I wish we weren't forgetting.
But we are.
And that makes their memory - including that of the grandfather I never met - all the harder to bear.
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We could some do with some forgetting on the glorification front and some better social memory and facts on what and who caused these wars. A salute to all the fallen, military and civilian.
Lest we forget……
Let us forget Brexit.
Go to The Long Long Trail, longlongtrail.co.uk, click on Army, then Regiments and Corps, then Infantry Regiments, then (I suspect) Norfolks. From the National Archive, if you have basic information you might be able to get his documents also, if the battalion is known there are some surviving war diaries.
I have his service record
He served in both wars, being in the professional navy
He died in 1946 as a result of his war service
On the Ayshford Trafalgar Roll there are 74 Murphy’s listed.
You should tell us more about him Richard.
Heroes deserve to have their stories told.
Professional navy? RN or merchant? What ships did he sail on? What did he die of?
My great great uncle Ernest Luke Moss died at the Somme on the first day of the battle fighting with the Somerset light infantry. I’d love to hear similarl details of your grandfather.
If you know them.
Sometime…
At this time of year I listen to Vaughan Williams 4 & 6 symphonies as I have seldom heard a better depiction of the cacophony of war (with the exception of Mars by Holst). VW was I understand a medic or ambulance driver in WW1. The 6th Symphony he wrote after the second world war. He denied that it was program music as such but the music seems to fit so well with the hell that is war.
Then to finish off I listen to his 3rd Symphony (the Pastoral) where the 2nd movement (lento moderato) has a bugle solo very similar to the last post against a back drop of strings playing a wonderful chord progression. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and then I remember. I really do – it hits home.
My great grandfather was a regimental sergeant major with I think what was the South Wales Borderers. He started off as a PT instructor but ended up going into action. He was shell shocked and as a result became a very violent man if provoked. My Father loved him and feared him in equal measure. Dad remembers Grandad occasionally waking up in the middle of the night screaming and sobbing throughout his life. Awful.
One of my uncles (the first born of my Grandmother on my mother’s side) died in France early in WW2. My Grandmother used to make a place for him every Sunday dinner for year’s afterwards.
The next uncle down went to war in the desert. He played guitar and was playing songs with his best mate in a shell hole when a shell landed and blew him out of it. He went back to try to find his friend and there was nothing left. Nothing. Gone.
I don’t wear poppies to remember ‘them’. I remember them by the stories passed down to me and which I will pass onto my kids in the hope that they do not have to experience something like that.
Just listened to Britten’s War Requiem, which combines the sacred with Owen’s poetry and superb music.
I had a grandfather who served in The Great War. It left him deaf and suffering from chronic illnesses, bouts of pleurisy and pneumonia, throughout the time I knew him. As a boy I remember seeing many men in Glasgow who had lost limbs in one or other of the great conflicts – a neighbour lost both legs and eventually got one of those funny little 3-wheelers. As a small boy I used to go through my parents’ photos from the 2nd WW and there were several pictures with the words “They shall not grow old….” I wondered what it meant.
And as a letter in today’s Guardian tells us, our war pensioners are frequently refused any increase in their pensions thanks to the Work Capability Assessment – Lest we forget.
I did my usual thing. After Mass I watched/listened to John MacDermott’s The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda on Youtube, and wept with rage as I usually do at the politicians’ utter folly.
I was fortunate enough to do my national service in Rhodesia – on the wrong side- and learned so much about how great blokes really are and how terrible conflict really is. The armistice should have been the end; but once again the politicians stuffed it up so that within about 20 years we would have another war and men like Richard’s grandfather would serve twice.
Siegfried Sassoon summed it up:
“You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye – Who cheer when soldier lads march by – Sneak home and pray you’ll never know – The hell where youth and laughter go.”
I watched the much vaunted documentary on BBC last night.
I noted more that anything else the sense of fun, adventure and obligation the monologues evidenced at the start of the conflict with those more negative attitudes of people’s feelings at the end.
We talk about the ‘glorious’ dead but those dead, eviscerated bodies I saw on the battlefield did not look very glorious to me. Where is the glory in seeing your guts shot out or your leg hanging off?
I’m sure that if we could speak to the dead of that conflict they’d much rather be seeing their grand kids growing up, having Sunday dinner, having a drink at the pub with their mates or just dunking a biscuit in their cup of tea.
The best way to remember them is not to bloody do it again unless you really have to. The second world war was one of those ‘have to’ moments but it too could have been avoided. Which is why we have the EU. Or we did.
Days like yesterday make you want to tell their stories don’t they.
