Armistice Day
My grandfather was born in 1898,, or thereabouts. He went to Flanders in 1917 I think, straight out of school. He was a second lieutenant, a rank with an average life expectancy of 6 weeks He was exceptionally good at maths, so he was put in the artilliary, and it was his job to calculate the angle the big guns had to be set at to hit their targets. He survived until the Armistice and was then in Flanders for most of 1919 as well. According to my grandmother and my mother, he would rarely talk about his experiences during the war. There were a few funny stories he told, but on most of it he was silent, as were most of his contemporaries that my mother remembers.
My grandmother, who was born in 1904, told me that when the Armistice was signed, the headmistress of her school (it was an all girls school) told all the girls that so many young men had been killed in the war that many of them would never get married, and that they had better get used to the idea.
In Britain, every city, every town, and every village, has its own war memorial. Even in the smallest places there can be twenty or thirty names on the list. A scythe cut through a generation.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen
My grandmother, who was born in 1904, told me that when the Armistice was signed, the headmistress of her school (it was an all girls school) told all the girls that so many young men had been killed in the war that many of them would never get married, and that they had better get used to the idea.
In Britain, every city, every town, and every village, has its own war memorial. Even in the smallest places there can be twenty or thirty names on the list. A scythe cut through a generation.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen