Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that loyal heart are you always 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?
The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plough
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
And I can’t help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you ‘The Cause’?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Eric Bogle
SIR JONATHON PORRITT – Environmentalist
As an English teacher in London back in the 1970s, it never ceased to amaze me how easily the empathy built between those untested west London kids and the young men in the trenches – there in Flanders simply ‘to be killed or kill’. They understood that there would have been no reprieve, even for those who survived their experiences in the trenches, as with Edmund Blunden’s ‘Can You Remember?’
‘CAN YOU REMEMBER?’
Yes, I still remember
The whole thing in a way;
Edge and exactitude
Depend on the day.
Of all that prodigious scene
There seems scanty loss,
Though mists mainly float and screen
Canal, spire and fosse;
Though commonly I fail to name
That once obvious Hill,
And where we went, and whence we came
To be killed, or kill.
Those mists are spiritual
And luminous-obscure,
Evolved of countless circumstance
Of which I am sure;
Of which, at the instance
Of sound, smell, change and stir,
New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.
And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.
Edmund Blunden
RAYMOND BRIGGS – Illustrator
‘Auntie’ was the name used by children for any old lady in the nineteen thirties and forties. A child would seldom use the lady’s full name – Miss Smith or Mrs Bennett, for example – unless they were an authority figure, such as a school teacher. Nor would a child dream of using the lady’s first name, Ethel or Marjorie, but Auntie Ethel and Auntie Marjorie was OK and more polite.
It was odd, because these ladies were not our real aunties, but then, some of them were! I was evacuated to a stone cottage in Dorset with Auntie Flo and Auntie Betty. Flo was my real aunt, Betty was not.
As for these ladies being ‘old’, it was many years before I realized that they were only middle-aged. They belonged to that unlucky generation born around 1900, so they would have been about eighteen in 1918, just the age to be on the look out for a boyfriend and hoping to get married.
To a child, anyone over forty seems ‘old’, but when you are eighty, as I am now, forty is peanuts!
Boys of my generation, born about 1935, were called up for National Service in the Army or the Air Force aged eighteen. Some were sent out to fight in the Korean War, and many were killed there. Really, they were still schoolboys. Korean War? Ever heard of it?
I was very lucky. I was given ‘deferment’ from National Service for one year, to complete my four-year art course. I became eighteen in 1952, so finally went into the Army in 1953, the very year the Korean War ended.
Phew! Just missed it. I was lucky with the year I was born; the Aunties were very unlucky with theirs.
AUNTIES
When I was a child,
There were always lots of
Aunties.
They were everywhere.
Some were real aunties –
Mum’s umpteen sisters,
Dad’s umpteen sisters.
There was no end of them.
Auntie Flo, Auntie Betty,
Auntie Edie, Auntie Marjorie,
Auntie Bertha, Auntie Jessie . . .
The list is endless.
I won’t go on,
Except for Auntie Violet,
My favourite auntie,
Killed on a bus in the Blitz.
It seemed quite natural,
Didn’t give it a thought.
That was the way the world was –
Lots of old ladies everywhere.
They were called spinsters.
Some were rather quaint.
And looked down upon.
A few were slightly mad.
Then, one day,
When I was grown up,
It dawned on me –
First World War
A million men were missing.
Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
The men these women never met,
Never even had the chance to meet.
All dead
These ladies were always kind,
Gentle and loving to me.
Not sour, bitter and resentful,
As they had every right to be.
A million missing men.
A million aunties.
Raymond Briggs
SARAH BROWN – Charity campaigner and writer
Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth is the best-known book about the First World War written by a woman. It is one of the most moving and agonizingly painful accounts of personal loss. I remember reading the book as a teenager, and being so gripped by its pages, willing the survival of each young soldier friend sent to the Western Front.
The loss of her fiancé, Roland Leighton; her beloved only brother, Edward Brittain; and numerous close male friends and acquaintances to the horror of trench warfare smashed Vera’s safe, predictable world to smithereens. In total, almost nine million soldiers’ lives were lost in the Great War, and no one else escaped unhurt or unaffected; all were scarred in some way whether serving in the military or on the Home Front.
Testament of Youth endures for me for two reasons: its powerful story about personal survival beyond desperate grief, and the will to rebuild a life built on strong feminist principles in a fast-changing world.
