More on World War I

Our gym instructor at prep school was a nice oldish man called Sergeant Hirons. He was certainly old enough to have seen action in the 1914-18 war and I remember him often humming and singing softly to himself Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag in the gymnasium whilst we grappled with our Lee-Enfields. He had obviously been warned not to talk to us impressionable boys about his experiences, and probably had no wish to do so anyway.

Many years later, over here in France, I became friendly with an old man whom I called "Monsieur Paul" and who had been involved in what is generally considered the most terrible battle in the History of the world: the Battle of Verdun. One of the things that traumatised Monsieur Paul the most was his conviction that, in the indescribable mayhem, he had almost certainly killed several soldiers on his own side. By the law of averages, he himself would in all probability have been killed had he not been discharged because he had already lost his other brothers. He didn't want to leave the battlefield.

I have just been re-reading Akenfield, Ronald Blythe's classic account of a village in the Suffolk of the 1960s, a masterpiece if ever I read one. It reminded me of something that it is so easy to forget - that life on the land was so harsh in the decades leading up to 1914 that men couldn't wait to sign up for the army...