[The following is taken from the final passage of ‘Tommy: The British Soldier on the Wester Front 1914-1918,’ by Richard Holmes, and I could not help but include it. It is as moving and as poignant a piece on the Great War and its participants as I have ever found.]
It is often said that the war’s veterans never spoke about their experiences, but this is not true. They spoke freely to insiders, to comrades in national veterans’ organisations of which the British Legion, vigorously championed by Haig, became the best-known; in scores of smaller clubs and associations, and to the men remembered as ‘uncles’ by my father’s generation, who unfailingly appeared in collar and tie on Sundays and talked about things as secret as the rites of some arcane religion. For just as wartime leave had drawn a sharp dividing line between front and Blighty, so the peace cut even deeper. There were things a man could never share, even, or perhaps especially, with those he loved the most. For how could you describe being splashed by your best friend’s stomach contents, seeing barbed wire draped with entrails, or praying that the next shell would kill anyone, however much you admired them, rather than you? And how too could anyone understand the bliss of an army blanket on a stone floor, the delight of the quarter-bloke’s shout of ‘Gyp-oh’ when the hot bacon fat was brought on, or the pleasure of listening to the fifes squealing in the little square at Corbie?
it is small wonder that we sometimes find them hard to grasp, and try to judge them by poems they never read, or cast them in dramas they would never have bothered to watch. Like so many wars, the First World War could have been averted by more astute diplomacy and waged with greater skill. Like so many peaces, that which followed it could have been better drafted or more capably sustained. Yet we must judge the men who fought the war by their motives and achievements, not by the conflict’s origins or results.
Let us, by all means, persist with those squabbles which will remain dear to historians. But let us never forget that generation whose courage and endurance lift my spirits and break my heart. And let us do better for their great-grandchildren than we did for them.
Source:
Holmes, Richard. "Envoi." Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914-1918. London: HarperCollins, 2004. 630-31. Print.
Further Reading:
Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, KT, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCIE
No comments, yet...