Stories of the Great War

The Great War has now passed out of living memory.

 For most of us today the abiding image of that conflict are the rows of military gravestones, many bearing that simple inscription “A soldier of the Great War.”
And if we were pushed we might recall those grainy black and white pictures of soldiers staring back at us, and the poems of Wilfred Own and the other war poets expressing “the pity of war.”

But for everyone who died many more came back.  Most like the men of my family rarely spoke of the experiences nor would I expect them to.  By the time I was old enough to speak to them as an adult that war had been over for the best part of sixty years and they were older than I am now.

Which is a salutary thought for my memories from being 17 and 18 which was the age when most of them went are at best hazy and certainly fragmentary, add to that the awful things they must have seen and it is not surprising that they said so little.

We sent six off to fight for King and Country.  Along with two uncles, two great uncles, and my grandfather there was also my great grandfather.  They either volunteered or were called back to “the colours”.  And because my grandmother was German we had family members in the forces of Imperial Germany.  All of which has led me to reflect that for us the Great War was nothing less than a family civil war.

Their motives for going were as mixed as their experiences.  My great grandfather had served as a young man in the late 1880s in the army of the old Queen and was still on the reserve list, although he had been turned down for active service in the second South African War he rejoined in 1914.

In the case of one my great uncles it was an opportunity to escape from a life he was unhappy with.  As a British Home Child* he had gone to Canada in the May of 1914 aged just 16, spent a difficult year on farms across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick finally running away, changing his name and lying about his age to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the August 1915.

And his brother who was my grandfather also lied about his age and joined up in the May of 1916.
Other members of the family seem to have volunteered ahead of the call up.  But like so much of my family history the documentary evidence is thin on the ground.  But what there is does run against the popular view of the struggle.  My great uncle Roger was forever coming up against military authority, my grandfather prolonged his stay in the army until 1922 and my two uncles rose from the ranks to NCO and officer.

Nothing particularly odd in all of this except that it is my family and my story and over the next few weeks I want to explore more of their experiences.

Pictures; Montague Hall 1914, George Simpson circa 1918, from the collection of Andrew Simpson
* British Home Children were children sent to Canada and later Australia and settled on farms and as domestic servants