| All very interesting and good post here. Ains, you mention a trip that I plan to do myself, a trip that I have for a long time felt that I have to make on my own, be interested to know if you guys that have been have also done it that way.
My Grandfather never spoke of WW1 to anybody other than me and he only did that when he was on deathbed, the night before he died. - I was 11 at the time and did not fully understand what he was telling me. I also could never understand why as I grew up he would silently walk away shaking his head when I was playing with my soldiers or making the machine gun noises with anything that resembled a gun. A few years on and I was reluctantly sitting there in my English Lit class when the subject switched to war poetry of WW1, - I was hit by a bolt as things fell into place.
A few years ago I spent a day in the Imperial war museum, after booking my time in their library a really helpful person bought me a pile of books with references of my grandfather’s regiment. I traced where he had been on the day he got blown up; Hill 41 Ypres, - I also discovered and put into place what he had told me of a tour of duty; a tour that took them behind enemy lines on reconnaissance immediately before The first Battle of the Somme. A tour of Duty that so decimated his regiment that the few became "lucky" enough to be rested on that first day of the battle of the Somme as they waited for new recruits.
I still have his medals, - and his spurs, he was in The City of London Yeomanry, I have the pieces of shrapnel that were removed from his back, the letters and the Christmas cards home, including the one written the day before he was injured, and dictated letters written by nurses from Bolougne field hospital. I also have photos of him with all his friends, smiling back at the camera, sitting perched on straw bales taken somewhere in Northern France. . I guess I was very lucky that he came back, (would not have been born otherwise!!).
If any of you have not read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulkes I would say go buy it tomorrow, - it is fiction, starts a bit slow as it paints the picture of the summer of 1914 pre war, but when it gets going it is very atmospheric.  |