Women had learned that they could take on the work of men who were at the front, but also discovered that in war’s aftermath, this ‘lost generation’ left huge gaps in their lives – not enough men to marry once the survivors returned, and the women’s jobs were not theirs to keep once the war was over. As the world changed for ever, it struggled also to return to normal in a painful way, and Vera Brittain’s voice was powerful as she established herself as a wife and mother while campaigning for peace and social change, and the rights of women, in the years that followed.
Testament of Youth, published in 1933, is as much about the role of women, and Vera’s own belief that she could have a strong marriage with children, while still maintaining her own career and personal friendships.
Vera Brittain’s vivid and intimate w
riting about the human tragedy of the First World War also acts as a powerful reminder of the importance of bearing witness to historic and troubling times. While the challenges of the twenty-first century are different, they are as complex and challenging. How honestly we tell the story of our time is how we pay it forward to the generations to come.
The passage that stands out in the book for me is where Vera’s intended fiancé Roland’s clothes are returned to his mother. The visceral recollection of the smell of the clothes evokes so much in one tiny glimpse onto the experience of such deep, personal loss.
FROM TESTAMENT OF YOUTH
In Sussex, by the end of January, the season was already on its upward grade, catkins hung bronze from the bare, black branches, and in the damp lanes between Hassocks and Keymer the birds sang loudly. How I hated them as I walked back to the station one late afternoon, when a red sunset turned the puddles on the road into gleaming pools of blood, and a new horror of mud and death darkened my mind with its dreadful obsession. Roland, I reflected bitterly, was now part of the corrupt clay into which the war had transformed the fertile soil of France; he would never again know the smell of a wet evening in the early spring.
I had arrived at the cottage that morning to find his mother and sister standing in helpless distress in the midst of his returned kit, which was lying, just opened, all over the floor. The garments sent back included the outfit he had been wearing when he was hit. I wondered, and I wonder still, why it was thought necessary to return such relics – the tunic torn back and front by the bullet, a khaki vest dark and stiff with blood, and a pair of blood-stained breeches slit open at the top by someone obviously in a violent hurry. Those gruesome rags made me realise, as I had never realised before, all that France really meant. Eighteen months afterwards the smell of Etaples village, though fainter and more diffused, brought back to me the memory of those poor remnants of patriotism.
‘Everything’, I wrote later to Edward [Vera’s brother, also to die in the war in 1918], ‘was damp and worn and simply caked in mud. And I was glad that neither you nor Victor nor anyone who may some day go to the front was there to see. If you had been, you would have been overwhelmed by the horror of war without its glory. For though he had only worn the things when living, the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the Dead. The mud of France which cover them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it was saturated with dead bodies – dead that had been dead a long, long time . . . There was his cap, bent in and shapeless out of recognition – the soft cap he wore rakishly on the back of his head – with the badge thickly coated with mud. He must have fallen on top of it, or perhaps one of the people who fetched him in trampled on it.’
Vera Brittain
MICHAEL LONGLEY – Poet
I wrote ‘In Memoriam’ in the spring of 1965. It’s the first of many elegies for my father, about whom I have been writing obsessively for decades. He enlisted in the London Scottish as a boy-soldier in September 1914, and miraculously survived the Great War. Before he turned twenty-one he was promoted to Captain, and put in charge of soldiers so young his company was nicknamed Longley’s Babies. He was seriously wounded at the Battle of High Wood, and was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry. He died in 1960, when I was twenty.
IN MEMORIAM
My father, let no similes eclipse
Where crosses like some forest simplified
Sink roots into my mind; the slow sands
Of your history delay till through your eyes
I read you like a book. Before you died,
Re-enlisting with all the broken soldiers
You bent beneath your rucksack, near collapse,
In anecdote rehearsed and summarised
These words I write in memory. Let yours
And other heartbreaks play into my hands.
Now I see in close-up, in my mind’s eye,
The cracked and splintered dead for pity’s sake
Each dismal evening predecease the sun,
You, looking death and nightmare in the face
With your kilt, harmonica and gun,
Grow older in a flash, but none the wiser
(Who, following the wrong queue at The Palace,
Have joined the London Scottish by mistake),
Your nineteen years uncertain if and why
Belgium put the kibosh on the Kaiser.
Between the corpses and the soup canteens
You swooned away, watching your future spill.
But, as it was, your proper funeral urn
Had mercifully smashed to smithereens,
The shrapnel shards that sliced your testicles.
