'…young men of every nation are simply used as pawns in the "games" played by our elected leaders…' Photo: Till Westermayer / flickr CC.
The games people play
Bill Bingham reflects on the time he spent in the army
Degerndorf is a lovely little German village surrounded by majestic mountains, beautiful rivers and sparkling lakes, and is set amongst picturesque farmland. It is also the location of a barracks built in the mid-1930s for the German army.
The military barracks at Degerndorf was later to play a significant part in my life as a national serviceman but, at the time of its construction, I was in that mysterious place of human wonderment and not yet born. I was not, as it were, ‘under construction’ myself. It seems it was not yet my ‘time’ or indeed my ‘season’, as the Book of Ecclesiastes puts it (Rabbinic tradition tells us King Solomon wrote this particular work).
