Perspectives On The Front

The First World War has always held a deep interest for me. While I have a family connection to the war – my Grandmother’s brother Forbes was killed at Vimy Ridge and my Grandfather on my father’s side was wounded severely at Hill 70 – my interest pre-dates any serious awareness of this family connection.

I always noted a tone of loss and sadness, even after sixty years when my grandmother mentioned her older brother Forbes – a fondness for a brother she knew only briefly as a very young child. But when my father spoke of my grandfather it appeared rarely to be with love or fondness – perhaps more personal regret – his lasting phrase being “my father could do more with one arm than most of us could do with two.”  It’s only been in recent years that I started to look into their experiences in the context of my understanding and interest with the war.

While my fascination with the First World War began as a young teenager captivated by the idea that the battlefields of Belgium and France were a fertile ground for finding relics of a war, it was the War that held my interest.  So much about the First World War defies comprehension; far more than the war that followed. It was medieval in nature – armies bludgeoning each other in the most savage and unimaginative way until one side, exhausted, gave ground – the dead and almost-dead of both sides strewn across the battlefield.  Yet men signed up knowing the conditions – loved ones, husbands, fathers and brothers – fully aware of the likelihood of being killed, wounded or maimed in unimaginable ways.

The First World War was fought in our time. For many of us, soldiers who fought in the war were alive during our lifetime and the same obsession I had as a child – finding relics from the war – grips me today as I wander through cemeteries in Belgium and France, reading inscriptions on headstones, pillboxes well marked, and the detritus of war easily found among plowed fields.  For us, the First World War is living history – and we are the last generation for which this will be the case; for the next, it will be as the Boer War, the US Civil War or some other ancient event is for us – something captured only in books and films.

This blog is primarily focused on stories that I’ve written about lives. Most often they’ve started with a headstone I’ve seen in a cemetery, or a record of death, and a passion to uncover the life cut short by the war. . .  what I’ve come to call a life untold. But I also touch on life at the time – vignettes or happenings at the front, to draw a sketch of life at the time.  The goal of this blog is to help unveil these lives, this time, and to help keep history alive.