You remember the dead, but on Armistice Day, you just feel the need to tell again, aloud, the stories they told you, or your parents.
That’s how they stay alive in our memories, how our children will know a little of what they went through.
Someone on an earlier post mentioned the glorification of war. I agree.
It may be because in this country, the military hierarchy and the Church, as well as the Royal British Legion, are the ones leading the commemorations, but I find it really impossible to take.
It’s all about ensuring that we see only the glory, the grandeur even, of what they call victory. So they can continue to recruit to fight in their wars.
There was just cold mud, hunger, filth, almighty noise and terror in those trenches.
Why don’t they tell people the truth, and stop this solemn farce.
I remember commemorating the 11November every year as a school child in France.
Just a bugle, the mayor with the veterans of WW2 ( my dad, like all his comrades, not in uniform) and school children.
No grandeur, no drums, just a lonely bugle by the war monument.
We were told of the misery of war by our parents. They stressed nothing but that. They also said they hoped peace would last this time, that we might be the first generation ever not to lose a son, a husband, a brother, in a war.
My father said to me he was glad I was a girl, he’d have been terrified if he’d had a son.
He spent 5 years as a PoW in East Prussia. His father spent 4 years on the Western Front, came back alive, but had been gassed and died when my dad was 2.
On the other side of my family, my grand-mother had lost her first husband in 1917, in Verdun. He was 21.
She re-married in the mid-1920s, to my grandfather, a much older man, who had also been in Verdun, but had survived physical injury in the trenches.
He had killed a German soldier with his bayonet.
I never met him, he died 4 years before I was born. But both my mother and my grandmother used to tell me one of the only thing he was prepared to say about his war was that if only he and the German soldier had spoken a few words in the same language, they would have walked away from each other.
My grandfather never recovered. He could never forget. He never forgave himself for his instinct to survive.
So those commemorations…no, I can’t do those. Or the poppy.
I always repeat his words in my mind, I listen to silence, I plant something in the garden…I have so many trees by now!
And I learnt languages.
Thank you Marie
I have to agree as well. I don’t buy poppies any more, and, like Marie, I find this the UK way of remembering over the top; in fact, I think there is an element, intentional or not, of glorifying Britain’s military past. There now seems to be far more focus on WW1 and 2 than 30 or 40 years ago, when we were much closer to the events, and there were still survivors around in quite large numbers.
And I find it rather peculiar for current politicians to be making such a fuss about remembering the horrors of these wars when they’re trying to take us out of the EU, which was set up, lest we forget, in response to the horrors of wars in Europe caused by right wing nationalism. The same nationalism behind much of Brexit, and believed in fervently by those who oppose the EU, and everything it stands for.
Well said Marie. I used to buy a poppy until several years ago, but I won’t any more precisely because the whole thing in this country is now being overdone, and has been for several years now. There is definitely an element of reinforcing Britain’s role as a great power, and by implication, yearning for that power again; something we see all too clearly in the whole Brexit debacle. Isn’t there a huge irony that we’re comemmerating the 100th anniversary of the end of WW1 at the same time as Britain is (possibly) leaving the EU, which was created in response to the horrors of the 2 world wars?
And didn’t other countries suffered even more than Britain, but make far less fuss about it?
It’s really gone ‘over the top’ now. If I thought all this official fuss would stop further wars, I wouldn’t object. Sadly, I don’t see it.
A visit to the war cemeteries, trenches and museums of the Westhoek (the former Western Front), is salutory and I defy visitors not to shed a few tears. That’s how never to forget.
I took my boys there a couple of years ago
It seemed like a duty to do so
Indeed. I used to take students to Peronne and the war cemeteries of the Somme every year.
We visited large cemeteries, and smaller ones in villages.
I never saw ‘my kids’ so silent and subdued.
Job done.
Marie,
I did my Rhodesian national service under the supervision of officers who had fought in Malaysian Communist Insurgency in the 50’s. They were a rough lot, but they all said that the worst thing you could ever do is bayonet someone. You never forgot and couldn’t forgive yourself, just as Wilfred Owen wrote in Strange Meeting.
Also, we need to remember that soldiers on active service really do love each other, and to see so many pals die must have been soul-destroying.
My only recourse is meditation and prayer over something that is utterly incomprehensible, which can only be initiated by wilfully blind politicians, who we must get rid of.
Thank you John.
I’m sure my grand-father would have wept if he could have read, or heard, Wilfred Owen’s words.
But he was Breton, typical convenient canon fodder, an unimportant man, only knew Breton and a bit of French. Just enough to receive orders. So many were like him.
