Worth remembering.

Four pieces of metal.

That’s all they are really. Now polished to a gleaming newness, recovering some of the effect they must have had when they were awarded over ninety years ago. These were the visible marks of the grateful country which did little to make real the Poison Dwarf’s platitude of making it a fit place for heroes.

My grandfather’s, Willy John’s, medals from The First World War now are properly presented. Framed so that they can travel to Spain safely and can be hung so that, together with the etching by Archie Griffiths, I can have strong reminders of my home.

Medals for war are like those neat, tasteful, carved tombstones that stand in serried ranks in the fields of France: acceptable tokens which make bearable the unbearable reality of what occurred in the rat infested muddy trenches and the unbelievably bloody battlefields which saw almost an entire generation of British humanity wiped out.

The anger that The First World War engenders is something almost visceral in someone like me, born thirty years after the armistice. What it must have been like for my grandfather who survived both Battles of the Somme, but saw his friends and comrades wiped out, is unthinkable. He carried his deafness from the sound of the guns as a physical memento from the conflict, but what he carried in his mind defies comprehension.

My father always described me as “the most belligerent pacifist I know” and argued constantly with me about such concepts as a “just war.” We never agreed, though I think that he would be wryly amused by how far my religious scepticism has come to match his own views! His version of Humanism has strongly influenced my own moral development, but my residual “Anglican Atheism” has always made a whole hearted commitment to Humanism difficult.

I share with Aunt Bet a – “love” isn’t the right word, perhaps “devotion” might be more appropriate – for the poetry of The First World War. In an anthology like “Men Who March Away” edited by Ian Parsons you can trace the changing attitudes of poets to the progress of the war and the bitter reality it forced some people to accept.

Perhaps poetry is the nearest that I can tolerate the human, emotional implications of an obscenity like The First World War. I could never, for example, bring myself to visit the war graves of the continent: I would find that unbearable. I know that for some it is a cathartic experience and it brings home to them the full horror of the conflict, but it is not for me.

My grandfather never talked to me about the war and rarely to my father. He never spoke of the apocalyptic horrors that he must have seen and he kept his stories at a ‘human’ level.

One incident he did tell my father was when my grandfather was sleeping in the trenches and he was forced awake because a rat was eating his finger. As my grandfather jerked his hand away, the rat came with it, his fangs embedded in his flesh. My father told me that, as my grandfather recounted this story, his look of horrified disgust made it seem as if the incident had just occurred.

For my father, as for me, this little tale of piquant disgust, has exemplified the unnatural horror of the whole conflict.

Whatever ambiguous feelings towards The First World War I may have, I recognise that my grandfather volunteered in 1914 and saw the whole bloody conflict through to the end. He survived against the odds and in spite of people like Haig.

His example is a good one to take to Spain, especially to Catalonia where people like my grandfather fought against the fascists.

An example to live by.