Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) standing in the midst of fellow soldiers 1915.
I wanted to quote the Ezra Pound poem, and then I found a particularly splendid framing for the poem by Wen Stephenson in the January 2005 issue of the Atlantic, so fine that I feel obliged to include it, as well.
“E has sent me the Chinese poems,” wrote a young French-born sculptor named Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was serving as an officer on the Western Front, to his London patron Olivia Shakespear on April 11, 1915. “I keep the book in my pocket, indeed I use them to put courage in my fellows. I speak now of the ‘Bowmen’ and the ‘North Gate,’ which are so appropriate to our case.”
[S]omething triggered a memory of Gaudier-Brzeska at the front and the little book he kept in his pocket.
That book, Cathay, published in London in April 1915, was a curious pamphlet containing eleven “Chinese” poems by Ezra Pound. It came in a drab tan wrapper—a reference, perhaps, to the uniforms then being worn, and shredded, in Belgium and France.
At the front of the volume appeared this puzzling inscription:
For the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga.
Some explanation, some deciphering, is required. Rihaku is the Japanese form of Li Po, the great T’ang Dynasty poet who lived from 701 to 762. Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) was an American scholar of Far Eastern literature whose voluminous notes on classical Chinese poetry—compiled in Tokyo in 1896-99 and containing the Chinese characters accompanied by rough English translations of the poems—had been entrusted to Pound by Fenollosa’s widow in 1912. The professors Mori and Ariga were the Japanese scholars who served as Fenollosa’s translators and interpreters of the Chinese texts. Fenollosa, you see, couldn’t read Chinese. Neither could Pound.
There is much more to be said, about the text of Cathay itself and about Pound’s theory of “Imagisme” and his understanding, erroneous as it may have been, of the Chinese written character or “ideogram.” (For further decipherings, Richard Sieburth’s notes on Cathay in the Library of America’s recently published Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations are highly recommended, as is the chapter entitled “The Invention of China” in Hugh Kenner’s 1971 study The Pound Era.) T. S. Eliot famously called Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” But what Pound invented here had little to do with Chinese and everything to do with his time, our time—maybe all times.
So it was that somewhere in the trenches near the Marne in the early spring of 1915, the twenty-three-year-old Henri Gaudier -Brzeska read to his troops the following poem from Cathay, the one referred to in his letter as the “North Gate.” It’s a text, it has to be said, that is not so much translated—Pound’s Chinese “translations” are notoriously inaccurate, though accuracy as such was hardly the point—as derived, paraphrased, transmuted from the eighth-century source (by way of professors Fenollosa, Mori, and Ariga) into a new and startlingly powerful, startlingly alive, English poem.
To Gaudier-Brzeska in the trenches—despite the layers of history, geography, and language, of cultural and aesthetic mediation, separating him from the original Chinese—the poem, by some uncanny process, rang as true, as immediate, as any news bulletin. If literature is “news that stays news,” as Pound would later write, then here is a war poem appropriate to the ages.
Lament of the Frontier Guard
By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:
Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.
A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars-men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.
Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku’s* name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.
By Rihaku
[*Rihoku, not to be confused with Rihaku [Li Po], is the Japanese for Li Mu, a Chinese general who defended China against the Tartars and died in 223 B.C.E. (Richard Sieburth, Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, Library of America, 2003).]
In his last letter to Mrs. Shakespear, on May 29, Gaudier-Brzeska wrote: “Today is magnificent, a fresh wind, clear sun and larks singing cheerfully. The shells do not disturb the songsters…. They solemnly proclaim man’s foolery and sacrilege of nature. I respect their disdain….”
He would be killed on June 5, 1915, in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast.
Lieutenant Frank Luke, May 19, 1897 – September 29, 1918.
Chelius Carter elucidated a really fine recent reference for us:
Don’t know if too many people caught the reference, but the U.S. fighter pilot who shot down China’s errant hemispherical touring balloon used the call-sign of “FRANK 1” – a direct nod back the WW I American fighter pilot, Frank Luke, aka: the “Arizona Balloon Buster.”
