Lest we forget

[Caley Mad In Berks]

With 2014 being 100 years since the start of WW1 and 70 years since the D-day landings, Armistice day this year seems even more poignant.  My son has written this poem to mark the occasion.  It seems to be receiving good reviews with his Facebook following, so I have, with his permission, reproduced it here.

 

One hundred years of war    by Al Stewart, 2014

 

One hundred war-torn years ago

A million boys I did not know

Who'd never held a gun before

Stood side by side and went to war

 

They did not know the reasons why

Yet there they stood, prepared to die

Arm in arm and hand in hand

For this great green and pleasant land

 

For four long years they fought their cause

In this; the war to end all wars

That man would go to war again

Seemed unimaginable then

 

But in the next one hundred years

The world would shed more blood and tears

Millions more laid down their lives

Sons and daughters, husbands, wives

 

We'll never know how many perished

Folk who once were loved and cherished

Plain white crosses without names

Memories in picture frames

 

So testament to all that violence

Standing side by side in silence

On this day of deep regret

We honour them: Lest we forget

[Alex MacLeod]

And we should not forget these souls either

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/nov/14/firstworldwar.uk

[IBM]

And we should not forget these souls either

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/nov/14/firstworldwar.uk

Very true Alex, it is not to late!

[Charles Bannerman]

And we should not forget these souls either

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/nov/14/firstworldwar.uk

Of the 306, only 2 were officers. It would appear that it was more likely to be accepted that officers were suffering from "shell shock".

By WW2 this practice had mercifully disappeared but under certain circumstances what we now know to be post traumatic stress disorder was still treated pretty harshly. In Bomber Command there was the danger of being "LMFd" - declared to "lack moral fibre". Men, who were all volunteers and who had gone through the stress of goodness knows how many bombing raids, in some cases just cracked, were deemed to lack moral fibre and were shipped off the base in disgrace ASAP to avoid this "spreading".

It was not unknown for aircrew simply to jump out of the plane and indeed one gunner on an American ship in the Pacific was seen and heard to jump into shark infested waters with the words "It's a lovely day today."

 

As it happens one of these WW1 executions creates one of the ongoing storylines in Downton Abbey where there is a refusal to include the name of a relation of Mrs Patmore because this was what had happened to him.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Charles Bannerman