Remembering...by Sue Purkiss

Seven years ago,  I went to a funeral in Wells. The cathedral was full, and I, like many others, watched on big screens outside on the green. Someone royal was there, and there were representatives from several European countries. It was all filmed and was later shown on the television news.

So whose funeral was it? That of a statesman or a politician? Or a famous actor, perhaps?

No, none of those. It was the funeral of an ordinary working man. No-one had heard of him until he was a hundred years old, when he finally broke his silence and began to speak about a war in which he had taken part as a young man: World War One. After that, he found fame as one of the last surviving Tommies; he travelled to France to take part in memorial services, he co-operated in the writing of a book about his life, he appeared in documentaries, speaking movingly about the pointlessness of war, he met the great and good. One by one, his contemporaries died, till finally he was the only one left: Harry Patch, the last fighting Tommy. He died when he was 112. I've written about him before - you can see those posts here and here.

Harry Patch on the 

There are many ways through which we remember that war and others: through books, through film, through poetry. They all work, they all move us and make us think. But just over a year ago, I joined a choir. It's run by Issy Emeney, who not only writes and performs music, but is also a painter and a flatfoot/clog dancer. And she has written a song, called The Last Tommy, about Harry. Into just a few verses, she gets the pointlessness, the waste of war. The penultimate verse is sung as a solo, and every time I hear it, it catches me. You can listen to the song here, and I'm sure Issy won't mind me quoting that verse:

Look into an old man's eyes
And what do you see there?
Peace and reconciliation
For the wounds we all must bear:
There's hope in every sunrise,
Joy in every song I write;
But when England's very last Tommy died
I cried, I cried...
When the very last fighting Tommy died,
I cried.

And now to remember a musician and poet who died last week - Leonard Cohen. This is a reading he did recently of the famous poem written during the First World War by John Macrae, a Canadian doctor - so it's a sort of double remembering. Thanks to Alison Arlington for this, a friend who posted it on Facebook.

Remembrance: by Sue Purkiss

It's that time of year again.

Remembrance. Remembering. As I've written before on this blog, my father, like most of his generation, fought in the war. Well, he didn't do all that much fighting; he was taken prisoner on the way to Dunkirk. Years later, he would watch Remembrance Day parades, the Royal Military Tattoo and suchlike with a slightly sardonic glint in his eye, shake his head, and say: "Why do they want to remember it? Why can't we just forget ?" It was understandable. He'd had what he called 'a bad war'. His memories didn't link up with the smart uniforms, the well-phrased speeches.

He was not alone. It's a well-known phenomenon that many soldiers don't wish to speak of their experiences. As far as possible, they want to forget. But they can't. They can suppress them, but often the memories rise to the surface in old age; this happened with Harry Patch, the 'last surviving Tommy', who only began to speak of his experiences in the trenches when he was over a 100. It happened with Felix Weinberg, who only recently wrote a memoir, Boy 30529, (which I reviewed here last month) about his experiences in the concentration camps; he saw no reason to speak about what had happened to him till he was an old man - he was determined not to be defined by what had happened to him. It happened with Eric Lomax, who was a prisoner of the Japanese. His suppression of his memories caused him great emotional difficulty, and it was only when he faced up to them with the help of Amnesty International, and even went to meet one of his former guards, that he found a measure of peace. (He wrote about this in The Railway Man.)

Earlier this year I went to visit the battlefields and cemeteries of Flanders. We were based in Ypres, and we went a couple of times to the Menin Gate to hear the last post. If I'm honest, I found the experience a little disappointing. I had imagined the gate looking out over a plain, with a few observers standing in a circle round the trumpeter - I think I must have seen this painting, by Will Longstaff, with its drifts of ghostly soldiers, and based my expectation on that. Instead, the archway is in the centre of the town, with a busy road running through it. This is closed off for the ceremony, and the space under the arch is crammed with people, so that all you can really see is other people's heads. But when you look at the names inscribed on the archway afterwards, and take in the fact that there are 54,896, and these are only the names of those British soldiers with no known grave who were killed between 1914 and 15th August 1917: then something of the scale and nature of the slaughter begins to reveal itself, and the experience is both sobering and moving.

Siegfried Sassoon, with the anger of the survivor, did not respond to the gate in that way. This from his poem, On Passing The New Menin Gate:

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

But of course these reminders are not principally for the participants. They're for the rest of us. And they're so important. Surely, the more of us they bring to see the horror of war, the more chance there is that we will do everything we can to avoid war in the future - or that's the hope, even if it sometimes seems a vain one. 

Flanders is littered with cemeteries - all beautifully kept by the War Graves Commission - and with museums that tell the story of those days incredibly well - particularly the recently re-done Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres itself. Here are just a few pictures.

A small cemetery in Ypres; a little later in the summer, these flowers must have been beautiful.

I hope you can read these words, from the museum at Tyne Cot Cemetery.

These figures were in one of the few German cemeteries; the Belgians were less generous with their grants of land to the vanquished, and so here there were far fewer individual graves. The stonework was dark grey, as opposed to the white stone of the Allied graves. 

Finally, a personal remembrance. During the war, my father palled up with a softly spoken Hampshire lad called Eric Shepherd. Shep, as Dad called him, had an astonishing way with animals - even the fiercest dog could be gentled by him, a gift that must have come in very handy when the prisoners had the chance to 'liberate' food! He was a lovely man, and he died last week, aged 93. Rest in peace, Shep.