Getting up early in the morning for dawn patrol along the front lines, Luke would depart from the other pilots to tend to his special passion of shooting down the German’s observation balloons – extremely dangerous work as, as not only were these balloons encircled with anti-aircraft fire…they were filled with highly explosive hydrogen. A pilot’s incendiary bullets would set it off and the pilot stood a real good chance of being engulfed in the ensuing conflagration.
Eventually, on 29 September 1918 Lt. Frank Luke…did not return.
On PJMedia, “Spengler” gravely strokes his chin, compares today to August 1914, and equates Putin’s yearning for a cordon sanitaire of Russian satellites and puppet states to the Cuban Missile Criss of 1962.
Vladimir Putin acted wickedly, and illegally, by invading Ukraine, but also rationally: Russia has an existential interest in keeping NATO away from his border. Russia will no more tolerate American missiles in Kyiv than the United States would tolerate Russian missiles in Cuba.
The United States could have averted a crisis by adhering to the Minsk II framework of local rule for the Russophone provinces of Eastern Ukraine within a sovereign Ukrainian state but chose instead to keep open Ukraine’s option to join NATO. That was rational, but also stupid: It backed Putin into a corner.
There is no excuse for Putin’s action, but there is an explanation that’s similar to one that applied to his forbears of 1914: Putin chose to attack before the West had the opportunity to arm Ukraine with sophisticated weapons that would raise the future cost of military action.
Well, I don’t think everybody in 1914 was equally “rational,” or equally responsible. Russia seems to me more responsible by far than average for trouble-making in the Balkans, instigating Serbian Nationalism, and then stepping in as Serbia’s protector (its self-appointed role as defender of the Eastern Orthodox) when a Nationalist fanatic murdered the Austrian Grand Duke.
I’d say Britain was responsible, too, for enormous damage to herself, by rushing to the defense of plucky little Belgium on the basis of an antiquated, widely forgotten 19th Century treaty and a heap of Jingoism.
As to the supposed equivalence of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 and Ukraine joining NATO in 2022, there are enormous differences. The Soviet Union in 1962 was an ambitious, aggressor power who explicitly promised “to bury” the United States.
NATO, in 2022 pre-the Russian-Invasion-of-Ukraine, was a decidedly decadent and complacent defensive alliance, whose wealthy Western European members begrudged spending the 2% on GDP promised by treaty on defense, who were perfectly willing to depend for energy requirements on Russia, and all of whose members had absolutely zero claims on Russian territory or ambitions to attack Russia.
Vladimir Putin’s rational causus belli, according to “Spengler,” was potential missiles in Ukraine some fine day, but any such future missiles, assuming Ukraine was ever permitted to join NATO and assuming America kept electing hawkish Republican presidents with the cojones to defend Central Europe, those missiles would be purely defensive missiles.
NATO-member missile-equipped Ukraine would not, in Putin’s phrase, be “holding a knife to Russia’s throat.” That Ukraine would merely possess a credible deterrent.
All rational Russia was standing to lose was the opportunity unprovokedly to invade, occupy, shell, bomb, ravage, and annex a sovereign neighboring state without a shred of legitimacy.
Russia’s real position is that of the violent criminal who claims self defense in the course of gunning down an unarmed law abiding citizen, because, he says, he was afraid that in the future his victim might arm himself.
A rather moving original color photograph of a British family inspecting dead sea birds along a beach near the Margate Cliffs in Kent. The birds were killed by first war-time use of poison gas by the Germans in the Second Battle of Ypres, 22 April — 25 May, 1915. There were roughly 60,000 British casualties. German casualties were around 35,000. The Germans gained three miles of ground.
WWI came to an end by an armistice arranged to occur at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The date and time, selected at a point in history when mens’ memories ran much longer, represented a compliment to St. Martin, patron saint of soldiers, and thus a tribute to the fighting men of both sides. The feast day of St. Martin, the Martinmas, had been for centuries a major landmark in the European calendar, a date on which leases expired, rents came due; and represented, in Northern Europe, a seasonal turning point after which cold weather and snow might be normally expected.
It fell about the Martinmas-time, when the snow lay on the borders…
—Old Song.
From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:
St. Martin, the son of a Roman military tribune, was born at Sabaria, in Hungary, about 316. From his earliest infancy, he was remarkable for mildness of disposition; yet he was obliged to become a soldier, a profession most uncongenial to his natural character. After several years’ service, he retired into solitude, from whence he was withdrawn, by being elected bishop of Tours, in the year 374.
