Both of my grandfathers survived the trenches of the first World War. One reasonably well, one not so well, but they reached the 1960s so I met them both even though one was a very brief meeting. Many of my age cannot say that.
In respect to those grandparents and potential grandparents who did not come home, this blog and the associated Twitter and Farcebok accounts will be silent today.
This day is not and has never been a glorification of war as the Lefties now try to pretend. It is a day to remember the hell of war and the horror of death on an industrial scale.
Wear your poppy with pride. It is not ‘far-right’, it is something that flies in the face of Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Che Guevara and the other socialist ‘cleansers’. It is the remembrance that scares those who want to do it all over again. It is the memory they want you to forget.
Remember.
If you forget, as they want you to, they will do it again.
underdogs bite upwards 
Me too. I knew both of my grandfathers, who fought in The First World War. I had previously overlooked that fact, until you mentioned it.
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My maternal grandfather volunteered, got sent to North Wales for training and was then invalided out with varicose veins because he couldn’t march. My granny used to tell everyone he was in the artillery and was deafened by the guns. Must have had damned good hearing to hear them in Wales.
My paternal grandfather was in a reserved occupation. He was a boot manufacturer and made boots for the army. Made a fortune out of it – especially the ones he was flogging out the back door to the market traders. They caught up with him after the war and he died in his forties from drink, penniless. Serves him right really.
I’m more proud of the first one, but you have to admit the second one is more interesting.
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My father’s father fought in Mesopotamia against the Ottomans, met Lawrence of Arabia and went on to fight in France. He survived and I met him and he showed me his bullet wound scar. He played the piano and sang WWI songs in French. He also spoke Welsh and Arabic. I knew my mum’s dad too. He was told by his three brothers to feign illness. He did. They were all killed in WWI and he had a reserved occupation in the UK, to where they all travelled from Canada. The three great uncles were in the Canadian army. God bless them all. I kept the silence today for them.
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I’m more proud of the first one, but you have to admit the second one is more interesting.
It takes all sorts to fight a war, not just the cannon fodder on the front line. Pity they caught up with him really. He sounds like a genuine entrepreneur.
My maternal grandfather died long before I was born. He was a ship’s carpenter, so I guess would have seen action, but he died in a quayside accident in the 20s, apparently. My paternal grandfather was a dentist, so probably spent the war pulling teeth. Probably. They would both have been quite young during WW1. My father was born in 1917, and my mother in 1923, so I can only guess at their parents’ ages. Shame, really. I would have loved, as a boy, to have had a couple of gung-ho hero grandfathers to boast about. The reality of course is that had they been gung-ho front-liners they probably would have both died early and brutal deaths and my parents wouldn’t have been born…
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The Snowdonia climate sent a fair few recruits home early. My grandfather – a crack shot recruited for specialist sniper training – went down with rheumatic fever after too many days lying on rainy mountainsides and was invalided out with associated chronic heart disease, exacerbated, he once said, by the constant stress of knowing he he would be ordered to stalk and kill men not in the heat of battle but as they went about their daily routine in the trenches.
He lived to the age of 96, a confirmed and vocal pacifist until the end.
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Both my grandfathers survived WW1.They didnt say anything about it too me (much to young). But my mother told me that in early 1916 owards the end of his army training my maternal grandfather was in the middle of his shooting test when a passing Rupert told him how well he was doing. He encouraged him by telling him if he kept up that standard he would qualify as a sniper. Rumour had already let everyone know that the life expectancy of a sniper was pretty damn poor. He missed a lot of shots after that.
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Very well put, Legiron. It seems too many of our long-standing traditions are being re-branded as”far right” by the lefty reformers these days in an attempt to erase traditional British values in favour of their culturally Marxist multi-culty faux utopia. Wear your poppy with pride that we might remember the fallen and strive to maintain some of the freedoms they fought for.
Peace.
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They tried the ‘white poppy’ game to discredit it. That didn’t work.
Setting up their pets to burn it didn’t work.
All they have left is to try to link it to some mysterious ‘far right’ which seems to consist of everyone who doesn’t want to live in the old East Berlin.
All those shot wall-jumpers were all ‘far right’, you know.
I’d just take it as a compliment. If you are ‘far right’ it means you are very right indeed. Which means they are wrong.
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My grandfather was wounded at Ypers and sent to England where a Lord and Lady opened up their mansion for Belgian wounded soldiers. He told me that he was forever grateful to the English people.
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I meant Ypres in Belgium
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There’s a graveyard not that far from where I am sitting. It has a section of war graves of Canadians who had just come over shortly before the First World War ended. There is one headstone in particular which caught my eye. The name on it I Forget. A French Canadian called Ivan.
He lost his life at 19 in a local hospital. He was killed by Spanish Flu. Not a shot fired, no running across no mans land into machine gun fire and no wounds mental or otherwise.
Yet he was as much a victim as any of the other millions who died on all sides and all locations.
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My mother was taken to Bodelwyddan as a child and shown the graves of the Canadians who died of Spanish Flu at Kinmel Park.
