For a flashpoint with the potential for serious ill-will and violence, Legionnaire's Day was a subdued affair.

Today was the day that Latvia - or at least part of Latvia - remembers some of its fallen soldiers. According to your point of view, these soldiers are referred to either as the Latvian Legion or as Latvian units of the Waffen SS, Hitler's own ‘private' army (as opposed to the regular army or Wehrmacht). As non-Germans, Latvians could not serve in the Wehrmacht. Of course, Baltic Germans could, but introducing them into the equation would make it even more complex.

I won't go into the full claims and counter-claims made by each side as to the exact nature and actions of the Legion (which still spark furious argument), except to pose the question that I usually end up asking foreign friends who express an interest in the subject: "So which side would you have chosen - Stalin's Communists or Hitler's Nazis? And remember that not choosing is the one choice that is impossible to choose..."

The usual dread warnings of violence preceded this year's event, which consisted of a church service followed by a flag-waving procession the short distance to the Freedom Monument to lay flowers at its base.

The heaviest police presence I have seen in Riga (barring the visit of George Bush) effectively defused any tensions. Protests against the parade consisted of little more than a few whistles and half-hearted jeers. There's not much more to say other than to record a few impressions I noted along the way.

What struck me most strongly was the marked, in fact one could say ‘tragic' difference between two distinct sets of people taking part in the parade. At the front were the few surviving Legionnaires, holding their banners with a mixture of pride and pathos, their eyes revealing that they were living now and ‘then' simultaneously.

I spotted the first of them on the tram into town. Sitting opposite me was an elderly man, spotlessly turned out in hat, coat and gloves with clean, shiny shoes. He emanated martial correctitude with his straight back and ‘eyes front' stance and I would guess he was considerably older than he appeared at a glance.

Certain that he was a Legionnaire, I followed him from the tram (he set an impressive pace) and sure enough, on the other side of Ratslaukums he greeted a group of identical-looking old codgers who exchanged warm handshakes all round.

Providing stark contrast was a similarly-sized knot of young men a few yeards away. Shaven-headed and muddy combat-booted, with unearned badges patched to their bomber jackets and the smell of booze hovering over them like a fog they were just a motley, slouching bunch of thugs, too stupid to notice the old men standing nearby, let alone realise who they were and maybe learn something about remembrance from them. The really worrying thing is that the future of the parade belongs to the skinheads. As the Legionnaires fall away over the years, it will turn into a demonstration that Nazis are alive and well rather than that Legionnaires died many years ago.

But even more pathetic - in the true sense of the word - was a single old lady I watched as the parade formed into a guard of honour at the Freedom Monument. While the patriots waved their huge flags, and the body-armoured riot police surveyed the crowd lining the crash barriers and fingered their batons, a tiny, shrunken figure walked between them unnoticed.

Bent over double by age in a worn coat but still clearly taking as much pride in her appearance as circumstances would allow, she edged her way invisibly to the bottom of the monument in order to lay a flower with all the others.

I wondered who she was and why she was here. It cost her considerable physical effort just to to walk the few yards to the memorial, so she had no lack of motiviation. Maybe a lover or a brother had gone away with the Legion and never returned? For years she would have had to endure that loss in silence, unable to admit to such a thing in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. But here she was now, able to make a public gesture that she remembered and it still meant something to her.

She was conspicuously not part of the main parade. Maybe she'd simply got confused and lost or couldn't stand the press of the main queue. But whether intentionally or not, she was showing that remembrance is really a personal thing, meaning different things to different people and that speeches and slogans can never explain the real reasons why things happen to individuals.

If only the flag-wavers, whistle-blowers, riot police, and bovver-boys had noticed her instead of each other, maybe Legionnaire's Day would mean something more to them than a chance to face off.