Certainly the end of an era for those who wore their country’s uniform.
Perhaps the First World War has not yet completely slipped across the horizon of human memory, as for a while there will be those whose childhoods will have been shaped by first-hand experience of the war in one way or another.
No doubt there are still a few French and Belgians who remember all too well the noise, terror and bewilderment of what went on around them, while others in the UK and the US may recall the maimed and crippled returning from the conflict.
I have an aunt, 101 in April, who still has all her wits about her, and while she is alive I still feel a personal link to those days, while she recalls the arrivals of the wounded and the celebrations that broke out on Armistice day – her father ran a pub in Birmingham and it was just about drunk dry!
Many of us will have known people who fought in that war, and now it is up to us to preserve our inherited memories. I particularly treasure a meeting some years ago with an old gent who had been batman to Britain’s only double VC, Noel Chavasse. His description of the circumstances in which Chavasse won his VC and bar was real living history and I only wish I’d had a tape recorder to hand.
Chavasse had been in the RAMC, and his batman only ever referred to him as “the doctor” – prompting the thought that maybe he had arrived on the Tardis after all:)
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