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Post by samdawson on Jul 16, 2021 17:22:02 GMT
One small street in my hometown had sixteen dead men. Think of the widows, the mothers, the brothers and fathers who didn't go. Some women spent their whole lives waiting for their men to return. Many men returned mad or in pieces. My own immediate family had five casualties. Two dead, one wounded twice in one day. Worst of all the only people they could take solace with were fellow soldiers. No one wanted to talk about the horrors of war, and the civilian population only knew about glorious victory and brave deeds. The Great War was all-consuming. It's often said that every family in the country was touched. There were only 56 "Thankful Villages", where all those who left to fight came back. A quick google says there are nearly 46,000 villages and towns in the UK. Erich Maria Remarque was one of many who wrote vividly about the sense of alienation felt by troops on leave while among their loved ones, from whom they had to conceal the realities of the front. It's a lifelong duty, it appears: speaking personally the only stories I heard about the suffering of family members in WW1 was from my grandmother, while as a boy my father, with one exception once, only told amusing stories about WW2, unless he was with his menfriends and they had been drinking, at which point they would talk about the horrors, particularly the Japanese POW camps which some of them had survived.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jul 16, 2021 19:17:32 GMT
One small street in my hometown had sixteen dead men. Think of the widows, the mothers, the brothers and fathers who didn't go. Some women spent their whole lives waiting for their men to return. Many men returned mad or in pieces. My own immediate family had five casualties. Two dead, one wounded twice in one day. Worst of all the only people they could take solace with were fellow soldiers. No one wanted to talk about the horrors of war, and the civilian population only knew about glorious victory and brave deeds. The Great War was all-consuming. It's often said that every family in the country was touched. There were only 56 "Thankful Villages", where all those who left to fight came back. A quick google says there are nearly 46,000 villages and towns in the UK. Erich Maria Remarque was one of many who wrote vividly about the sense of alienation felt by troops on leave while among their loved ones, from whom they had to conceal the realities of the front. It's a lifelong duty, it appears: speaking personally the only stories I heard about the suffering of family members in WW1 was from my grandmother, while as a boy my father, with one exception once, only told amusing stories about WW2, unless he was with his menfriends and they had been drinking, at which point they would talk about the horrors, particularly the Japanese POW camps which some of them had survived. Yes, that was the standard approach. They didn't want to bring the memories back and most people simply wouldn't have understood,
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Jul 16, 2021 22:41:35 GMT
I can't remember his name unfortunately, and couldn't find him on a brief search. On retirement he took up fly fishing. His name Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart. He served in the Boer War, World War One and World War Two. In the process he was shot in the face, losing his left eye, and was also shot through the skull, hip, leg, ankle and ear. During WW1 he was badly wounded on eight occasions and mentioned in dispatches six times. And those woundings, incidentally, do not include the terrible damage he did to his fillings pulling the pins from grenades! Thank you!
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jul 17, 2021 9:53:14 GMT
His name Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart. He served in the Boer War, World War One and World War Two. In the process he was shot in the face, losing his left eye, and was also shot through the skull, hip, leg, ankle and ear. During WW1 he was badly wounded on eight occasions and mentioned in dispatches six times. And those woundings, incidentally, do not include the terrible damage he did to his fillings pulling the pins from grenades! Thank you! If you wrote his life as fiction no one would believe a word of it.
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Post by šrincess šµuvstarr on Jul 17, 2021 12:51:05 GMT
If you wrote his life as fiction no one would believe a word of it. It says he tore his own fingers off when a doctor refused to amputate them.
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