We Will Remember Them

As I sat down to write this, at two minutes past the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, with the BBC's live broadcast from Westminster Abbey in the background, I felt terribly sad. Here we are, in November 2009, with photographs on our newspaper front pages of a cortege of dead young men being driven from RAF Lyneham, through the Wiltshire village of Wootton Bassett, on their way to their temporary resting place at a hospital in Oxford. Where once we watched these moving services of remembrance thinking "lest we forget", now we look at them afresh, as we vow "we will remember".

When I was growing up in the 1950's and 1960's, no one talked about the war. Looking back, I can see that it was because its horrors were best left buried deep in the recesses of far distant memory. There were only three things about it that my mother, who nursed at Charing Cross hospital through much of it, ever told me. One was that she lost a favourite green leather shoe scrambling into an air raid shelter during one of the worst nights of the Blitz. Another was that her wedding ring [my parents married in 1942, when my father was on leave] was made from gold pooled by friends, otherwise they would have had no ring. The third was that she and her fellow nurses had had to cut down a poor dead airman who had parachuted out of his aircraft and somehow landed on the parapet outside their ward.

How many hundreds of other anecdotes had she hidden, I wonder? My father, who was in the RAF, never spoke about any of it although, to be fair, he had long died by the time my interest in history had manifested itself. My mother-in-law, who was a motorbike dispatch rider charging around the Chatham dockyards in the thick of it, has recounted very little. Rather like the reluctant tourist's return from an exotic holiday, laden with tales and photographs, they must have realised pretty quickly that no one wanted to know. A new dawn had begun and war was best forgotten. Remembrance Sunday came and went once a year, and that was that.

On my flight from Toulouse to Bristol last Saturday, I scavenged a free copy of 'The Daily Telegraph' from the British Airways newspaper rack as I boarded my Easyjet flight [it did say 'please take your complimentary copy', even if they had probably only intended them for their own customers!]. Inside, on the eve of Remembrance Sunday, was an illuminating article by Peter Parker, the biographer of the last British Great War veteran, Harry Patch, who died on 25th July this year at the ripe old age of 111. I had known that Patch had been called 'the reluctant hero' after his return, disillusioned, from the horrors of Passchendaele but beyond that I knew very little else about him.

It transpires that he had lost his Anglican faith when he left the army but later joined a choir hoping to revive it. "In the end, I went because I enjoyed the music and had friends there. But the belief? It didn't come. I felt shattered, absolutely, and didn't discuss the war with anyone from then on, and nobody brought it up if they could help it." In addition, according to Parker, he refused to join veterans' associations, had no wish to visit battlefields, never attended a regimental reunion and avoided all war films. It was only when the BBC wanted to film a documentary entitled 'The Last Tommy' in 2004 that he was persuaded to revisit Flanders. "What a waste. What a terrible waste," he memorably said.

I was reminded of a scene in the film version of Alan Bennett's superbly scripted 'The History Boys', almost as good as the stage play and with the same National Theatre cast. When Irwin, the new history supply teacher who aspires to a career in television, takes the boys to a war memorial, he asks them why they think has has brought them there. "To remember, Sir," they say. "No", he replies, "it is so that we can forget." And we did, didn't we?

Almost fifty years after the end of the Second World War came Bosnia, and Srebenica, and our attitude to war began to change. A sense of failure was seared into our complacent brains. Then, twenty one months into this new century, on 9/11, everything changed irrevocably. The poppies of Flanders' fields have now been replaced with the poppies of Afghanistan. Jonathan Friedland, writing in today's 'Guardian' headlines with "The coffins will keep coming until we conquer our amnesia on Afghanistan". It is a mess, a horrible, bloody mess, not least because we have forgotten why we went in there in the first place. A war whose aims have long been lost in the quagmire of international politics is taking young lives once again.

Harry Patch was conscripted into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry in October 1916. Many of his friends had volunteered earlier for the Somerset Light Infantry. "We were the PBI - the Poor Bloody Infantry- and we were expendable," he said. I think of the fallen from Bardies today, too. Like the south west of England, the south west of France provided the infantry divisions in the Great War, the cannon fodder. The effects on the economy of both were devestating.

The Barthet family, who had owned the Chateau de Bardies since 1822, was decimated. Louis Barthet, the eldest son of Joseph and Marie Lesparda Barthet, survived but returned from the war wounded. His younger brother, Etienne was killed in 1916. Amelie, one of their sisters, married Captain Ambroise Henry, who was killed not long after the commencement of war. Suzanne, another sister, married Ambroise's younger brother, Lieutenant Auguste Henry, who was himself killed three weeks later.

There were many more from our little part of France who were sacrificed; the husbands and fiances of the maids, whose uniforms were still tucked away in 'armoires' upstairs when we bought the house, the gardeners who had left hidden traces under overgrown laurel trees, rather like at the lost gardens of Heligan, in Cornwall, the farmers who had tended and husbanded the land, the 'voisins' from the nearby 'hameaux'. They are commemorated in St Girons and will be remembered today.

The Second World War took a heavy toll too. George Crinon, who had married the daughter of Auguste and Simone Henry, professor of mathematics and principal of the college, was killed in June 1940 fighting for France. Many others, ununiformed, lost their lives as members of the 'maquis', the resistance, who were very strong in our area. The nearby village of Rimont on the main St Girons/ Foix road was the scene of a Nazi reprisal on 21st August 1944, when forty four trucks filled with soldiers newly back from the eastern front rampaged through the sleepy, innocent village. On that day, 11 Rimontais were executed, many women brutally raped and 236 buildings torched. We must not forget the price that civilians also pay in war.

The town of St Girons was also the starting point of 'Le Chemin de la Liberte', the final stage of the escape route over the Pyrenees organised by the O'Leary network. More than a hundred brave local men and women, called 'passeurs', lost their lives or their liberty taking the evaders over the high mountain passes to safety. They had a choice, and they chose to help people that they did not know at huge personal risk to themselves and their families. They are the unsung heroes and we remember them today, with deep gratitude, too.


They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.