Memory - Remembering

I will never visit the War Graves of the First World War.  It is not because no members of my immediate family are buried there

My paternal grandfather was a member of the armed forces throughout the duration of the war from the start until the end. He was wounded and sent back to ‘Blighty’ (after refusing an ‘offer of a fiver’ for his wound by a passing Scots soldier!) and was returned after his recuperation to the same point in the line that his company had occupied before he was hit.  The only difference on his return was that the whole of his company had been killed.

His description (second hand via my dad) of waking up in the trenches because he was being eaten by a rat, had a thrill of primal horror about it.  He told my father that as he jerked his hand away, as a rat was eating his finger, the rat did not release its grip and followed the trajectory of his hand.

I have read fairly widely about the First World War, not only in terms of history books but also in the literature of the period.  The poetry of the period is at once searing and compulsive.  From the poetry of Owen and Sassoon to the prose of Graves, I have sensed the horror, frustration, inhumanity, bitter irony and humour of the War to End Wars.  I have seen the photos, watched films and visited museums.  I have feasted full on the horrors of an almost unimaginable reality, that, as the real experience of the soldiers was allowed to be shared in an almost unexpurgated form was unparalleled until the truly unimaginable inhumanity that was the Second World War.

As a life-long (belligerent) pacifist I have always had problems with the glorification or normalization of War: our family outing to the Edinburgh Tattoo was a fraught moral conundrum for me.  And, just in case you are wondering about my ethical purity, I swallowed my reservations and went.  And I was moved and stirred by what I saw and heard!

In the same way, I cannot wear a poppy.  I pay money to the collectors, but I do not wear the flower.  I don’t know whether they still do, but the black plastic centre of the artificial flowers used to have the words “Haig Fund” embossed on them, and I simply couldn’t wear the name of the military commander who tried to kill my grandfather with his suicidal plans of attack (for the PBI, not of course for him) with any degree of equitability. 

And yes, I did dry-spit every time I passed his equestrian statue in the centre of London.

So, what did I do, here in Castelldefels to mark the Centenary of the Armistice?

I have my grandfather’s medals form WW1 and I have had them framed.  I may not have joined up as my grandfather did, and we obviously have differing views on the military, but I respect and value his dedication.  He was most proud of his 1914-1915 star, showing that he was one of the first to be involved in the war before conscription was needed to keep the numbers up as the disastrous swathes of destruction - ugh!  Attempting alliteration about deaths in that war is a grotesque literary trope!

Whatever I feel about the war, I respect my grandfather’s period in the Killing Fields of France and he is my real link to the conflict: not a slab of elegantly carved stone in a garden of carefully tended grass. 

I do not denigrate the cemeteries with their immaculate rows of white, but I know that I would not be able to take them.  I know that I would feel truly miserable and depressed rather than educated by such a spectacle.  I fully recognize that, for some, visiting these graves can be a valuable and emotional experience.  It is not one that I want to put myself through.

But the man, my grandfather, is worthy of thought and consideration and to that end I made some notes and jotted down thoughts to get me started on a new poem.  Work in progress.  And my grandfather’s medals will stay on the wall where I can see them as I type for the future. 

 

And perhaps those last four words should be something of a moral for me!

-oOo-

I have now, officially, taken more time trying to find a document about two Catalan artists in Word that I wrote some time ago than giving up and doing it all over again.  Well, not quite doing everything again.  I have managed to find a copy of the original document, so I will not need to do the research, I could just copy the couple of pages that I have found, and this time create a file and put it somewhere where I will remember putting it.  

And before you start thinking that if I have found a copy of the original document all I need do is look at the document’s directory or copy and paste, I might add that I have found a ‘printed’ copy of the original not an electronic one.  I do not have the program that can take a page of print and scan it into a Word document.  I understand from cursory search-glancing at the stuff on the Internet that OneNote used to have OCR capability, but no longer.  Or not if you look elsewhere on the Internet.  The end result, after attempting to take an image of the writing, download it from my phone as a PDF file and then attempting to save it to something else in the hope that the something else would recognize that the image had words in it and treat it as something that could be edited in Word. 

Didn’t work.

I re-typed it.  It doesn’t sound much, a couple of pages, but it was a couple of pages with accents, right left and centre with the odd umlaut.  And Word trying to foil my typing of foreign names with distracting underlining!  Still, it is done, and I know where to find it again!

And that is something more than nothing!