Thirty-Four Days

 

Armistice: we all know the familiar litany of 'the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month'. We all know and preserve the memory of family members who fought and died in conflict before and since the institution of this annual mark of collective respect for the dead of all wars. We all know that 'The War to End All Wars' was no such thing. What relatively few know, are the realities of war and death in combat. Today, I remember in particular, someone who died forty years before I was born, on December 22nd, 1914: my distant cousin, Tom Rudge [blog posts passim], who was killed shortly after his twenty-first birthday, on the last day of the first Battle of Ypres. Tom, like so, so many of the quarter of a million dead and wounded of both sides of the battle, has no grave, his whereabouts unknown; merely a dignified mention on the roll-call of the dead at Le Touret Memorial in France. I'll leave it to the words of Wilfred Owen from his "Anthem to Doomed Youth" to give a sense of the decimation of a generation of youth.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 

      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.