It was that time of year again; a time to make sure we'd bought our poppies - and a time to reflect, too. Time, perhaps, to take a break from being a dry, cynical old git with (I am told by others) a 'slightly waspish humour', and reflect that I may very well have been nothing at all without the sacrifice of some very brave people.
The late Leonard Cheshire VC - a war hero if ever there was one - was also an extremely modest man. He dismissed the suggestion that he possessed more courage than less famous men, saying that he simply wasn't scared, and that it was just his make-up. He remarked that, in his opinion, those who were absolutey terrified yet still carried on and did the job that had been put in front of them were the really courageous ones, and it's a point that is very well made, I feel.
Perhaps because of my daily historical excursions, I'm also aware of those not in the spotlight in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The wives and children and families of those we rightly remember also have their story, because, if war changes many things, the things it changes most of all - and usually irrevocably - are the people who fight it.
This happens in all wars, and is happening to someone right now, right here in Colchester Garrison, as I write this. It is inevitable, given the trauma and horror of the whole bloody business. My own great uncle, returning from the carnage of Flanders after four years of mud, corpses, disease and despair, was a man change beyond recognition. Physically unharmed, you would have called him lucky - not to say protected by the angels themselves. He was not lucky. He was de-sensitised, de-humanised, traumatised, and utterly unable to integrate into society. The Great War had turned a tough, cheery, little Colchester lad into a cold, remote, killer, and afterwards it was all he knew how to be. The lives of his family were changed for ever - and not for the best.
For anyone who has visited Flanders, the sight of "countless white crosses standing mute in the sand" - as Davey Arthur and the Furies so eloquently put it - is a deeply moving and troubling experience that never leaves one. On a bitter day in March, with snow on the ground and a wind full of bayonets howling across the Douai Plains, I stood at the Canadian War Memorial at Vimy Ridge to pay tribute to my ancestor, young David James McGlashon, who was just eighteen years old when he fell. I shall stand there in my mind all the days of my life.
It isn't, of course, just the Great War - they are all disastrous examples of man's blind indifference and failure to tolerate one another - but it is a very good example. The Second World War, in which my dad fought - was worse in terms of lives lost, and there have been others. There will be more, I have no doubt.
We honour them all every year with a poppy and a minute of our time - little enough, you may think for what they did for us, which is why, when I read that some twenty-one year-old prat has been convicted of putting graffiti on the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park, I have an overwhelming urge to treat him to his own very personal and utterly spectacular war. The term 'disproportionate response' springs to mind.
Which would be only the start of what my father - a rear-gunner in Lancasters - would have done to him, and he was a man who was 2 years younger than the graffiti idiot when he first went on 'ops' over Germany!
