Every so often, Britons like to measure their present against a past that time has in some ways overtaken, as doughty, imperial folk with a reach far beyond their island shores, suffused with a backs-to-the-wall fighting spirit, conjuring victory against the odds. From Shakespeare's Henry V rallying his troops against the French at Agincourt in 1415 to the English soccer team beating the West Germans in the 1966 World Cup, to coming out on the winning side in two world wars, this is a narrative built on the high points of national memory, a connect-the-dots guide to an old land's sense of what it has done, and can do, best. Recently, there has been a sunburst of such reflected glory. Last month, the funeral of Harry Patch, the last British survivor of the trench fighting on the Western Front in World War I, drew national, live television coverage as his coffin wound through the cathedral city of Wells escorted by German soldiers, among others. The moment underlined the message he voiced in his later years of war's futility, providing a poignant counterpoint to the government's efforts to justify a war in Afghanistan that is leeching the lives of the soldiers it sends there. But of all the evocations of the past, none seemed quite so determinedly quirky, and yet so perversely predictable, as the ascent last week to the top of the British music charts of an album by Dame Vera Lynn, at 92 the oldest person to attain that artistic peak. The album is an anthology of reissued songs that first became popular during World War II and were probably as well known to American service personnel who were based in Britain then as to the British themselves. At that time, they called Vera Lynn, a plumber's daughter from eastern London, 'the forces' sweetheart,' the lilt of her lyrics resonating as much with the troops on far-flung battlefields as with those left behind to work on farms and in munitions factories -- in the parlance of the era, keeping the home fires burning. In war, it is not only the troops in battle who shoulder the burden, ears ringing with the blast of roadside bombs or the enormous, intimate rattle of automatic fire. There are those who wait and fret and hope for solace. For a reporter growing up in baby-boom Britain, Vera Lynn's music became intertwined with stories of wartime separation and Home Guard heroics told at family gatherings as Britain emerged from rationing and deprivation to find that victory sat uneasily with a greatly reduced role in a changed world. Husbands and wives spent years apart; uncles were issued gas masks and assigned to douse the flames of bombings on Britain's northwestern shipyards; aunts stoically abandoned one home and moved to another after the baleful wail of air-raid sirens sent families scurrying into homemade shelters while bombs blew out the windows and flattened the roofs of their row houses. In those moments of danger and absence, with soldiers far from home and bombers in the skies, scratchy radios tuned to the BBC serenaded listeners with lyrics that promised bluebirds and peace. In 'The White Cliffs of Dover,' Vera Lynn assured the nation, 'There'll be love and laughter/And peace ever after/Tomorrow/When the world is free.' And in 'We'll Meet Again,' she conjured the end of those lonely days and nights when a simple telegram could bear tidings of the ultimate loss: 'We'll meet again/Don't know where/Don't know when/But I know we'll meet again/Some sunny day.' Many, of course, did not make that rendezvous with hope. Vera Lynn's rise anew to the top of the charts poses a question: why now? Britain, after all, was different then. People had different dreams, narrower horizons, lower expectations. The daily joust was about survival, not comfort. Consumerism was impossible for most people in an era when meat and cheese and butter were rationed and the candies and nylon stockings in gifts from American troops seemed the height of luxury. But there are faint echoes. (END OPTIONAL TRIM.) Britain, like the United States and other allies, is again at war. Counting from the beginnings of the current conflict in Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, troops have been deployed in battle for longer -- though with far fewer casualties -- than in all the years of World War II, from Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 (which was recalled this month on its 70th anniversary) to the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945. In excruciatingly relative terms, Britain faces the same hardship as others in a world struggling to shrug off recession. Jobs are scarcer, house prices have fallen, boutiques are shuttered and the land has far less appetite for self-denial than Vera Lynn's generation did. With elections due by next summer at the latest, there were somber warnings last week from Prime Minister Gordon Brown of cuts in public spending. It is perilous talk for a politician in a time of war: One of the first electoral casualties of Vera Lynn's day was Winston Churchill, the very symbol of Bulldog Britain, shoved rudely out of power in the first postwar election in 1945. Vera Lynn last topped the charts in 1952 in the aftermath of those austere days. 'Our boys are away again,' she said last week to explain her success, 'and the music is significant again. And it's a bit of nostalgia, too.' Or, as the columnist Michele Hanson mused in The Guardian: 'Lovely tunes have been out of favor for some time. It's been all screeching, thumping, rapping, crashing rage and multidecibels, but not much melody and modulation, so perhaps we need a bit of a change.' 