The locals (including my grandmother’s family) were then still intensely angry on behalf of these young men stranded in Europe while the transport ships which should have taken them home were requisitioned to repatriate US servicemen, many of whom had not seen active service.
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Thanks for your reply. I wasn’t aware of the ship issues at all. It was odd to even find the graves here in Leith although there is a large port and there was a large hospital close to the cemetery.
I’ve found out as much as I can helped by wife who is a genealogist.
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Two great uncles on the Menin gate (Dead, no known grave); one killed on a ship somewhere in the north sea, 1917 I think. Granddad used to keep his picture in a little used room at the family farm. By contrast we had a relatively casualty free WW2.
Poppies are worn in our household. We will be attending the Veterans Day ceremonies held on Tuesday (A National holiday here in Canada). Bugger what some pantywaist lefty thinks.
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Great Granddad , who like all his class mates, lied about his age and stood on an orange box to ‘fight for King and Country’, who survived The Somme etc, would have been amused to see that google.uk today at least hasn’t succumbed to the Poppy-ness:
I, for one, will be pleased when it is all over and I can walk down the street with the Bestes Frau In The World and not have to have a sock filled with shiny english pennies (better than 1 cent euros- take my word on that) in my coat pocket incase one of the poppy cladded decides to take umbrage at our conversing in German while we walk.
Today is the day of the year when I wish I had learnt to whistle properly as a child and could give a rendition of ‘The Rifles Of The IRA’ whilst walking past.
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On any other day in the year, I would have just stepped over your comment. But reading it today induces me to lump you in with the jeering jiadi scum. That you can walk down the street mentally whistling an IRA tune at these men and women is largely because so many of them died so that you could have the freedom to do so. Shame on you.
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“That you can walk down the street mentally whistling an IRA tune at these men and women is largely because so many of them died so that you could have the freedom to do so.”
You think? What an interesting view of history you have and you have every right to be wrong. At least you didn’t trot out that most hackneyed piece of polemic , the ‘you’d be speaking German now’ taunt (always funny to see their faces when I tell them, in fluent German, that I spend my entire life speaking German).
The War dead died for a whole heap for reasons but for my or our freedoms it wasn’t- and that’s not me speaking, that’s the various Granddads and Great Granddads of my family who all fought for the Great Lie.
The shame is on the poppy clad , who proclaim with each paper flower bought, that they are OK with our government not keeping their end of the ‘contract’ but are happy to leave the care of ex-service people up to the various fake charities.
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I was most fortunate to know all my grandparents. Grandad P lied about his age to join in at the tail-end of WWI and ran a Allied POW camp in Egypt in WWII.
I was in London for a meeting this week and decided to go see the poppies at the Tower:
Sadly I was reminded of the Al Weiwei sunflower exhibition at the Tate …
http://s44.photobucket.com/user/Roobeedoo2/media/TowerHamlets-20141104-00041_zpse6f9bbc9.jpg.html?sort=3&o=2
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I suppose they have similar themes. From a distance they look all the same but each one is an individual.
I did think about buying one of them but then thought – no. They should be left for those families who lost someone. It would be like getting a little bit of them back.
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Yes, I wholeheartedly endorse your sentiments, LI. Politics shouldn’t enter the equation when we pay our respects to those who made the ultimate sacrifice that we should be free of tyranny. We are fighting a different type of war now, but once again it’s about liberty. And tyranny.
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A Great Uncle was a Naval Captain who was killed by carbon monoxide poisoning when he was inspecting inside a funnel for some unknown reason. Another distant relative was in the Highland Light Infantry and died at The Somme in 1916, A cousin of my father was in the Black Watch and is buried at Le Touquet. My maternal grandfather served 1912-1919 in the Black Watch and survived being part of the British Expeditionary Force and The Somme. He suffered as piece of shrapnel was left in his chest, he died in 1958. My grandmother said it was the German shrapnel that eventually killed him. She would hate to know I now drive an Audi. My paternal grandfather was a farmer so in a reserved occupation. My dad said he did try to join up in 1916 but was refused.
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“She would hate to know I now drive an Audi”
I once asked my Prussian Father-in-Law if , whilst he was being bombed and strafed by the Allies, he could have ever imagined that his own daughter would marry an Englishman, marry the grandson of the very people who had tried fairly hard to kill him as a teenager ? His reply “We didn’t see ‘your’ bombs as an attack but as liberating us” – and that’s a very common view among Germans of his generation. Then he asked me to make sure I sent him another tub of Brylcream -cos it was really hard to get in Germany at that time (the late 80s).
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Both of my grandfathers served in Great War. My maternal gf was a regular at the outbreak of the war and was captured during the Mons battle- poor sod spent 4 years in a German POW camp. My other granddad fought at the Somme in 1916. Although not physically hurt he was certainly a changed man when he returned. We honour the fallen in New Zealand on 25th April (ANZAC day). That date marks the anniversary of the initial Landings in Gallipoli. The Gallipoli battles have a special place in the hearts and minds of Aussies and Kiwis and many gallant men are interred there.
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