Ahead of Remembrance Sunday, Fr Bobby Gilmore recalls the toll World War I took on his granduncle who was gassed while serving with the US military.
They were young and vibrant
full of awe
they waved him off to war to end all wars.
One a young wife the other a younger sister.
Sixty years later in a tunnel of fog they stand
in a bare isolated flowerless field called the Somme
heads bowed
shoulders drooping
as if being held upright by his memory
they share their loss.
They remember him.
The picture in the newspaper on Remembrance Sunday of the wife and sister of an English soldier standing in the fog on a barren field in Europe depicted a side of the horror which was the 1914-18 war that seldom is thought about.
They, as young girls, saw him off with pride and awe to fight a war to end all wars only never to see him again or to find out where he fell. They were left behind to a life of wondering. There was no gravestone to his memory, his body not recovered. He became a list on a wall.
The effects of war are multiple. Death, destruction, the breakdown of the social order, disabled men, broken women and families, bereft communities, abandoned children, refugees.
Johnny Higgins was married to my grand aunt, my mother’s aunt. We used to visit frequently in the 1950s when cars took to the road again. Johnny’s speech was blurred and as children we found it hard to understand him. When we asked our mother why this was, she answered that he was in the war.
But that didn’t explain the blurred speech. Later, when we got older and having been asked again as to the cause of his indistinct speech mother answered that in that war gas was used against the soldiers by the Germans. Blurred speech was one of the effects of the gas. In most instances it would be death.
Johnny Higgins emigrated to the United States as a young man. He was called up for national service and was sent to France to fight on the side of the allies against Germany. He was invalided out of the war and sent home to the United States disabled. Overcoming his disability he received a pension and returned to Ireland. He married my grand aunt and settled down to farming. He never talked about the war.
When he died two American soldiers arrived for his funeral and draped his coffin in the American flag.
Recently, gas was used by the Syrian government against its own people even though the use of gas has been outlawed by various conventions. Are we too civilised to go back to war? Do we ever learn?