That instant I, your most unlikely son,
In No Man’s Land was surely left for dead,
Blotted out from your far horizon.
As your voice now is locked inside my head,
I yet was held secure, waiting my turn.
Finally, that lousy war was over.
Stranded in France and in need of proof
You hunted down experimental lovers,
Persuading chorus girl and countesses:
This, father, the last confidence you spoke.
In my twentieth year your old wounds woke
As cancer. Lodging under the same roof
Death was a visitor who hung about,
Strewing the house with pills and bandages,
Till he chose to put your spirit out.
Though they overslept the sequence of events
Which ended with the ambulance outside,
You lingering in the hall, your bowels on fire,
Tears in your eyes, and all your medals spent,
I summon girls who packed at last and went
Underground with you. Their souls again on hire,
Now those lost wives as recreated brides
Take shape before me, materialise.
On the verge of light and happy legend
They lift their skirts like blinds across your eyes.
Michael Longley
‘Harmonica’ is probably the poem of mine I like best. When I was a boy I brought home from school a mouth organ which my father picked up and started to play quite well. I had never heard him play anything before. In the trenches, during lulls in the fighting, he and his mates had taught themselves to play harmonicas. For years I desperately wanted to write a poem about this, but I had to wait. One day I read how the early Greek philosopher Anaximines believed that air was the basis of creation. He gave me the poem. I wrote ‘Harmonica’ in November 2001.
HARMONICA
A tommy drops his harmonica in No Man’s Land.
My dad like old Anaximines breathes in and out
Through the holes and reeds and finds this melody.
Our souls are air. They hold us together. Listen.
A music-hall favourite lasts until the end of time.
My dad is playing it. His breath contains the world.
The wind is playing an orchestra of harmonicas.
Michael Longley
K. M. PEYTON – Author
My husband is very old and remembers his father as a survivor of the First World War.
He had been injured in the leg and the doctors wanted to amputate it, but he refused to let them. Luckily the leg healed, but he walked with a bad limp. He had brought a souvenir home from the war: it was a German helmet known as a Pickelhaube. Pickel means ‘point’ and Haube means ‘hat’, so it was a helmet made of very thick, tough leather with a spike sticking out of the top. What the spike was for was a mystery. Did one run at the enemy head down and stick them in the chest? My husband was very fond of this helmet and loved playing at war, hearing all the stories from his father and his friends. When he was three he was given a set of lead soldiers to play with, and he dug trenches for them in the tiny garden behind his house and set them in. He refused to bring them in at night, as he said all soldiers slept out in the trenches, and hi
s mother was cross because all the paint wore off and they looked old and battered very quickly. But that was how he wanted it.
He didn’t know then that when the time came, in the next war, he too would sleep out in the rain like his tin soldiers. He told me once that on a long march they had to sleep when they could go no farther, just where they happened to be, which was in a marsh. He said they sat in their tin hats and lay back against their packs. Perhaps the Pickelhaube would have made a better seat, securely stuck with its spike, and the leather warmer to the bottom.
Later he went to North Africa to fight in the hot desert, but that is another story.
SIR TERRY PRATCHETT – Author
My maternal grandfather never went to war; he was lucky enough to be too young to go to the First World War and too old for the second one, and because he was a rather taciturn individual I never plucked up the courage to ask him if he was happy with that situation, but it was just how the calendar fell. He lived in London when the First World War was gently sliding towards the Second World War.
The war my paternal grandfather fought became known as the Great War, and it was a campaign that simply ate men. It could be called a slaughterhouse. Granddad didn’t tell us much, but what was it that he deigned to tell us? Only that it was bad; I think he took the view that I and my cousins were kids, and shouldn’t have nightmares. But to me the way he wasn’t telling us things said a lot, as if talking about it would call it screaming back.
He was a wonderful gardener and had green fingers, which fortuitously had not been shot off. One day I was chatting to him as he worked in his garden; he broke his silence to tell me about a time when he was a guard at a prisoner-of-war camp near Blandford Forum. One of the prisoners had carved a flute; but my granddad took it away from him. As he told me this, he started to cry with great big sobs. The sobs became a wail that I had never heard from a man before, and it went on and on, which worried me quite a lot – and then suddenly he was all smiles again. And sitting in the garden, we shared his dinner of bread and cheese, with an apple each.
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