One to remember: Tony D’Souza’s Thought for the Week
‘I am standing in a trench and the water is up to the lace holes of my boots.’
Remembrance Sunday will be observed all over the UK in some form this week. It commemorates the moment the guns fell silent in 1918. The ‘great war’ was supposed to be ‘the war to end all wars’.
Ha. That’s a laugh. I am standing in a trench and the water is up to the lace-holes of my boots. The thing I dread most about sentry duty is about to happen: wet socks, which means cold feet – an intolerable misery for a sentry. Yet another intolerable thing in this intolerable war filled with petty humiliations and horrors heaped upon the humble footsoldier.
It’s true what they say, you know. The darkest hour is just before the dawn. Metaphorically and literally it’s true. I am looking out at no man’s land, the land between them and us, pockmarked by craters and the shattered trunks of what were once trees. Now the sun is beginning to rise and I can make out their barbed wire, back-lit by the pale pink light of dawn, it looks like mad, barbaric bunting.
Who started this war? Who wanted it? Not me. I was a bank clerk. Lucky to get the job really. Working in the city in a collar and tie when most of my mates went straight into a factory. Some of them are here also. I don’t think any of them wanted this war either. We were swept along by the clamour and the glamour. The brass bands and the ballyhoo. The girls flirting and giggling when they saw us in our new uniforms. We loved all that.
I’ll tell you one thing: it might be the darkest hour before the dawn, but it’s also the coldest. The cold comes up from the ground. Sometimes gradually, sometimes quickly. On nightwatch I stuff my trousers with newspapers, and that helps. It’s certainly better than reading the tripe those journalists are turning out for the folks back home. Their standards remain as high as ever, all of it is just as true as when they said we would all be home by Christmas.
My socks are now wet. I am cold, hungry and tired. I wonder, did the ancient Greeks or Trojans feel this way? Probably. Was there a Trojan who, just like me, stood in a damp hole waiting for the sun to come up. I bet there was.
Wars come and go. I am not going to tell you that they are all the purest hell because you know enough by now to know that for yourself. The worst thing is the sheer waste. All those young lives lost. All innocent. All those civilians killed too. And for what? A line moved on a map? A general’s reputation? A dictator’s place in history? Ha.
Wars keep happening. Me and my kind are just the stuff of history. Just grist in the mill. Just like the Greeks and the Trojans or the Romans and the Britons and all those who ever went to war before or since. Finally, war comes down to this: some poor blighter killing some other poor blighter – every one of them some poor mother’s child. That’s war. And I suppose someone, somewhere in the world has always, and always will, stand in a hole like me, waiting for the dawn while ancient constellations circle in the cold night sky above.
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