90 Years Ago Today

i completely agree with you. a lot more people were killed in wwii, but there's something haunting about the trenches and the gas and the horrible senselessness of going over the top.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3534068.stm

Despite the danger he faced, he thinks he had an easy time of it compared to men who served in the infantry.

"On the western front, men in the trenches stood in water up to their knees. They had to eat and sleep in that water. How did they manage?" he said.

He said those men regularly had to march for miles on end only to stop and dig trenches before marching on again.

"They were like hermit crabs," he said. "But I've always said the men in the trenches were what won the war for us."

One of those men, John Oborne of the Light Infantry, also attended the Cenotaph ceremony, despite preferring to leave his memories of the war in the past.

"You wouldn't like to know what I did," he said. "What do you go to war for? To kill people."

"I thought I'd be doing some good, even though I was just a tiny cog in a great big wheel. I never gave it a thought that I'd be killing people.

Mr Allingham used to share that reticence, but shares his experiences now to honour those who died in the war, and to help the modern generation understand the horrors they witnessed.

"War's stupid," he said. "Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway."

This stuff always has me in tears.

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 gas-shells drop softly 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 dream 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 ever jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs-

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.

the statistics of that war are astonishing--the number of young men killed, the resulting decrease in birth rates following the war....

Our captain cried, All hands and away tomorrow
Leaving these girls behind in grief and sorrow.
What makes you go abroad, fighting for strangers
When you could stay at home, free from all dangers?

You courted me a while just to deceive me
Now my heart you have gained, and you mean to leave me
There's no trusting men, not my own brother
So girls if you can love, love one another

The concept (fairly loose) of the song cycle is a vision of an edenic "old england" which WWI destroyed forever. The cycle was recorded and comprises the first side of an album also called Anthems in Eden.

xpost

ah yes the war requiem... sigh.

I have a head for dates and this day (and admittedly, some stuff at work) just had me down today.

Don't know Barker, sorry.

in case i didn't express myself well enough, i meant my thanks in earnest, i was glad to be reminded of this anniversary and reading the edward grey quote gave me the chills. and made me think and all that.

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats' restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

-- Philip Larkin