The zeal and piety he displayed in this office were most exemplary. He converted the whole of his diocese to Christianity, overthrowing the ancient pagan temples, and erecting churches in their stead. From the great success of his pious endeavours, Martin has been styled the Apostle of the Gauls; and, being the first confessor to whom the Latin Church offered public prayers, he is distinguished as the father of that church. In remembrance of his original profession, he is also frequently denominated the Soldier Saint.
The principal legend, connected with St. Martin, forms the subject of our illustration, which represents the saint, when a soldier, dividing his cloak with a poor naked beggar, whom he found perishing with cold at the gate of Amiens. This cloak, being most miraculously preserved, long formed one of the holiest and most valued relics of France; when war was declared, it was carried before the French monarchs, as a sacred banner, and never failed to assure a certain victory. The oratory in which this cloak or cape—in French, chape—was preserved, acquired, in consequence, the name of chapelle, the person intrusted with its care being termed chapelain: and thus, according to Collin de Plancy, our English words chapel and chaplain are derived. The canons of St. Martin of Tours and St. Gratian had a lawsuit, for sixty years, about a sleeve of this cloak, each claiming it as their property. The Count Larochefoucalt, at last, put an end to the proceedings, by sacrilegiously committing the contested relic to the flames.
Another legend of St. Martin is connected with one of those literary curiosities termed a palindrome. Martin, having occasion to visit Rome, set out to perform the journey thither on foot. Satan, meeting him on the way, taunted the holy man for not using a conveyance more suitable to a bishop. In an instant the saint changed the Old Serpent into a mule, and jumping on its back, trotted comfortably along. Whenever the transformed demon slackened pace, Martin, by making the sign of the cross, urged it to full speed. At last, Satan utterly defeated, exclaimed:
Signa, te Signa: temere me tangis et angis:
Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor.’
In English—
‘Cross, cross thyself: thou plaguest and vexest me without necessity;
for, owing to my exertions, thou wilt soon reach Rome, the object of thy wishes.’
The singularity of this distich, consists in its being palindromical—that is, the same, whether read backwards or forwards. Angis, the last word of the first line, when read backwards, forming signet, and the other words admitting of being reversed, in a similar manner.
The festival of St. Martin, happening at that season when the new wines of the year are drawn from the lees and tasted, when cattle are killed for winter food, and fat geese are in their prime, is held as a feast-day over most parts of Christendom. On the ancient clog almanacs, the day is marked by the figure of a goose; our bird of Michaelmas being, on the continent, sacrificed at Martinmas. In Scotland and the north of England, a fat ox is called a mart, clearly from Martinmas, the usual time when beeves are killed for winter use. In ‘Tusser’s Husbandry, we read:
When Easter comes, who knows not then,
That veal and bacon is the man?
And Martilmass beef doth bear good tack,
When country folic do dainties lack.’
Barnaby Googe’s translation of Neogeorgus, shews us how Martinmas was kept in Germany, towards the latter part of the fifteenth century
‘To belly chear, yet once again,
Doth Martin more incline,
Whom all the people worshippeth
With roasted geese and wine.
Both all the day long, and the night,
Now each man open makes
His vessels all, and of the must,
Oft times, the last he takes,
Which holy Martin afterwards
Alloweth to be wine,
Therefore they him, unto the skies,
Extol with praise divine.’
A genial saint, like Martin, might naturally be expected to become popular in England; and there are no less than seven churches in London and Westminster, alone, dedicated to him. There is certainly more than a resemblance between the Vinalia of the Romans, and the Martinalia of the medieval period. Indeed, an old ecclesiastical calendar, quoted by Brand, expressly states under 11th November: ‘The Vinalia, a feast of the ancients, removed to this day. Bacchus in the figure of Martin.’ And thus, probably, it happened, that the beggars were taken from St. Martin, and placed under the protection of St. Giles; while the former became the patron saint of publicans, tavern-keepers, and other ‘dispensers of good eating and drinking. In the hall of the Vintners’ Company of London, paintings and statues of St. Martin and Bacchus reign amicably together side by side.
