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!
