A time of remembrance

He’d been married three years, was enjoying life with his wife and daughter, everything was going well for them…and then the war broke out. He tried to ignore the inevitable and get on with life, together with his family but knew he’d have to leave them in the end. He was just a country lad who loved the land and animals, not up with politics and such; he just wanted - well - to be left alone and to be with his family.

Of course that couldn’t be, not with his country at war; he was a man and was expected to fight. It didn’t matter where he went, there was always something to remind him; flags flying, patriotic posters in prominent places, men and women in uniform; that and the questions folk asked, without even speaking when they saw him.

His heart was heavy; something seemed to warn him not to go; on his own sometimes he’d get a kind of a premonition, though he wasn’t superstitious. A voice, warm and proud whispering, ‘You’re going to be a hero. You’ll get a medal!’ Then a different voice, cold and matter of fact, taunted, ‘Because you’re one of those warm and sensitive types, you have to realise some things; those you leave behind; those who order you to go and those who train you, won’t have to see you shoot your rifle, use your bayonet as you advance, screaming your insane head off; and in the state you’ll be in after that, well, it’s best you don’t come back. You can see that, can’t you? But then, your country will be proud of you; you’ll be a hero!’

Of course he slept badly, waking often, imagining himself staring at his own gravestone; his name standing out amongst row upon regimental row of others, neat and trim and: ‘Ready for inspection! Sir!’

...

Whether they accomplished anything by their visits to the cemetery at Cape Helles, would be hard to say; but his beloved and his daughter placed fresh flowers on the small white slab beneath his name plate each time they went. Like all wives and family members after such visits, they both left feeling drained and unutterably sad, hating the stupid waste of it all. They left heartaches and tears as well, but you can’t record those, can you?

*

A fellow member of the Returned Services Association told me this story after he’d been to take a photograph of the battlefield where the Turkish soldier and the R.S.A. chap’s friend, a Kiwi solider, fell and died. It was through one of those strange coincidences life throws up at you sometimes, that he came to know this chap’s wife and daughter and they established a firm friendship. They met in that Turkish cemetery that day and took a photograph of his grave. The inscription read simply: ‘Private Talat Demisar, aged 22 years. He did his duty’.

And from a short distance away, the haunting strains of the Last Post hung in the quiet air as the three of them remembered, together.

Dennis Crompton © 1997
(first published www.denniscrompton.wordpress.com 2013)