poppy

Ninety-Three years ago today, four years of war ended with the signing of the Armistice Treaty by Germany and the Allies.

By the end 9,721,937 soldiers had died on the battlefield leaving 21,228,813 wounded. Of the dead 885,138 were British; of the Allies only the French (cheese-eating surrender monkeys anyone?) and Russians lost more troops, the latter by almost a million. The defeated Germans lost 2,050,897. All the above figures are purely military, not civilian. If we were to include them as well the total of deaths in First World War would come to a staggering 16,543,185 human beings.

There are no longer any surviving British soldiers of what is called The Great War, from here on in living witnesses to the abject-absolute horror of what happened near the start of the last century are consigned to the history books. One of those survivors was my Grandfather. He was 15 years old when he went to the front to look after the horses, but because of his size he was soon issued a Lewis Gun (made by BSA who are better known by civilians for making motorcycles) and was ordered to a post in a trench in The Somme.

The Lewis gun was a ‘light’ machine gun which meant that if you were physically able it could be moved around, but not sufficiently for a soldier to be able to nip into no mans land and back to the trench for bacon and eggs what-ho (as if.) It was common for two Lewis Guns (you can see one in action at 2.06 in the film below) to sit at either end of a given Trench and crossfire into the enemy, such was the power of the weapon men could be cut quite literally in half.

In this respect he was fortunate as he didn’t have to go over the top, though he was witness to thousands of his colleagues and friends being cut down and, doubtless, responsible for doing the same to the enemy. Fuck alone knows what he saw; he never spoke to my dad about it (though dad remembers granddad slam dunking granny onto the bedroom floor confusing a moonbeam with an incendiary one night) and I only learnt of what it was he actually did when I was about 12. He explained the Lewis Gun and ended with what could be described as an anecdote, which was the getting of a black eye from a flaying pair of legs, ‘just the legs.’ When he was interviewed a year before his death by the historian Lyn Macdonald he didn’t give much away to her either.

Fortunately for me (and probably for him too) he got trench foot and was dismissed from duty and it was here he met my granny working as a nurse in a nearby military hospital. Ironically, if it wasn’t for The Lewis and Trench Foot it’s unlikely I’d have been.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of all of this is the legacy of the conflict. The millions dead and wounded, the waste of young lives, the sheer hell of warfare, yet we’re all still at it. When all is said and done, war is a complete and utter waste of virtually everything. To think how much the human race has progressed in those millions of years, one would’ve thought we’d be beyond this sort of thing now.

I shall leave you with the sublime words of Wilfred Owen, killed in action a week before The Armistice.

“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”