Remembrance
I get more than a little jumpy writing things about stuff like this, because I am far from knowledgable and, as someone who is almost always against the wars that ‘we’ have fought recently, it can seem a bit rich to me, writing about the people who fought in them.
My Granddad was a marine in WWII though. He drove a landing craft in the D-Day landings, he pitched up in Singapore and Madagascar, fought in the Pacific and, erm… I don’t know much else to be honest, because he doesn’t really talk about it.
He’ll tell us funny stories when they occur to him, and it’s not like he avoids the topic, but I’ve never heard him tell any kind of tale about the war which I would describe as all that harrowing. It’s possible that he’d rather not bring it up because the memories are a little hard to face, but I suspect it might be because, for all we would listen attentively, we actually would not be able to truly understand what the tales he would be telling actually, deep down, mean to him.
The world moves incredibly fast. The things my Granddad does tell us which do make an impact are the tales of living in Wales and Manchester immediately before and after the war. He talks about trying to get fired by his foreman at the steelworks just to prove he could face the man down. He talks about his brother fighting their father, and running off with him to fend for themselves and make a living whilst he was in his early teens. He talks about how he and my Grandma tried to keep the house warm, and how he would steal coal from work to put on the fire in the evening.
It’s difficult enough to know what the people who fight in modern wars really experience, despite some excellent films which try and get it across, but as much as anything when I think about my Granddad and his role in the Second World War and in particular the combination of that war and the society in which he lived at the time, it really strikes me that increasingly no-one understands what these guys went through, not properly. Apart from a desire to fight Germans, one of the reasons he was so keen to get into the forces, in whatever division, was because working in the steelworks in Manchester was so incredibly shit.
The perception of the threat of someone bent on ‘taking over the world’, which in itself seems like a quaint concept these days, the lingering strength of the concept of England or Britain as an Island Empire, the overwhelming industrialisation, family life being so massively different and social standards radically so… it’s amazing how quickly people forget what life used to be like, even in their own childhoods.
For the best part of six years my Granddad fought in the British army against someone trying to conquer the nation, and indeed the whole continent. Six years. I don’t think that it would be possible for me to truly grasp that and more than anything else on Remembrance Day, that’s what I find myself thinking.
The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Green Fields of France (No Man’s Land)
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The Waterboys – Red Army Blues
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Nice writing Matthew!
Yes, well done. About 15 or 16 years ago a friend and I walked into the Ancient Order of Hibernians Hall in Troy, NY, and a “party” was going on. Three or four graybeards were sitting at the bar and drinking toasts. My friend and I were the youngest people in the room by about 60 years, and we asked what they were toasting. They replied that it was the 50th anniversary of the date they all enlisted together to fight “the Hun.” The most important event in any of their lives by far.
It’s always the thing that grabs me most when I read books set during both of the World Wars. The contrast between what these sometimes very young men were experiencing out in the field, and life back home in the UK. Maybe it was less clearly defined in WWII with the advent of bombing by plane, but the accounts in novels like Birdsong of soldiers coming home to everyone “doing their bit,” during WWI are heartbreaking. Not only did a huge number of young men lose their lives, but an entire generation of them who’d seen things that they could never talk about, that could never be understood by their families and loved ones were essentially lost to society. It’s difficult to believe that all of this occured in recent history, that the final men who fought have only just died.
Well said Matthew,
I always make a point in observing the minuets silence on Nov 11th. This used to cause some friction when I worked in Avalanche and turned the stereo off at 11am every Nov 11th. I even shushed a few customers as well.
Thanks. It’s difficult to write with any authority when the one and only thing that keeps occurring to you is that you have no authority to be writing this whatsoever.
Still, a sober thought is probably as much value as an authoritative essay for situations like this.
my grandparents met just before WWII, he was then shipped off to North Africa, and she did whatever she did…..then over four years later he was demobbed and they got married…..now that what gets me nearly in tears everytime…..over 4 years they waited for each other.
the cliché is generally true, we don’t know we’re born!
Only to produce you.
What a waste.
i know!!!
Well, someone could have warned them, but they’d never have listened. Love is annoyingly stubborn like that
My grandfather served in WWI and survived, he enlisted in 1915 and fought in the first battle of the Somme to Ypres and was on the Western front til the end, one of the lucky ones. He never spoke about it and I used to think of him as a curmudgeonly old git when he used to stay with us, he was in his 90′s when I was a teenager.
The year before he died he sat me down and talked about the trenches as I was covering the Great War in history, he spoke quietly and sometimes with a faltering tone but I will never forget what he told me. My view of my grandfather changed that day, I thought then that I was a pacifist and still don’t think that i could kill another human being but I have the greatest respect for those who fought and died in both world wars. So every Armistice day I observe the 2 minutes silence out of respect for that dignified but grumpy old git who used to knock my cats off the chair with his walking stick and all the others like him
Less than 8 years after fighting for King and Country, he was on a picket line trying to get decent wages and conditions for all workers. How quickly the ruling classes forgot the sacrifices those young men made.
Yes, when they say ‘we’ need to make sacrifices they invariably do not include themselves in that we.
In many ways, honouring the veterans of the world wars just throws more recent ones into stark relief.
I’m struggling to think of the last major war that anyone will all pat each other on the back and agree was “just” in the rear mirror of history (was the Falklands just or eminently convenient for a struggling government?) and I strongly suspect it won’t be our forays into Iraq and Afghanistan either. Bosnia we fucked up by only getting serious when people had already been massacred while the UN stood idly by looking cute in blue berets. Korea, Vietnam?
I feel depressed for the veterans of recent wars. Why would anyone join the Army now, illegal wars in sandbox client states that save nothing and no-one apart from Halliburton profits and contractors?
And for who? A government that instead of putting the economy on a war footing, can’t get round to ordering enough bulletproof vehicles or telling the industrial defence complex to pull its finger out its arse and create new kit in less in a decent procurement period. A government that is privatising army training and selling off decent army housing while neglecting the rest.
Again, I suspect many escape a fate they view as worse but if you are just in it for three square meals and camaraderie, prison has more home comforts these days and probably attracts more well meaning busybodies and funding than underequipped squaddies stuck in the arse end of Kandahar.
My grandad was killed during WWII. He was a fireman. He was putting out fires during a blitz. It was a stormy night. He was blown out the back of the fire truck and broke his neck. My mum was a little girl. It breaks my heart everytime I think of it.
I meant to add. Lovely piece of writing Matthew. And you have every right to write about these things. Especially when you do it so well.
Thanks Euan, that’s nice. I am confident enough in my casual chatty writing, but having to tackle something quite serious is a little different, so thanks.
Mrs. Toad, I think you’re spot on. One of the hardest things Vietnam vets had to face was coming back to a country a large part of which treated them like murderers, even after all they’d faced.
Any British soldier in Iraq has to face a pretty depressing truth: that their presence has been potentially worse for the people of Iraq than the presence of Saddam Hussein, due to botched political vanity projects instigated by the likes of Blair and Bush. How the fucking hell do you even begin to deal with that?
I do think that we have moved on significantly from Vietnam though when the troops were vilified when they arrived home.
While not that many people are excited by the war, I think we are much better at separating the war, which is a political decision from the troops who are basically just going to work. Only a really really tough work.