Europe - at least - owes his generation a debt of gratitude.

For those who never came home...

The Great War
by Vernon Scannell (b.1922)

Whenever war is spoken of
I find
The war that was called Great invades the mind:
The grey militia marches over land
A darker mood of grey
Where fractured tree-trunks stand
And shells, exploding, open sudden fans
Of smoke and earth.
Blind murders scythe
The deathscape where the iron brambles writhe;
The sky at night
Is honoured with rosettes of fire,
Flares that define the corpses on the wire
As terror ticks on wrists at zero hour.
These things I see,
But they are only part
Of what it is that slyly probes the heart:
Less vivid images and words excite
The sensuous memory
And, even as I write,
Fear and a kind of love collaborate
To call each simple conscript up
For quick inspection:
Trenches' parapets
Paunchy with sandbags; bandoliers, tin-hats.
Candles in dugouts,
Duckboards, mud and rats.
Then, like patrols, tunes creep into the mind:
A long, long trail, The Rose of No-Man's Land,
Home Fire and Tipperary:
And through the misty keening of a band
Of Scottish pipes the proper names are heard
Like fateful commentary of distant guns:
Passchendaele, Bapaume, and Loos, and Mons.
And now,
Whenever the November sky
Quivers with a bugle's hoarse, sweet cry,
The reason darkens; in its evening gleam
Crosses and flares, tormented wire, grey earth
Splattered with crimson flowers,
And I remember,
Not the war I fought in
But the one called Great
Which ended in a sepia November
Four years before my birth.

__________________
Never let right or wrong get in the way of a good opinion

Lest we forget

Very poignant posting - thanks for drawing our attention to that.
Strangely enough, we were only talking of of visit to the Somme cemetries just over a year ago. We visited Tyne Cott (the largest allied cemetry, I believe)near the Ypres salient - it was just a numbing experience.
Finally went to see the huge Menin Gate, where after a lot of searching amongst the 50 odd thousand names inscribed on it, we found our great-uncle. Strangely, it was an extremely emotional experience.
Huge sacrifices (on all sides) that should never be forgotten.

Hopefully this link will work:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-...s-dead-at-110/

I had just finished reading this when I first saw this thread.

I also had Granfathers in both WW1 and WW2, so I found this quite sad to read.

Here are some great points from the story listed above (in case the link ever fails)

Claude Choules:

• Born in Britain and raised in Wyre Piddle, Mr Choules joined the Royal Navy in 1915 at 14.
• At 16 joined the British Grand Fleet aboard HMS Revenge
• He settled in Fremantle after he was seconded to the Royal Australian Navy in 1926
• IS RECOGNISED AS THE ONLY LIVING VETERAN WHO SERVED IN BOTH WORLD WARS
• He was declared the last known survivor of the more than 70 million military personnel mobilised globally during The Great War
• Survived the Gallipoli landing.
• Mr Choules recorded many of the twists and turns of his long life in his autobiography "The Last of the Last".

“I have had a happy life,” he said from his home at the Gracewood Hostel in Salter point in 2009. “I don’t think there was anything in my life I would wish had not happened.”
- Claude Choules, 2009 (died 2011 aged 110yo)