Me Granddad the poor fckr and lucky I guess served in the artillery so didn’t see the front line. He was wounded in 1917 by shrapnel after the ammunition limber got taken out by a direct hit, not enough to make the rest of his life restricted through injury. Wiped the rest of the gun crew out, as he was tending to the horses and that’s all he ever really spoke about his experience of ‘The Great War’.
I guess there's less and less of us that actually knew men that experienced the horrors of the 'Great War'. I have a permanent (1950s) memory of my Uncle Tom Crow (actually my Dad's Uncle, but that was how I knew him) sitting hunched by the hearth in their small terraced house, still coughing his lungs up as result of a dose of gas at the front. A truly gentle man and a railway worker, until he (quite soon after) couldn't work any more. I suppose he was lucky to have made it as far/long as he did. No fanfare. No financial or other help. Dirt poor all his life, but would give you anything. These men experienced things we thankfully can't imagine. WW2 was no better. I also cared for my father (RA N.Africa & Italy WW2) as he suffered PTSD in his old age. It never leaves them.
I'm extremely grateful for the fact I was able to hear (as a teenager ) some of what my grandfather went through. His brother was killed standing next to him in the 1916 Somme offensive. We are so lucky to have been spared the horrors of the world wars and subsequent conflicts through the accident of birth year Maybe we need a separate thread for these recollections?