On the inauguration, as lord mayor, of Sir Samuel Dashwood, an honoured vintner, in 1702, the company had a grand processional pageant, the most conspicuous figure in which was their patron saint, Martin, arrayed, cap-Ã -pie, in a magnificent suit of polished armour; wearing a costly scarlet cloak, and mounted on a richly plumed and caparisoned white charger: two esquires, in rich liveries, walking at each side. Twenty satyrs danced before him, beating tambours, and preceded by ten halberdiers, with rural music. Ten Roman lictors, wearing silver helmets, and carrying axes and fasces, gave an air of classical dignity to the procession, and, with the satyrs, sustained the bacchanalian idea of the affair.
A multitude of beggars, ‘howling most lamentably,’ followed the warlike saint, till the procession stopped in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Then Martin, or his representative at least, drawing his sword, cut his rich scarlet cloak in many pieces, which he distributed among the beggars. This ceremony being duly and gravely performed, the lamentable howlings ceased, and the procession resumed its course to Guildhall, where Queen Anne graciously condescended to dine with the new lord mayor.
This football, supplied by Captain Wilfred Percy “Billie†Nevill, was kicked over the top by Private A A Fursey, 6th Platoon, B company, 8th (Service) Battalion, The East Surrey Regiment from Carnoy trenches, Montauban, The Somme 1st July 1916.
In this week’s Spectator, Jeremy Clarke visits the WWI Somme Battlefield.
Phone calls aside, the only human contact I had on my ten-day Somme battlefield tour was with the lady who ran the bed and breakfast establishment. My bed was on the upper storey of a disused light railway station in a clearing in a beech wood. Madame lived with her husband in a modern bungalow 100 yards down the line, but came along each morning to cook my bacon and eggs. The greater part of her clientele consists of British Great War buffs. But Covid-19 had kept them away and I had the breakfast table, the old station and indeed the Somme battlefield entirely to myself.
The dining room was once the waiting room. In here the walls were decorated with trench maps and other Great War memorabilia, including a tribute to Captain Billie Nevill of the 8th Battalion East Surrey Regiment, who famously led his men over the top on 1 July 1916 by drop-kicking a football into no man’s land. He’d written on the football: ‘The great European Cup-Tie final, East Surreys v Bavarians.’ Displayed on a stand was a punctured leather replica of this celebrated football.
[Actually, Captain Nevill Captain WP Nevill, “commanding “B” Company had purchased four footballs for his platoons to kick across No Man’s Land ‘subject to the proviso that proper formation and distance was not lost thereby’. Captain Nevill promised a reward to the first platoon to score a ‘goal’ in enemy trenches.]
After a careful study of the trench maps, one day I went and found the spot from which Captain Nevill had punted his football. Then I followed his path between the British and German front line trenches. The distance was about the same as three football pitches laid end to end. History records that the East Surreys gamely chased the football up the long uphill slope but were scythed down by a German machine gun on the left wing. Captain Nevill reached the German wire and was about to chuck a hand grenade when a late tackle in the form of a bullet to the head ended the match for him. Every morning he looked levelly out from his framed portrait and watched me eat my bacon and eggs off a plate decorated with a design of red poppies. The tablecloth was a pattern of red poppies. Madame invariably served breakfast wearing a diaphanous shawl hand-embroidered with poppies.
This last photo of Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen (2 May 1892 – 21 April 1918), known in English as Baron von Richthofen, and most famously as the “Red Baron,” shows him playing with his beloved Great Dane, Moritz, just moments before he embarked on his last flight.
