FROM IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
So it was that the Verdurins gave dinner-parties (then, after a time, Mme Verdurin gave them alone, for M. Verdurin died) and M. de Charlus went about his pleasures and hardly ever stopped to reflect that the Germans – immobilized, it is true, by a bloody barrier perpetually renewed – were only an hour by car from Paris. The Verdurins, one would imagine, did think about this fact, since they had a political salon in which every evening they and their friends discussed the situation not only of the armies but of the fleets. They thought certainly of those hecatombs of regiments annihilated and passengers swallowed by the waves; but there is a law of inverse proportion which multiplies to such an extent anything that concerns our own welfare and divides by such a formidable figure anything that does not concern it, that the death of unknown millions is felt by us as the most insignificant of sensations, hardly even as disagreeable as a draught. Mme Verdurin, who suffered even more from her headaches now that she could no longer get croissants to dip in her breakfast coffee, had eventually obtained a prescription permitting her to have them specially made in a certain restaurant of which we have spoken. This had been almost as difficult to wrangle with the authorities as the appointment of a general. The first of these special croissants arrived on the morning on which the newspapers reported the sinking of the Lusitania. As she dipped it in her coffee and gave a series of little flicks to her newspaper with one hand so as to make it stay open without having to remove her other hand from the cup, ‘How horrible!’ she said. ‘This is something more horrible than the most terrible stage tragedy.’ But the death of all these drowned people must have been reduced a thousand million times before it impinged upon her, for even as, with her mouth full, she made these distressful observations, the expression which spread over her face, brought there (one must suppose) by the savour of that so precious remedy against headaches, the croissant, was in fact one of satisfaction and pleasure.
Marcel Proust
MIRANDA HART – Actress, comedian and writer
‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ is an old music-hall song that became very popular in boosting British morale despite the horrors of the First World War. It was one of a large number of songs aimed at maintaining morale, recruiting for the forces, or defending Britain’s war aims.
It is also one of the songs used in the musical Oh! What a Lovely War, a satire on the First World War, still performed today.
I love it because it is a song I knew as a child, but I didn’t know its resonance until I was much older. It is amazing that a First World War song can be part of a child’s culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When I sang it, I always found it rousing and inspiring, and so I can only imagine what it did for the troops at the time, in the stark reality of war.
I love it because it could only be British – a stiff upper lip, a great song steeped in great music-hall culture, yet not belittling or undermining the seriousness of the subject. An honourable attempt at lifting spirits. You can smile while singing it. You can cry while singing it. I hope the youth of today are singing it in playgrounds too.
PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES IN YOUR OLD KIT-BAG
Private Perks is a funny little codger
With a smile – a funny smile.
Five-feet-none, he’s an artful little dodger
With a smile – a funny smile.
Flush or broke, he’ll have his little joke,
He can’t be suppress’d.
All the other fellows have to grin
When he gets this off his chest, Hi!
CHORUS
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile.
While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag,
Smile, boys, that’s the style.
What’s the use of worrying?
It never was worth while, so
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile.’
Private Perks went a-marching into Flanders
With his smile – his funny smile.
He was lov’d by the privates and commanders
For his smile – his sunny smile.
When a throng of Germans came along
With a mighty swing,
Perks yell’d out, ‘This little bunch is mine!
Keep your heads down, boys, and sing, Hi!’
CHORUS
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile.
While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag,
Smile, boys, that’s the style.
What’s the use of worrying?
It never was worth while, so
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile.’
AFTER
Only Remembered
Fading away like the stars in the morning,
Losing their light in the glorious sun,
Thus would we pass from this earth and its toiling,
Only remembered for what we have done.
Only remembered, only remembered, only remembered
for what we have done,
Thus would we pass from this earth and its toiling,
Only remembered for what we have done.
Only the truth that in life we have spoken,
Only the seed that in life we have sown,
These shall pass onwards when we are forgotten,
Only remembered for what we have done.
Only remembered, only remembered, only remembered
for what we have done,
These shall pass onwards when we are forgotten,
Only remembered for what we have done.
Who’ll sing the anthem and who will tell the story?
Will the line hold, will it scatter and run?
Shall we at last be united in glory?
Only remembered for what we have done.
Only remembered, only remembered, only remembered
for what we have done,
Shall we at last be united in glory?
Only remembered for what we have done.
