the Iraq war) to date, all 51 UK service personnel who have died, whether in combat or from other causes, have been returned home.

The nation's formal mourning therefore has had to shift from the graveside to the runway at RAF Brize Norton, where our fallen heroes complete their journey home.

Beginning on 30 March this year in the presence of the Duke of York and Geoff Hoon, servicemen have manhandled coffins off C-130 Hercules transport aircraft with the sort of dignity that the British armed forces do best.

Fear of political controversies, and perhaps the sensitivities of relatives, has meant that the monarch and the prime minister have avoided the occasions, leaving the armed forces chiefs and government ministers to mourn on behalf of the nation.

Collective experience

With higher expectations from society, it comes as no surprise that the state is now rightly expected to bear the expense of flying our warriors home. Fewer casualties in all our recent wars means this is easier to contemplate under the glare of the world's media.

Apart from Remembrance Sunday, the nation has no collective experience of dealing with battle deaths, so the ceremony at Brize Norton has provided an opportunity to give the media their five minutes, while demonstrating reverence: it is a good compromise.

So far, the UK has been lucky in this war, compared with the US death toll (at the time of writing) of 329. Go back 87 years and the MoD would have to have taken over Heathrow's Terminal Four for a month to cope with the casualty lists from the first day of the Somme in 1916 (19,240 killed). How could that be spun to the media?

Mourning has shifted from the graveside to the runway at Brize Norton

The Falklands also yielded a service of thanksgiving, which was said to have angered Margaret Thatcher. The late Lord Runcie, then Archbishop of Canterbury, preached calling for Christian reconciliation. He said that the Argentine dead should be remembered as well as the British.

Baroness Thatcher was looking back to the days when such services contained a note of triumph as well - 'we've won'. Today the Iraq war is difficult to define as even having ended. So the memorial service at St Paul's is today's equivalent of the Falklands thanksgiving service, when the nation can pause and bow its head.

These changes in culture and our attitude to death in battle also means there will be no more war cemeteries of the kind so familiar at Ypres or on the Somme, as today's war casualties are split up from their comrades and buried separately.

While the Commonwealth War Graves Commission does a wonderful job, when you visit some of the inhospitable, godforsaken corners where our young men and women lie, it comes as no surprise that they expect - and we now offer them - some far corner of a British field instead.

Peter Caddick-Adams is a military historian at the Royal Military College of Science at Cranfield University