And So It Goes

I've written before about my uncle Arthur's involvement in the Second World War, and I've mentioned that he spent eight hours floating in the Med after his glider, along with many others, was released too early by inexperienced American crews flying the tugs that would take them to the planned invasion of Sicily, and dropped them in the drink. Two hundred and fifty two men drowned as a result. My uncle survived. Only to end up being redeployed to Holland on Operation Market Garden - the subject of the film 'A Bridge Too Far', where he was captured after experiencing God knows only what, and as a result of which he spent the rest of the war in relative safety as a POW.

But I want to leave you with a quotation relating to the previous World War - The Great War - and the Western Front where my distant cousin Tom died a few weeks into his service at the age of barely twenty-one years old. It's from 'The Middle Parts of Fortune' by Frederic Manning, a novelisation of his experience in the conflict:

'...They moved off at once. Shells travelled overhead; they heard one or two bump fairly close, but they saw nothing except the sides of the trench, whitish with chalk in places, and the steel helmet and lifting swaying shoulders of the man in front, or the frantic uplifted arms of shattered trees, and the sky with the clouds broken in places, through which opened the inaccessible peace of the stars...' The perversely prosaic reality of war rendered utterly and tragically poetic. It has ever been thus, sad to say...