This was the WORLD war, but the fighting took place on only the minutest fraction of the earth’s surface; my whole image & idea of war, which I had had since childhood, was transformed.
Many years later I was talking to a fellow class member about some famous Anglo-Saxon battle which we had been learning about, & how it was always surprising & faintly disappointing to go to the site of such an historic event & find just a small field – maybe even smaller than a modern rugby pitch.
I mentioned my reaction to the WWI battlefields & we fell into exclaiming about how ‘small’ was that war too.
Another class member – an elderly gentleman who may even have been old enough to fight in that war himself - overheard this last part & became very upset, berating us loudly for our insensitivity to the vast suffering caused. We could only apologise – no point trying to explain.
I have just been reading Nevil Shute’s autobiographical memoir, Slide Rule, & found these memories stirring again.
Shute’s older teenage brother Fred was shelled in July 1915 when trying to rescue his sergeant from a trench which had been mined. He was evacuated to field hospital, but died of gangrene 3 weeks later. His parents were at his side ‘as was common in those days.’
Even more extraordinarily Shute’s father took 16-year old Nevil & his mother to Rome & Naples for a 6 week holiday the following Christmas, & Nevil made his own way home by train in time to get back to school for the new term.
“Wars were localised in those days … the Western Front was ablaze with war from Switzerland to the sea but this was completely static; there was nothing to prevent the normal express trains full of tourists from running as usual 50 miles behind the lines, & no currency restrictions …”Shute also records that during those years of war he had grown to accept the prospect of death.Nevil Shute: Slide Rule: An Autobiography
I cannot remember any particular resentment at this prospect; indeed, in some ways it was even stimulating. It has puzzled many people to imagine how the Japanese produced their Kamikazes … in the last war. It has never been much of a puzzle to me … in 1918 anybody could have made a Kamikaze pilot out of me.Nevil Shute: Slide Rule: An Autobiography
He even describes how his English Public School, Shrewbury - which also numbers Charles Darwin among its old boys – prepared its pupils for what was to come
[It] was a time for contemplation of the realities that were coming & for spiritual preparation for death, & in this atmosphere the masculine, restrained services in the school chapel … played an enormous part. The list of school casualties grew every day. Older boys … left, appeared once or twice resplendent in new uniforms, & were dead. We remembered them … as we knelt praying for their souls in chapel, knowing as we did so that in a year or so the little boys … would be kneeling for usNevil Shute: Slide Rule: An Autobiography
Religion, martyrdom, inculcated by teachers. Sounds like a kind of radicalisation.