Arthur Roy Brown, the man who shot him down, wrote:
“… the sight of Richthofen as I walked closer gave me a start. He appeared so small to me, so delicate. He looked so friendly. Blond, silk-soft hair, like that of a child, fell from the broad, high forehead. His face, particularly peaceful, had an expression of gentleness and goodness, of refinement. Suddenly I felt miserable, desperately unhappy, as if I had committed an injustice. With a feeling of shame, a kind of anger against myself moved in my thoughts, that I had forced him to lay there. And in my heart I cursed the force that is devoted to death. I gnashed my teeth, I cursed the war. If I could I would gladly have brought him back to life, but that is somewhat different than shooting a gun. I could no longer look him in the face. I went away. I did not feel like a victor. There was a lump in my throat. If he had been my dearest friend, I could not have felt greater sorrow.â€
Freiherr Manfred Albrecht von Richthofen was given a full military burial by No. 3 Squadron Australian Flying Corps, which included a memorial wreath inscribed with the words,“To Our Gallant and Worthy Foe.â€
WWI came to an end by an armistice arranged to occur at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The date and time, selected at a point in history when mens’ memories ran much longer, represented a compliment to St. Martin, patron saint of soldiers, and thus a tribute to the fighting men of both sides. The feast day of St. Martin, the Martinmas, had been for centuries a major landmark in the European calendar, a date on which leases expired, rents came due; and represented, in Northern Europe, a seasonal turning point after which cold weather and snow might be normally expected.
From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:
St. Martin, the son of a Roman military tribune, was born at Sabaria, in Hungary, about 316. From his earliest infancy, he was remarkable for mildness of disposition; yet he was obliged to become a soldier, a profession most uncongenial to his natural character. After several years’ service, he retired into solitude, from whence he was withdrawn, by being elected bishop of Tours, in the year 374.
The zeal and piety he displayed in this office were most exemplary. He converted the whole of his diocese to Christianity, overthrowing the ancient pagan temples, and erecting churches in their stead. From the great success of his pious endeavours, Martin has been styled the Apostle of the Gauls; and, being the first confessor to whom the Latin Church offered public prayers, he is distinguished as the father of that church. In remembrance of his original profession, he is also frequently denominated the Soldier Saint.
The principal legend, connected with St. Martin, forms the subject of our illustration, which represents the saint, when a soldier, dividing his cloak with a poor naked beggar, whom he found perishing with cold at the gate of Amiens. This cloak, being most miraculously preserved, long formed one of the holiest and most valued relics of France; when war was declared, it was carried before the French monarchs, as a sacred banner, and never failed to assure a certain victory. The oratory in which this cloak or cape—in French, chape—was preserved, acquired, in consequence, the name of chapelle, the person intrusted with its care being termed chapelain: and thus, according to Collin de Plancy, our English words chapel and chaplain are derived. The canons of St. Martin of Tours and St. Gratian had a lawsuit, for sixty years, about a sleeve of this cloak, each claiming it as their property. The Count Larochefoucalt, at last, put an end to the proceedings, by sacrilegiously committing the contested relic to the flames.
Another legend of St. Martin is connected with one of those literary curiosities termed a palindrome. Martin, having occasion to visit Rome, set out to perform the journey thither on foot. Satan, meeting him on the way, taunted the holy man for not using a conveyance more suitable to a bishop. In an instant the saint changed the Old Serpent into a mule, and jumping on its back, trotted comfortably along. Whenever the transformed demon slackened pace, Martin, by making the sign of the cross, urged it to full speed. At last, Satan utterly defeated, exclaimed:
Signa, te Signa: temere me tangis et angis:
Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor.’
In English—
‘Cross, cross thyself: thou plaguest and vexest me without necessity;
for, owing to my exertions, thou wilt soon reach Rome, the object of thy wishes.’
The singularity of this distich, consists in its being palindromical—that is, the same, whether read backwards or forwards. Angis, the last word of the first line, when read backwards, forming signet, and the other words admitting of being reversed, in a similar manner.
The festival of St. Martin, happening at that season when the new wines of the year are drawn from the lees and tasted, when cattle are killed for winter food, and fat geese are in their prime, is held as a feast-day over most parts of Christendom. On the ancient clog almanacs, the day is marked by the figure of a goose; our bird of Michaelmas being, on the continent, sacrificed at Martinmas. In Scotland and the north of England, a fat ox is called a mart, clearly from Martinmas, the usual time when beeves are killed for winter use. In ‘Tusser’s Husbandry, we read:
When Easter comes, who knows not then,
That veal and bacon is the man?
And Martilmass beef doth bear good tack,
When country folic do dainties lack.’
Barnaby Googe’s translation of Neogeorgus, shews us how Martinmas was kept in Germany, towards the latter part of the fifteenth century
‘To belly chear, yet once again,
Doth Martin more incline,
Whom all the people worshippeth
With roasted geese and wine.
