Saturday 8 November 2014

Don't feel bad


It's that time of year again, but this time it's the 100th. They have put up the Christmas decorations outside our compact... oh you know what I am saying... but we have a whole 2 minutes of silence to go through before the boy-band actually switch them on. Sorry, Sir Cliff - maybe next year.

I heard this morning that there is a thriving industry that has developed around the fields in Northern France where they all got blown to bits, and it sells stuff to battlefield tourists, including chocolate poppies.

Having booked yourself into a hotel close to the sites, you may like to order a 'Passchendaele' beer (see above - it really exists) that asks you to observe a minute of silence after you have opened it and before you begin to drink it. If they served that in my pub, the silence would be deafening.

Of all the tonnage of ordnance which landed both sides of No Man's Land during those 4 years, a quarter of it failed to explode and, every year, farmers plough up 150 tons of it which they stack up in a corner as far away from their tractors as they can. There's just too much to shove into a bucket of water until the army turns up.

The journalist read out a note attached to a bunch of flowers which was left by a German tourist in Ypres, and it read, "I am sorry, but I don't understand what you all died for." He/she is not alone in their ignorance.

The platitudes become more and more hollow as the years go by, and if it were not so incomprehensibly tragic, 'The War To End All Wars' would be a joke. What cynical idiot came up with that bit of sloganry? 'Lest We Forget' is another brilliant excuse.

T2, my 54 year-old German mate, asked me when he was here a week ago, what was the meaning of all those red flowers that people were wearing in their button-holes?

Yesterday they arrested two maniacs who were - allegedly - planning to knife the Queen to death tomorrow as she laid the first wreath against the memorial.

Every year when that cannon goes off near the Cenotaph, I - for one - become a little more angry, but a little more quiet.


I went out after writing the above, and saw this. Good old Daily Mail, riding on the back of the Tower of London. I thought that the money from poppies went to soldier's charities?

37 comments:

  1. P.S. Today's contentious comment: Rufus Wainwright is an egocentric, whining, pain-in-the-arse.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. He is the son of an arsehole father. What do you expect?

      Delete
    2. How come you didn't visit my blog today or yesterday? Saving the best 'til last?

      Delete
    3. I must be, but I am being helped by Google Blogger, who keep telling me that I am following nobody. I'll go back and have a peek.

      Delete
    4. It's not on my list - have you barred me?

      Delete
    5. For fucks sake, pull your finger out and add me yourself. Cut and paste me in to your blog list. We may have blocked each other in the past but I believe at the moment we are talking although you obviously need reminding.

      Delete
    6. Keep your knickers on - again. Of course you have been on my blog list. For some reason you seem to have disappeared. Do you think I don't know how to follow someone? Anyway, if you carry on talking to me like this, I may take a break from you. Not for long, mind...

      Delete
    7. I wouldn't want you to get left behind ....

      Delete
    8. I run so fast that technology cannot keep up.

      Delete
  2. Sadly the Germans 'don't understand what they all died for' because, just like the Japanese, they have altered history. The Allied forces were the aggressors, and the poor Germans simply victims. Oh, and if you believed what they tell you here; the French won the war.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't believe that, knowing as many Germans as I do. Three generations later, young Germans are understandably weary of taking the blame for the actions of their Great Grand Parents, but most of them do, and do willingly. Also, nobody won the war - at least not on their own.

      Delete
    2. We've even had a war memorial altered nearby because they didn't want to upset the Germans. The Germans rounded-up a load of villagers and burnt them all to death in the church. The memorial originally read 'In memory of the German atrocities'. It doesn't any more!

      Delete
    3. There has to come a time when we stop hating, even if we carry on remembering. Especially in the European Union. I didn't personally enslave Africans, for instance.

      Delete
    4. It is a very slow process but it will come but probably not in our life time.

      Delete
    5. I was shouted at by three 80 year-old S.S. men in Southern Germany once. That was a freaky experience.

      Delete
    6. Let's just say that one cannot throw all Germans into one bucket. I have always known and felt that we Germans were the aggressors. I was also never taught any differently in school. I was not alive at the time of the two World Wars (now we have narrowed my age range down somewhat, hehe) so I don't want to be blamed for something that happened before I was even born. But I have always felt a sense of responsibility for treating the subject with respect.

      Delete
    7. This is pretty much what I was suggesting to Cro. I think you were taught to feel a sense of responsibility in school, weren't you?

      Delete
    8. I'm pleased to hear you say that Iris. I was really shocked when our local memorial was altered to lessen the outrage. I hold no bitterness whatsoever, I just believe that things should be remembered as they actually were. Hollywood is probably even more to blame than the EU.

      Delete
  3. Have you been watching The Passing Bells this past week. Very poignant I thought. I was relating the ending to the husband, who was down the pub, and missed it. I managed to reduce him to tears with my re-telling - even though there is actually no one left now who was in that war it was still a ridiculous waste of life.

    ReplyDelete
  4. My grandfather was killed at Ypres in 1916 the year his son was born, my father, so they never met. My father was always very quiet about it. I had lots of questions I wanted to ask him and my Grandmother but I wasn't allowed to. I wonder if really she would liked to have talked about it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Most of them wanted to forget all about it, I think. It's the same with most devastating experiences - how can you explain the inexplicable to someone who hasn't had the experience? He probably just passed it on from his mother, but who knows?

      Delete
    2. I can understand my father not wanting to talk about it but his mother, perhaps she wanted to. She married her first husband's brother so my father was brought up by his uncle who was a lazy bastard who never did a day's work in his life and made my father work for him and pay for all his gambling and then he outlived him and tried to do the same with my brother.

      Delete
  5. My Father, who fought in the 2nd world war would never wear a poppy. He said 'My father fought in "the war to end all wars"' but it wasn't'. 'I gave 7 years of my life for the same thing he believed in, I was demobbed on the Friday and went back to work on the Monday. There has been conflict all over the world since then. What was the point? If I had been brave enough, I would have been a conscientious objector'

    I always wear a poppy but can hear my Fathers words as I pin it on.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I feel a bit dubious about these commemorations organised by the various governments of the day, in between organising their own wars, but they still have to be observed.

      Delete
  6. I will always buy a poppy from an old veteran at Veterans' Day. It's important to them, so it is for me. I think about my donation supporting their local VFW, where they reminisce. And sorry as I am my parents' generation, and their parents' generation didn't talk of their experiences, leaving us to ferret out any understanding, I also find the next generation not consummately fascinated by the experiences of mine. History is left to be reinvented, as it it lost.
    There always will be old veterans selling poppies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes. My young friends show no interest at all on my history as a young revolutionary in the late 1960s, but they didn't even in the early 1970s either.

      Delete
    2. The Che Guevara beret put them off.

      Delete
    3. No, it was Cro's Monty beret. We used to go shopping with him in Farnham.

      Delete
    4. As I remember, conversations either didn't progress far beyond "Far out, man," or their brilliance could not be recalled the next day. Accounting for the lack of history.

      Delete
    5. I spent an entire Summer doing nothing but talking in 1968, and I can remember quite a lot of it.

      Delete
  7. When you said: "It's that time of year again …." I thought that you meant it's time to buy the annual crate of clementines/mandarines that nobody will ever eat.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's a bit before that time, but it's on it's way.

      Delete