dual personalities

So asks  Siegfried Sassoon in his poem, “Aftermath”, written in 1919. Here it is in full:

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.

But the past is just the same-and War’s a bloody game…
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz–
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench-
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack–
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads—those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

And that was less than a year or so after the end of the war. Certainly, for Sassoon, the Great War remained the defining event of his life. He never ‘got over it’ and he never allowed himself to forget. But the world moves on and a lot of people prefer to cultivate amnesia, while others think that public remembrance is just a way to glorify and  justify war (we’ll say no more of those people). 

The veterans of WWI are now all at rest and those who fought in WWII are fading fast — all the more reason to remember then this Veterans’ Day. It’s no longer fashionable to talk in terms of “the greatest generation”, but really, many of these people did extraordinary things under the most hideous circumstances without wavering or complaining a bit.

Go to the military obituary page  at the Daily Telegraph and read about some of the incredible things that people did and survived during WWII. Take mild-mannered naturalist John Cloudsley-Thompson,  for example. At 21, he commanded a tank crew in North Africa, got severely wounded, did a stint training men at Sandhurst, and finally convinced his commanding officers to send him back to active service just in time for D-Day and the long fight to Germany. His marvelous obituary reminds us of what good character really means. In North Africa in the face of horrible fighting and conditions, the young officer  “defused the tension of waiting to take on the Afrika Korps by directing his crew to hunt for spider and scorpion specimens. He even acquired a desert fox from a local which his crew tamed and nicknamed “Noball”. At one point the fox got lost inside the tank’s engine, forcing the entire squadron to wait before moving off.” Can’t you picture this and don’t you wish you could have known him? After the war, he became a well-known professor and prolific scholar.

There he is in 1964 in the Sudan.  He is survived by his three sons.  They sure don’t make ’em like that anymore. So let’s drink a toast to Professor Cloudesly-Thompson and all those like him, who served their countries.  Be at peace.