Both all the day long, and the night,
Now each man open makes
His vessels all, and of the must,
Oft times, the last he takes,
Which holy Martin afterwards
Alloweth to be wine,
Therefore they him, unto the skies,
Extol with praise divine.’
A genial saint, like Martin, might naturally be expected to become popular in England; and there are no less than seven churches in London and Westminster, alone, dedicated to him. There is certainly more than a resemblance between the Vinalia of the Romans, and the Martinalia of the medieval period. Indeed, an old ecclesiastical calendar, quoted by Brand, expressly states under 11th November: ‘The Vinalia, a feast of the ancients, removed to this day. Bacchus in the figure of Martin.’ And thus, probably, it happened, that the beggars were taken from St. Martin, and placed under the protection of St. Giles; while the former became the patron saint of publicans, tavern-keepers, and other ‘dispensers of good eating and drinking. In the hall of the Vintners’ Company of London, paintings and statues of St. Martin and Bacchus reign amicably together side by side.
On the inauguration, as lord mayor, of Sir Samuel Dashwood, an honoured vintner, in 1702, the company had a grand processional pageant, the most conspicuous figure in which was their patron saint, Martin, arrayed, cap-Ã -pie, in a magnificent suit of polished armour; wearing a costly scarlet cloak, and mounted on a richly plumed and caparisoned white charger: two esquires, in rich liveries, walking at each side. Twenty satyrs danced before him, beating tambours, and preceded by ten halberdiers, with rural music. Ten Roman lictors, wearing silver helmets, and carrying axes and fasces, gave an air of classical dignity to the procession, and, with the satyrs, sustained the bacchanalian idea of the affair.
A multitude of beggars, ‘howling most lamentably,’ followed the warlike saint, till the procession stopped in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Then Martin, or his representative at least, drawing his sword, cut his rich scarlet cloak in many pieces, which he distributed among the beggars. This ceremony being duly and gravely performed, the lamentable howlings ceased, and the procession resumed its course to Guildhall, where Queen Anne graciously condescended to dine with the new lord mayor.
One day I was visiting the museum for the Lancashire regiments in Preston, Lancashire. While I was there I saw a medal box which, among other medals, contained an Iron Cross from World war one.
The officer I was talking to told me the story behind the medal and its owner, who I believe, was called Albert. Anyway, I will call him Albert from here on.
I must say that sometime has passed since this conversation and so I am going to fill in some blanks and add, what I hope you will find funny. But when I tell this story I always get a lump in my throat.
Albert was between the lines, in no man’s land, when he was seriously wounded. That night a German search party came out. I presume that they were looking for their own men but I don’t think they were worried about taking a British Tommy back.
They got him back and he would be sent to the nearest hospital. His uniform would be cut of, his wounds attended to and then he was put to bed in a hospital just behind the lines filled with German wounded. By now he would be wearing German army pyjamas.
One day the door opens and a German army general comes into the ward. You can imagine all of the staff standing rigidly to attention when he came in. He addressed the wounded patients. He told them that they were all heroes. They had all fought and been wounded for their country. As a result, they were all to be awarded the Iron Cross, you can imagine him stopping by each bed, awarding the medal, stepping back and saluting the soldier and then moving on to the next.
Was Albert awake or conscious ? I don’t know but I bet you a £5.00 that he didn’t speak German.
I imagine two German orderlies standing to attention as the is happens, call them Hans and Karl.
Karl. “Hans do you think that the General knows that the man in bed 14 is a Tommy?â€
Hans “Of course he will. He is the General.â€
Karl. “But what happens if he doesn’t and give’s the Tommy a medal?â€
Hans â€Good point. You had better tell him.â€
Karl “Me. You are senior to me. Oh too late. The Tommy has just been awarded one of the highest honours that Germany can bestow.â€
In due course the General found out what had happened and was asked what should happen. Did the Tommy get to keep the medal or should it be taken off him? Well- I told you he gets to keep it.
The General said that the medal had been awarded to men who were heroes. They had fought and were wounded for their country. He was such a man and, as such, he deserves the medal.
I am raising a glass to the German General. I wish I knew his name.
German scholars made more than 200 recordings of British POWs during WWI in an effort to study regional speech and accents. Surprisingly, these century-old voices have survived to today.
