Years ago, I was told that my maternal grandfather had contracted dysentery during the Great War after serving in the trenches, at one point standing waist deep in water. He recovered and was transferred to the War Office in London. I was reminded of the story when I came across this episode in Bruce Bairnsfather's book, Bullets and Billets mentioned in an earlier post.
Near this lay the trench which he had been telling me about. It was quite the worst I have ever seen. A number of men were in it, standing and leaning, silently enduring the following conditions. It was quite dark. The enemy was about two hundred yards away, or rather less. It was raining, and the trench contained over three feet of water.
The men, therefore, were standing up to the waist in water. The front parapet was nothing but a rough earth mound which, owing to the water about, was practically non-existent. Their rifles lay on the saturated mound in front. They were all wet through and through, with a great deal of their equipment below the water at the bottom of the trench. There they were, taking it all as a necessary part of the great game, not a grumble nor a comment.
Bruce Bairnsfather – Bullets and Billets (1916)
Maybe one of those soldiers was Grandad. Probably not - but maybe.
2 comments:
We need real, personal examples to make sense of something like the Great War. As Stalin said, one man's death is a tragedy; that of a million is a statistic. It's why nations chose one nameless corpse from out of the millions lost in the mud, and they became the unknown warrior.
So yes, definitely Grandad.
Sam - yes, personal examples do help make sense of the Great War. They certainly bring home the monstrous and inhuman futility of it. The machine-like nature of it too, as if nobody humanly sane was in charge.
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