I often think about him at this time of year, an old gentleman I used to see quite often. Almost every morning close to a war memorial, roughly the same time of day, about nine o’clock. Quiet, reflective, the sort of man who keeps himself to himself. Occasionally we would exchange a few words beyond good morning and then he would go about his business.

One day he wasn’t there, and he would never be again, but before that day he shared something that had a profound effect on me. He’d left a card on the memorial, asking people to remember those who had died in the second battle of them Somme. I paused to read the card and he said quietly “I wish I had died with them.”

I was speechless and he went on his way without saying anything else. What can you say to something like that? He was old enough to be my grandfather, and I was roughly the age he would have been at the second battle of the Somme in 1918.

I have spent a long time reflecting on his words in the years since he passed away, and now we have reached the point where all the combatants in the Great War are gone. Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier died in 2009 and with his passing the Great War shifted. The personal connection was gone, but the memories they have left behind remain, in books, interviews and in the words of the Great War poets and authors.

Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” came to mind not long ago, in the early hours of the morning, wide awake at 2.00 am, his description of the wholesale destruction; the monstrous anger of the guns and the stuttering rifles rapid rattle, asking who will pray for those who died like cattle, had me looking for the rest of the words.

Then the search moved on, from Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon and inevitably to Rupert Brooke. Brooke’s emotionally charged words, his eulogy to the sanctity of the soil in which the fallen lie buried, and the greater sanctity of the fallen themselves is inscribed on memorials in many places, “If I should die, think only this of me…”

An idealised optimistic view of the war seen in the opening months is reflected in Brooke’s poetry, his war ended, tragically on the 23rd April 1915 to septicaemia from a mosquito bite on his way to the Dardanelles. He is buried in an olive grove on the Greek Island of Skyros, fulfilling the words of his own poem. He had yet to see action.

Darker sentiments were expressed as the war dragged on, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon spent their war on the Western Front and the experience infuses their poetry. Owen served on the Western front and saw action at Serre and St Quentin between January and April 1917. He was repatriated to Craiglockhart hospital, Edinburgh suffering from shell-shock and met his literary hero, Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was also undergoing treatment for shell-shock, he encouraged Owen to bring the war into his poetry and as Owen appointed himself to the task of speaking for the men in his care and to shoe the “Pity of War”, a sentiment he expressed in vivid letters written from the front.

His best remembered work comes out of an intense period between August 1917 and September 1918. He returned to the Western Front and in October 1918 received the Military Cross for an action at Joncourt in the breaking of the Hindenburg Line, weeks later and one week before the Armistice he was killed in a battle to cross the Sambre-Ois canal at Ors.

No olive grove for Wilfred Owen, he lies in the Communal Cemetery at Ors along with 59 other casualties.

Sassoon had been sent to Craiglockhart following the reaction to a letter to The Times in June 1917 claiming the war was being deliberately prolonged by the government. As a decorated war hero, and a published poet, Sassoon’s words caused outrage and he was spared court martial by Robert Graves who persuaded the authorities he was shell-shocked.

Sassoon, like Owen, returned to the Front, was posted to Palestine and then back to France where he was wounded. He returned to England where he spent the rest of the war.
I often think about him at this time of year, an old gentleman I used to see quite often. Almost every morning close to a war memorial, roughly the same time of day, about nine o’clock. Quiet, reflective, the sort of man who keeps himself to himself. Occasionally we would exchange a few words beyond good morning and then he would go about his business.

Hardly a distinguished military career, but Erich Maria Remarque isn’t remembered for his military prowess but his description of the Western Front in his novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front.” An account of the war from and in the trenches. The voices of the soldiers on both sides share a common tongue.

In All Quiet, Remarque says
“Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting”

And Harry Patch’s take was

I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.

And the old gentleman with his daily remembrance?
The memorial he left the card propped against is indoors, hand written and decorated. Three sheets of heavy paper behind glass in a wooden frame. At the foot of the middle sheet are depicted the flags of the Allied nations and the inscription. “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.”
It is a sweet and decorous thing to die for one’s country.

Wilfred Owen called it the old lie and expressed his thoughts in a poem of the same name. I have no idea what the old gentleman thought, he came to remember his friends.

I don’t know where he is buried, probably in a local cemetery and the inscription on his stone will show he lived a relatively long life. I doubt that it will mention that he was a soldier too.