Lest we forget
100 years ago today Britain entered a war in which Europe slaughtered its young men on an industrial scale. Two of the men who fought and thankfully survived were my grandfathers. My paternal grandfather fought with the Grenadier Guards. My maternal grandfather Walter Burke (pictured above, in the late 1920’s when he was a territorial) was a soldier with a (or the) Manchester Regiment.
He must have been very young, and looked it, because his nickname was “Baby”. I never knew him. He died when I was a baby. I know only a little about what happened to him. He was shot and wounded in an attack, and fell into a shell hole. The Germans came across bayoneting the wounded, and he survived by playing dead. Later on the day he was rescued when a counter attack retook the land.
According to family legend, he was sent to Castle Howard to recuperate, where he and a daughter of a titled family who was serving as a nurse fell in love. But he was a working class lad and they were not permitted to marry. One small remarkable story of an “ordinary” man amongst so many. What horrors they both saw or encountered I cannot really imagine.
This is my small tribute to those who served, fought, suffered and died. I do not have the proper words for it, so I will borrow some from a man who saw it at first hand, Major John McCrea.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Gildas the Monk
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August 4, 2014 at 5:19 pm -
Equally applicable are the words are attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds (1875 -1958), an English Classicist, who had put them together among a collection of 12 epitaphs for World War One, in 1916.
“When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today”Nowadays, better known as the Kohima Epitaph.
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August 4, 2014 at 6:45 pm -
Thank you Gildas.
I lost my maternal grandfather at the Somme. Of course I never knew him but the echoes still ring down the years.
My mother was borne just after he died. She and my grandmother faced an uncertain and difficult future. Eventually my grandmother remarried but she always had a faraway look in here eye whenever I asked her about granddad. The pain never really went away.
How our family might have evolved had he survived we’ll never know. I still have his medals hanging on the wall and without being maudlin about it, the story of him and his young bride still gives me a sort of strength when I survey the current crop of conflicts (both armed and psychological). After the so-called ‘war to end all wars’?It is indeed up to us to use our tomorrows to the benefit of all.
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August 4, 2014 at 7:33 pm -
Quite so. Listening to the radio today there were many accounts that made it plain that the echoes of tragedy was etched in the lives of those who survived or were at home and lost loves ones
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August 5, 2014 at 2:14 am -
Observing the plethora of media events over the last few months makes me wonder how many more years this particular conflict will be marked; perhaps when there is no one left who personally knew someone who had participated in the conflict? When one thinks of the thousands slaughtered at Waterloo or the carnage that took place during the battles of the Civil War, it’s evident these were even more bloody and brutal, yet who outside those of us who love history even realises the scale of the death anymore? I suppose we can’t commemorate every war we’ve been involved in as a nation since 1066, but maybe all wars reach a point where they become so distant that they cease to be remembered beyond books and TV documentaries, which is sad, really. After all, who mourns the 21,000 dead and wounded allied troops at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709 now?
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August 5, 2014 at 9:44 am -
A good point Johnny. I was listening to Max Hastings on the radio yesterday who argued that WW! was not uniquely awful – all war is awful. So the guys at Waterloo had it just as bad as at the Somme. I agree, but the scale and the industrialised nature of the slaughter were a new phenomenon. Perhaps in 100 years no one will care.
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August 5, 2014 at 9:59 am -
I suppose it’s possible that having actual film of WWI is one advantage it has over previous conflicts in terms of making it feel within touching distance, and will possibly prolong its memory beyond the life span of its predecessors. Perhaps a past battle only preserved in paintings produced after the event will forever seem too far away for anyone to connect with it on the same emotional level?
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August 5, 2014 at 10:44 am -
Surely the difference was that where once you had to look your enemy in the eye and fill your heart with hate in order to spear him – WW1 introduced the concept of killing hundreds that ‘were said’ to be in a muddy trench just over the hill – but you never saw them. It was production line killing; efficient, monotonous, and meaningless.
Watching the list of wars in the world scroll through on your last video Johnny, reminded me of a quote I saw during the week.“There are currently 32 wars taking place around the World. 8 are border disputes, 24 are to decide which imaginary sky pixie is the best.”
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August 5, 2014 at 12:38 pm -
I doubt that there are any wars going on to decide which “sky pixie” is the best let alone 24. Wars are about power and which power structure is going to be giving the orders. Not about matters of faith–which is, in the end a personal matter. Yes–of course religious labels are put on conflicts but they are always political ie about power (over other humans) and the psychopaths who want that power. Even the wars of religion are less about God than about which power grouping–eg Catholics vs Protestants–is going to prevail. In times gone by the Church was a power structure and still retained a lot of that power in the early days of the nation state. But as the power has shifted almost entirely to political elements wars of religion have ceased–amongst Christians at least. The RoP is still a secular power structure and still involved in wars.
