At the going down of the sun...

[julesjones]

On the mantlepiece in my parents' house, there sits a brass box. Not so very big a box, just enough to hold a few things to bring some Christmas cheer. A ration of tobacco and cigarettes, perhaps some chocolate or sweets. A Christmas card from HRH Princess Mary.

It's a link with the past, with a man I never met. He survived the trenches, to bring his Christmas box home with him as a souvenir, but he died before I was born. As did another great-grandfather, who carried a souvenir of the war in his scarred lungs until his too-early dying day.

Both of my grandfathers survived the next war. Those men I did have in my life, though others of their generation in my extended family are among those who never came back.

I remember. Had any of those four men met the fate so many did, I would not be here to remember.

Comments

[tharain.livejournal.com]

My great Uncle Oscar, husband to my Great Aunt Claire, died in the late twenties, early thirties in an asylum, where he had lived, dleusional, for years as a result of being gassed in the trenches in the Great War.

Whom did this not touch? How can we continue?