Stories

I gave a tour to this British man the other day who told me an interesting story. His grandfather had fought with the British at Vimy during WWI (this was early in 1916 before the Canadians were on the scene). At one point he was wounded by shellfire and stranded out in no-man's land; when a German soldier happened upon him he thought for sure that would be the end. Instead, the German, finding no one else around, picked him up and carried him back to a Red Cross medical station. The British gave the German soldier some tea, and he spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. Apparently these two soldiers stayed in touch after the war and wrote letters to one another quite frequently. At one point they even met again in person, but sometime in the 30s they lost touch and this man's grandfather never ended up hearing from him again.

Today at work we were having a discussion about how everyone really did have a different experience in war. Some never saw the front, some were shell-shocked, some enjoyed the deep sense on camaraderie. Every experience was different. I'm reading Forgotten Voices of the Great War (by Max Arthur) right now, a compilation of excerpts from interviews with survivors of that war. Some stories are really fond memories of times during war; lighthearted descriptions of sniping on the "jerries." Other recollections can be much more gruesome, like being on burial duty, which consisted of crouching around in no-man's land at night trying to recuperate the bodies of fallen soldiers, sometimes after they'd been lying there for weeks. I can't even imagine.

It's quite a common thing to meet British (and sometimes Canadian) visitors who are re-tracing the movements of their relatives who served during the Great War, visiting battlefields where they fought, and sometimes died. These people have often done quite a bit of research, and gathered a great deal of information. I have yet to meet a French person who is doing this sort of thing and I'm not quite sure why. At Vimy, the French had been holding that part of the front line since the start of the war, until the British arrived in 1916. They lost an incredible number of men defending their country, and so I'm not quite sure why you never seem to meet relatives of those veterans.