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August 5, 2014 at 10:47 am -
Strange how we will justify the morality of killing a total stranger who might have just invented penicillin for all we know or care – he’s wearing the wrong ‘clothes'(uniform) – yet will argue for years over the morality of killing a man who has murdered someone else.
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August 5, 2014 at 11:14 am -
The lawyers will argue about anything, once they have a crank to turn to make us monkeys dance.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2013/11/uk-soldier-found-guilty-afghan-murder-2013118223059796363.html -
August 5, 2014 at 11:22 am -
That’s why I’m opposed to all wars, Anna, not “some” wars, all wars.
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August 5, 2014 at 11:37 am -
Me too…
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August 5, 2014 at 12:36 pm -
There was a debate on ‘Newsnight’ the other week about the censorship of images from war-zones, whether or not avoiding the gruesome reality of war respects the dead or whether it dehumanises them further. To me, the latter applies. Coverage on TV when I was a kid in the 70s was far more graphic than it is now. Whenever an IRA bomb exploded, people staggering about with blood streaming down their faces and tripping over severed limbs was fairly commonplace on mainstream news broadcasts; similarly, I remember seeing a photo in the Sunday Times Magazine at the back end of the Vietnam war – a victim of the Viet Cong laid in the middle of a field who looked as though he’d been savaged by a lion. It was horrific and haunted me for a long time, but it told me at a very young age that this war thing is terrible; and that’s stayed with me.
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August 4, 2014 at 10:06 pm -
My paternal great-grandfather and great-uncle died in that abomination: the former at the Second Battle of Ypres and the latter at Thiepville. They were both decorated veterans of the Boer War. One was in the Scots Guards and the other the Royal Artillery. (I have no Scots blood, so lets not get silly. These were professionals). They were both decorated again – posthumously . We have the medals at home.
My maternal grandfather fought with the Americans and was decorated as a “devil-dog”. Americans will know what that means. He survived.
There is nothing to be said for it. It was an unspeakable disaster. My great-grandmother would have told you that, and she told everybody that.
I have my great-grandfather’s military records, the exams he passed, his journals from the Front. He drew the flowers he saw when he was first sent to France, in exquisite detail, and he drew what he called “the carnage in the hedgerows” before he died.
Nothing will ever persuade me this was something we should feel proud about.
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August 4, 2014 at 11:23 pm -
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August 4, 2014 at 11:54 pm -
Thank you, Moor.
“And God bless them all/The long and the short and the tall/There’ll be no promotion/ This side of the ocean/So cheer, up me lads/Bless ’em all.”
I will never forgive them. It isn’t in me.
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August 5, 2014 at 12:33 am -
Amen to all the sentiments expressed here. There can be few families, of that generation, not touched by the Great War. Both my grandfathers fought. My maternal grandfather was a regular soldier at the outbreak and fought in the initial British battles during August. He had the misfortune to have been taken prisoner during one of these early battles and spent the next fours years in a prion camp in Germany- he came back as a skeleton of a man. I never met him as he died in 1947 of cancer. My dad’s father fought at the Somme and beyond. Although not physically injured he was psychologically hurt. I remember him dimly as he never spoke to me directly. According to my father, he never spoke of the war to him, at all. I discovered his metal cap badge in his garden whilst playing. I suspect he had discarded it on purpose and it is the only memento I have of him.
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August 5, 2014 at 3:56 am -
Siegfried Sassoon – Suicide in the Trenches
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go. -
August 5, 2014 at 2:49 pm -
My great-gandfather was also in the Grenadier Guards during the Great War. More accurately, he served in the Grenadiers for three years, then became a policeman in 1907, got my great-gradmother up the duff (having neglected to marry her first!), and did a runner to Australia, where he was when war broke out. As he was still in his nine-year period of reserve service, he returned to London to rejoin his regiment, and war in France in mid-January 1915. He managed to survive all the way to end of October 1918 when he took a bullet to the shoulder and was repatriated to the UK. Once there he insisted on travelling to see his family in Ireland, but fatally contracted pneumonia in the process. Such is fate.
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August 8, 2014 at 2:10 pm -
“If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.”
This Rudyard Kipling couplet, written after the death of his son in WWI, seems to sum up the futility of the conflict. He suggested it for his local war memorial but it wasn’t taken up. -
August 11, 2014 at 8:46 pm -
My mother was born in 1913. One morning in 1919 she came into her mother’s bedroom and asked her mother, ‘Who is that man in your bed?’. She had not for the duration of the war seen her father (who had been RNVR before) and who had spent most of WW1 on one of His Majesty’s Battle cruisers in the South Atlantic and then as Commander of a Gunship in West Africa (very Heart of Darkness).
Every family has stories – and perhaps that is one thing that distances WW1 from say Waterloo.
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