He used to spend a lot of time working, my mother told me. All hours.
He was a silent man. Not religious. We all find different ways to survive deep trauma, well…some of us don’t.
He was a fantastic father to my mother and his stepson, who he made sure went to school to become a teacher. His life ambition was to ensure his children were educated. They were. And they educated their children to abhor war and refuse to obey orders blindly.
Always question why. Always remember that people in authority, politicians especially, can be questioned and are worth no more than you, but may want to get something out of you, so they can lie and flatter to get their way. We learnt to spot those tricks.
We do need to get rid of their sort. But the question is how.
They are, pardon the phrase, entrenched.
It’s very touching to read people’s individual family stories of the horror of war – any war. We were extraordinarily fortunate not to have suffered the loss of any immediate relatives (to my knowledge) hence I’m especially indebted to the millions who did, enabling me to live in the peace & safety that I’ve been privileged to enjoy.
Two separate observations though. Firstly – let us not forget the 10s of millions of animals that were (and still are) the innocent victims of man’s inhumanity to man – horses, dogs, camels, elephants, pigeons, et al. – http://www.animalsinwar.org.uk/index.cfm?asset_id=1375.
Secondly – after all the horrors and human sacrifice of the past 100 years, why do voters still elect politicians who continue to support wars, either directly or indirectly? All the official wailing and gnashing of teeth is rank hypocrisy and emotional manipulation of the electorate.
While not on his side politically (and I’m only going on the press reports) I thought it was courageous of Macron to denounce nationalism publicly in the presence of Trump & Putin. Peace was at the heart of the post WW2 European Project. In spite of the conflicts in Kosovo, Bosnia, Yugoslavia and NI, Brexit will weaken the prospect of achieving lasting, sustainable peace in Europe. Why isn’t that a head-line topic?
In 1914, there must have been many veterans of the Crimean War still alive in the UK, and of course many of their children and grandchildren. That war had been fought only 60 years before the Great War, less of a period than separates us from the Somme and Verdun and Jutland and indeed separates our time from El Alamein and Dunkerque and Stalingrad. The British army in Crimea suffered horrendous casualties, as did their French, Turkish, and Piedmontese allies. There were therefore many in the UK then who would have had memories of the horrors of Alma and Balaclava, and the Charge of the Light Brigade (Lions urged on by donkeys), or memories of parents or grandparents who were traumatised by the suffering and slaughter of that now dimly remembered conflict that involved not just Britain, but also France, Turkey, Piedmont and Russia itself. But was there a solemn “Lest we forget” industry in Britain then? Were wreaths laid at war memorials in villages and towns up and down the land to remember the sacrifice of so many young men on the steppes of Crimea? Did Edward VII or Gorge V lead annual military parades down Whitehall or in the Westminster Abbey to commemorate the “Glorious dead”? Did men and women stand in solmen silence as the bell tolled at midday to remember and respect those men whose graves outside Sebastopol are some “corner of a foreign field that is forever England? Were there annual collections in the streets and outside shops and in schools where paper flowers were given to people to pin in their lapels to show their patriotic sentiments? If these things happened, I have never heard of them; perhaps in that pre-mass entertainment age, there was no audience for such public performances. Maybe if there had been such ceremonies, they have faded away with the years, and people were content t allow time like an ever rolling stream to bear all its sons away to fly forgotten as a drema flies at the break of day. Unsderstand me: my grandfather fought in East Africa with the Royal Fusiliers and was a victim of the great slaughter of 1914-1918, and my father served honourably in the RAF from 1940 to 1945. My mother had been raised fatherless by her widowed mother through the 20s and 30s, and lived through blitz and the V bombs and rationing and all the stresses of the Second War, raising he child in constant awareness that she might be widowed as her mother had been by the First War. The London flats where we lived were devastated by a V2 while we were taking refuge in comparatively safe Macclesfield. Our family remembers all too well the rigours and horrors of 1914 – 1918 (The “war to end wars” for the freedom of a “land made fit for heroes” etc) and 1939 – 1945. And we were, through all the period since 1945 hopeful that these truly would be wars to end all wars. And we never took much note of the public ceremonies, the street colections, the poppies, the church services, the standing in silence. Surely the time has come to put all that back into the history books, to forget, to have those two wars as securely in the schoolbooks rather than in the memories of men and women as the Crimean War. Surely, in 2058, we – or our descendants – will not still be sighing “lest we forget”? Now that all these ceremonies are finished, let us forget, and instead, think of and work for a future of peace.