When Harry Patch, the last British veteran of the First World War, died in 2009 at the age of 111, it seemed for some as if our final physical connection to the horror of the trenches had been lost.
Because for all the recorded memories of those who fought and died left behind, there was a feeling of sadness that the Great War was simply now part of history.
But then as anybody who has visited the battlefields of northern France and Belgium knows, that is not quite correct.
On the battlefields the impact of the war persists, not just in the fields of pure white graves that dust the landscape but also etched into the very earth itself, like freshly-healed scars.
Perhaps that is why Michael St Maur Sheil's photography has the effect that it does.
[CLICK HERE TO SEE MICHAEL ST MAUR SHEIL'S PHOTOGRAPHS]
Sheil, 65, a professional photographer, has taken more than 10,000 photographs of WWI battlefields in France, Belgium and Turkey since 2006.
His landscapes are ghostly, still and haunting, but also graceful. They manage to suggest the jagged craters, shattered trenches and razor wire that once tore the land apart, and where some 10 million soldiers died, while also depicting the gentle, softened shapes left after 100 years of interrupted peace.
Enormous craters are reborn as tranquil ponds, while front-line trenches seem more like simple folds melting into the ground.
The remains of the Chateau de Soupir, a misty winter morning on the Somme, munitions still dredged from the ground piled in heaps by farmers. Even the Lochnagar Crater, dug by 185th Tunnelling Corp and exploded with 50,000lb of ammonal in 1916 - all beautiful, but with the inescapable memory of the war literally just below the surface.
"I'm trying to photograph the battlefields as they are today," Sheil told The Huffington Post UK. "And show that 100 years later they really are very beautiful places. Which rather belies the history. The history is still there but they are beautiful."
Sheil is hesitant about sounding overly lyrical about his work, but he is still acutely aware of, sometimes even "overwhelmed" by, the emotional impact that his photographs have made.
"I don't want to get sanctimonious about it but I guess you could say there is this sense of healing, and reconciliation. As a photographer it's become quite a passion."
Sheil also leads tours of the battlefields as a qualified guide, and says that he feels that the impact of the war is still very much with us. More than 300,000 people still travel to the Menin Gate at Ypres to hear the last post ever year, he points out, and this year's Royal British Legion poppy appeal is set to be the biggest ever with expected donations in excess of £40m. So why does WWI still capture the imagination?
"I think it's the scale," he said. "And I think it's the fact that every singe village and community in the country would have been involved. My little village, population of about 300 people, there are 36 names on the war memorial. Every one of those would have been known in the village.
"When you think about it now we have a war going on in Afghanistan but a lot of people don't know anybody in the army, it's an abstract thing, but in those days everybody was affected."
Most of all Sheil insists he is trying to tell a story. His first battlefield photographs were shot to accompany a book by the late military historian Professor Richard Holmes, and there is a sense even today that he is documenting the landscape as much as illustrating its beauty.
"I once asked Richard did he ever get upset or emotional when he was on a battlefield and he looked at me and said 'if I'm not getting emotional I'm not thinking about where I am'," he explains. "But I think I'm trying to tell a story in pictures, it's a simple as that."
Some of Sheil's battlefield tours colleagues say that he has a soldier's eye for ground, even though he did not serve in the armed forces.
"Mike's absolutely magnificent," said Clive Harris, who also leads battlefield tours. "It's the way he can read the ground. The easiest thing to do would be to take a picture of a poppy in front of a grave. But the lad in the grave wouldn't have wanted that. The starkness of the terrain makes it beautiful."
On Friday it will be announced that Sheil is now working for the French government to produce a series of street galleries and exhibitions, which will incorporate his photography, which will be unveiled in 2014 - 100 years since the war began.
"A lot of people won't go to a museum or an art gallery and what we want to do is have a careful balance of photographs and text so that people who know nothing about the first world war will see the pictures, wonder what they are, and then get drawn in to it. That's the concept."
That relationship with the French authorities has also allowed Sheil to photograph areas that are not generally open to the public. The honour of photographing those scenes is something he takes very seriously.
But even though he knows the battlefields well, the emotion of the place still affects him deeply. You just have to see his photographs to realise that is the case.
"I was at one site last week, where I was just astounded," he says. "I think it's one of the last original soldier's memorial's on the Western Front. There was a cross with all of his equipment on it. It's a closely kept secret. One's seen photographs of crosses with helmets placed on top of them and things like that, but to actually come across one still there nearly 100 years later, a shiver ran up my spine."