Remembrance

I studied war poetry at school, as I'm sure most of us did, but had started to read it before. My grandfather had a variety of books, and they remained on the shelves after he died when I was seven, and as I grew I read them from time to time.

He served with the RAF, one of the wave of new recruits in the period immediately preceding the start of the Second World War, one of many young men who saw what was coming and decided to enlist. It was when the RAF was moving from being the preserve of the aristocracy (in its early days they only had commissioned officers), and this new wave of recruits were known as sergeant pilots. In his case, a sergeant navigator in a number of different bombers during the war. Of the men with whom he started out, he was pretty much the only one to come back, he flew so many missions the RAF stopped letting him fly, as by the law of averages there is no way he should have survived. He spent the later war years training others. He hated the bombing raids, as he and the rest of the crew knew that not every bomb would hit the military target they were aiming for, and that there would be civilians killed too. At the end of each mission they went straight to the pub. He won a number of medals, so I'm told, but gave them away to a boy who collected them, and almost never talked about the war.

One family story runs that he probably should have won more medals, but made himself very unpopular with a superior officer. He was posted to North Africa, and ended up coming home via points including Burma and Canada. His mother was furious that while in Canada he hadn't gone to visit his relatives, refusing to accept that when sent to serve in North Africa he hadn't taken the addresses of his Canadian relatives with him, so although he may have been a few miles from them, he had no idea until afterwards. This was made much worse by the fact that his Canadian cousin did come and visit her in Scotland! But I digress... On the final leg back to Scotland from Iceland, his superior officer forgot his parachute, and ordered my grandpa to give him his. His response was colourful and very much in the negative, involving a few ideas of where this particular gentleman could go. Thankfully they didn't need any parachutes, but he'd made quite an impression on that superior officer.

The other family story is of the huge argument he had with his father in 1940. He had been in France and came out at Dunkirk, and came home on leave immediately after, and told his parents what had happened. Dunkirk was not made public until it was well and truly over, and his father refused to believe that anything like that could ever have happened. I don't know whether he apologised to his son once it became public knowledge.

But back to poetry - from his selection, there are two poems which stand out for their incredibly different view of the First World War. Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier' (1914) and Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' (1917) are only a few years apart in date of writing, but a world apart in how they describe war.

Personally, I think that the First World War is an horrific example of the evils of politics, but the Second an example of how nations or groups of people can stand together for what is right. Wars and moments and incidents within them are somewhere between these two points, and exactly where you would put it often depends on your perspective. In the UK, our island status has given us a distance from the reality of war not experienced by other countries in Europe and elsewhere, which does affect our mindset more than I think we realise. Not having had to watch your own village being occupied makes war rather more philosophical than it was for many millions of people to the east and the south of us. Bombs are one thing, but seeing enemy soldiers in your own house is quite another. I blipped this on VE day this year, if you're interested.