FROM THE BUTTERFLY LION
I had seen the wounded men coming from France, blinded, gassed, crippled, and always dreaded seeing Bertie’s face amongst them. I had seen the long lists in the newspapers of all the men who had been killed or who were ‘missing’. I looked each day for his name and thanked God every time I did not find it. But still he never wrote, and I had to know why. I thought maybe he had been so badly wounded that he could not write, that he was lying in some hospital alone and unloved. So I determined I would become a nurse. I would go to France, and heal and comfort as best I could, and just hope that somehow I might find him. But I soon discovered that amongst so many men in uniform it would be hopeless to go looking for him. I did not even know his regiment, nor his rank. I had no idea where to begin.
I was sent to a hospital some fifty miles behind the lines, not too far from Amiens. The hospital was a converted chateau with turrets and great wide staircases, and chandeliers in the wards. But it was so cold in winter that many of the men died as much from the cold as from their wounds. We did all we could for them, but we were short of doctors and short of medicines. There were always so many men coming in, and their wounds were terrible, so terrible. Each time we saved one it was such a joy to us. In the midst of the suffering all around us, we needed some joy, believe me.
I was at breakfast one morning – it was June of 1918. I was reading a magazine, the Illustrated London News, I remember, when I turned the page and saw a face I knew at once. He was older, thinner in the face and unsmiling, but I was sure it was Bertie. His eyes were deepset and gentle, just as I remembered them. And there was his name: ‘Captain Albert Andrews VC’. There was a whole article underneath about what he had done, and how he was still recovering from his wounds in a hospital, a hospital that turned out to be little more than ten miles away. Wild horses would not have kept me from him. The next Sunday I
cycled over.
He was sleeping when I saw him first, propped up on his pillows, one hand behind his head. ‘Hello,’ I said.
He opened his eyes and frowned at me. It was a moment or two before he knew me.
‘Been in the wars, have you?’ I said.
‘Something like that,’ he replied.
Michael Morpurgo
MORRIS GLEITZMAN – Author
In Sydney’s Botanic Gardens is a bronze memorial.
It shows three horses, kitted out for battle and standing with patient determination on desert sand dunes.
The inscription reads:
ERECTED BY MEMBERS OF
THE DESERT MOUNTED
CORPS AND FRIENDS
TO THE GALLANT HORSES
WHO CARRIED THEM
OVER THE SINAI DESERT
INTO PALESTINE
1915–1918
THEY SUFFERED WOUNDS,
THIRST, HUNGER AND
WEARINESS ALMOST
BEYOND ENDURANCE
BUT NEVER FAILED
THEY DID NOT COME HOME
WE WILL NEVER FORGET THEM.
In fact, one did come home, but only one.
More than 150,000 Australian horses went to the war, often going with their volunteer owners. They were remarkable creatures, the Aussie Walers. Many of the troopers they served so loyally, and whose lives they frequently saved, never stopped mourning their loss.
They were given no medals, our Aussie horses. Just a few words in the gardens.
NICK SHARRATT – Illustrator
I have a sweet tooth and a bit of a fondness for Jelly Babies. But I had no idea about their history until, on a recent visit to the War Poets Collection at Edinburgh Napier University, Craiglockhart Campus, I heard the curator mention how the sweets came into being.
They were introduced in 1918 by the confectionery manufacturer Bassett’s to mark the end of the war, and were originally called ‘Peace Babies’ – little symbols of hope for the next generation after four years of horror. Two decades passed, but production was halted at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the sweets eventually reappeared in the 1950s, they, very sadly, weren’t called Peace Babies any more.
JONATHAN STROUD – Author
My chosen piece is a diary entry written by my great-grandfather, George Davison, on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918.
George was born in East Rainton, near Sunderland in the north of England, in 1890. He was by all accounts a kind and gentle man, and I think the photographs of him (many in his army uniform) clearly bear this out. The eldest of nine children, he left school at the age of twelve and found work on the railways. When war was declared, George immediately enlisted. He joined the 3rd Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, and served as a physical training and bayonet instructor before being transferred abroad. He was subsequently wounded, and afterwards transferred to the Army Gymnastic Staff, who were responsible for physical fitness training across the army. George was sent to Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, where the British Army was fighting the Turkish Empire. While there, he wrote his diary, and painted watercolour pictures of the people and places he visited.
I love his description of Armistice Day. I think it’s beautifully written and very visual. It also conceals much personal grief. Two of George’s brothers, Len and Dick, had been killed on the Western Front, Dick just a few weeks before peace was declared. I also like the way that he seeks to justify all the happy roistering. George came from a strict Methodist upbringing, and he was no doubt mindful of what his wife, Elsie, would think when she read about all the drinking!
George went home to his family. His elder daughter, Lenora (named after Len), became my grandmother. He died in 1945.
