Memories of memories: the Great War

A few conversations between the old and the young take us back centuries. When I was a teenager, I knew two old men who had fought in the Great War. One I knew when I was a volunteer for the Visiting Service for Old People in Birmingham. He had joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment just after the start of the war in 1914, after lying about his age. He spent most of the war in the trenches of the Western Front, but was later transferred to the Italian Front. He had been wounded, was sent to the field hospital and missed some action. When he returned to his squad, he found that all his friends were dead. The second old man was a next door neighbour in Shirley. He too had been on the Western Front, and after the Armistice had advanced with the Army into Western Germany. He told me that he and his fellow soldiers did not like the French civilians they met, and were amazed when they occupied Germany to find people who seemed far more like themselves. “We’ve been fighting on the wrong side”, the soldiers said. 

These are memories of memories of events almost a hundred years ago. Both these men, when themselves teenagers, also may have talked to old men who in their youth had fought in distant wars: perhaps the Crimean War or the Indian Mutiny. Assume a 50 years span of memory for such conversations, and only seven link me with someone who saw Shakespeare perform at the Globe, and the first settlers leave for New England. The past is closer than we think.