The legacy continues
On the eve of Remembrance Sunday the thoughts of many of us turn to those who have served or still serve in the military – those who survived unharmed the experience of being ‘in action’, those who survived but were physically or mentally scarred by it and, of course, those who did not have the good fortune to survive it at all.
Given we now live in the year 2019 a good deal of attention is given to those veterans of WW2 who are still with us. This summer’s D-Day and Normandy campaign commemorations – on the 75th anniversary of those momentous days – were on a scale that may not be replicated again simply because the last survivors are now in their nineties.
An enduring feature of war studies generally is how WW1 still dominates both academic and family ‘hobby’ interest [if that is the appropriate term to use].
Anyone who visits the website of The Great War Forum – or any of the thousands of similar devoted to specific units or war specialties – could not fail to be impressed by the numbers of people who are actively researching it even today: for many of us there is a stark reality to the adage that “The more you learn about it, the more you appreciate just how much more there is to know”.
WW1 is sometimes described – and was regarded by many at the time, and indeed afterwards – as “The war to end all wars”; however, one suspects that even then it was not the first to be awarded that title and going forward will certainly not be the last.
One of the reasons for this is that it was – and is – perceived and perhaps the first conflict in which whole nations were involved or affected by it as it was happening.
In Britain, which did not ordinarily have conscription or national service, the combination of the sheer number of military combatants required and the types of warfare and armaments that had been developed by 1914 meant that the national economy effectively had to be put on a wartime footing.
Thanks to the might of military firepower and (for the first time) potential concerted attacks from the air – even the home civilian population was at risk. Such was the casualty rate, there was scarcely a family in the country that did not have members actively involved in the war effort – some of whom did not return, whilst some of those who did were never the same again.
The sense of “collective experience” and involvement was all-consuming.
It is hard, in the 21st Century of ‘let it all hang out’ social media, to appreciate the impact that both WW1 and WW2 had upon the national consciousness during an era before television and radio had created their own peculiar sense of ‘community’.
Today I spotted the following piece by Caroline Davies on the recent burial of a British soldier over a century after he was killed, as appears upon the website of The Guardian.
On my first ‘guided tour’ of the WW1 battlefields, nearly thirty years ago now, I remember our group being told by our guide that between thirty and fifty bodies – and tons of armaments of every type – were still being discovered in Flanders every year, many of them disturbed by local farmers as they tilled their fields or sowed their crops.
Each discovery was carefully documented by teams of academics and researchers with such diligence and time-consuming care that, sadly but inevitably, many more such ‘discoveries’ were never revealed because some farmers, resentful the disruption they caused to the smooth running of their businesses, simply reported nothing and carried on tilling or ploughing.
See here for a link to the article concerned – WW1 BURIAL