Diary Entry by Company Sergeant Major George Davison, Army Gymnastic Staff, Baghdad, 11 November 1918
George Davison
SIR TONY ROBINSON – Actor, comedian and historian
Grandpa Jack
This is a picture of me and my grandpa, Jack Robinson, on our summer holidays in Paignton, on the south-west coast of England. It was taken thirty years after the First World War ended. Grandpa Jack is smiling. He’s probably just said something daft. That’s how I remember him: joking non-stop, the adults raising their eyebrows because he was such a kid, and me thrilled that a grown-up could say anything so hilarious.
He’d come back from the trenches to his dark little house in 1918. My dad and my Uncle Cyril hardly knew him; they’d been babies when he’d left.
When he walked through the front door, my grandma spread newspapers on the parlour floor. Dad and Uncle Cyril sat huddled on the sofa and watched this strange man take off his private’s uniform: first his soldier’s tunic, his soldier’s boots and his soldier’s trousers, then his shirt, his vest and his pants. My grandmother bundled them all up, wrapped them in the paper, and threw them on the fire. Grandpa Jack stood naked in front of the flames watching his clothes burn. Eventually, when all that was left of them was a big, black, smoking lump, he turned his back on them and, without a word, went upstairs and didn’t come down till the next morning.
What had his life in the trenches been like? Had he choked on poison gas? Had he lived among rats and pools of blood? Did his comrades die beside him? I don’t know. From that day onwards he never spoke to a single person about those four long years. All my memories of Grandpa Jack are of him smiling, like he is in the photograph.
SIR QUENTIN BLAKE – Illustrator
My parents lived in France for ten years after the First World War, before I was born. My father was a surveyor’s clerk working for the Imperial War Graves Commission, so that, as I look at recent books about that war, names like Ypres, St Omer, Armentières have some special extra meaning for me. It must have been strange for my young, newly married mother to move immediately to another country amongst acres of regimented white gravestones.
When I was a student, my older brother took me and my parents on an unusual holiday: a tour of British military cemeteries in Northern France, still kept in impeccable order. We made a visit to the estaminet that my parents had frequented, kept by a M. and Mme Bouzine. Now, thirty years later, the business was run by the younger generation of the family, but the (now elderly) couple were still there behind the bar. As we came in, Mme Bouzine said: ‘Ah, Madame Blake,’ and reached down for a bottle of champagne.
My parents must have known them quite well, because we were invited back for a meal. I remember the stewed rabbit being brought to the table in a metal dish, its skull vertical in the middle, its little teeth providing the centrepiece.
My father had served in the war; there too, I think, as a clerk. His friend, who perhaps was his best friend, was called Dicky Herbert; he was in a more dangerous occupation. ‘He was in machine guns; he knew he was for it.’ I remember towards the end of his life, at a time of quite different bereavement, my father saying – as much to himself as to anyone else – ‘Dicky Herbert. He’s been dead fifty years.’
SIMON MAYO – Presenter and author
When the history is too enormous, too terrible to comprehend, the small and the trivial can sometimes fill the void. So I have a picture and a song.
My grandmother’s photo of her brother, Lieutenant Stanley Gordon Killingback, always sat on her mantelpiece above the radiator, accompanied by her most recent poppy. I’m told I have a slight resemblance to my great-uncle, though if that is true it is lost on me.
In the picture he is in full uniform, neat moustache and a playful smile. His future was bright: he was smart, funny, and a keen amateur actor. His division of the Royal Engineers arrived in France in June 1916; he was killed in action two months later. The official letter to his family announcing his death at the age of twenty-one says he was ‘shot through the heart by a German sniper and was killed instantly’. It adds that his final words were, ‘Never mind me, you carry on with your duty.’
This is, to put it mildly, unlikely, but its intention to comfort admirable nonetheless. A
s a child, when the two minutes’ silence came, I could never imagine the slaughter of 1914–18, but I could remember my granny’s grief, so I thought of that instead.
The song I have chosen is ‘No Man’s Land’ by Eric Bogle. It is sometimes called ‘The Green Fields of France’, and is a meditation from the grave of a young man called Willie McBride, who also died in 1916. It too tells of a photo ‘Forever enshrined behind some glass pane/In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained’. My educator here is the peerless June Tabor, who included it on her Ashes and Diamonds album in 1977. Its melody is timeless, haunting, instantly memorable and, when combined with the words below, utterly devastating. The lament for Willie becomes a lament for Stanley and the nine million others.
Two deaths among the millions, but a melody for one and a face for the other.
NO MAN’S LAND
(THE GREEN FIELDS OF FRANCE)
Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Chorus:
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fir o’er you as they lowered you down?