We shall remember them....

I have always been struck that in the First World War and also the Second World War it wasn't soldiers who went off to fight. It was farmers and factory hands, dockers and coal miners, businessmen and intellectuals. All manner of people wrenched from their 'domestic lives' and flung into the maelstrom of hell, especially in the First World War.  How you make such a transition has for a long time fascinated me.  I remember my Uncle who did National Service saying he hated it because he could never kill another human, someone's son or father.  

Yet they responded and went for a thousand and one different reasons, most of them hoping, praying and expecting to come back home and resume their 'domestic life' once again when it was all over.

I tried to capture something of this in a short poem, imagining a soldier about to go over the top on his wedding anniversary. 

England Expects…too much?

June 11^th 1915…
Celebrating June 11^th 1904
Too young you were to wed,
    Some said
And him – ten years on

But eyes only for each other

A love as true as any
Wrought by bards and poets
Or sung in songs of romance

Little Benjamin was the first

Eighteen months on;
Followed by Flo and Danny,
We lost Rebecca, poor mite

Celebrating I am

Smiling as my guts
Twist and turn;
Was it as bad as this
    in 1904?

Celebrating I am,

Up early, 4.30am
Watching, waiting for the big push.
Nervous about meeting my new bride –
Sister Death and her bridesmaids –
Maimed and Wounded

Celebrating I am
Being once on the brink of heaven
Now on the edge of hell.


© Gordon Banks June 1993