Sunday, November 11, 2018

From the Western Front, 1918


In keeping with a whole series of Armistice Day posts recording the postcards sent back to my grandmother by my grandfather, Joe Flint, here's one sent on the 8th March 2018 - presumably bought at some local tabac?  The irony - which I doubt he'd have known - is that the previous night, March 7th, was the date of Germany's first ever air raid on London.  "Awfully busy at present" - the German offensive was building up on the Western Front at this time, and this was about three weeks before the first Battle of the Somme.

Joe was to die ten years later, most likely because his lungs were compromised by gas, and he'd caught flu in the autumn of 1928.  And he died on Armistice Day/Remembrance Sunday, which therefore has always been an extra-sad day for my father, as well as being the day in which he remembers his own friends and comrades who were lost in WW2 - who flew out from the aircraft carrier on which he worked as an engineer, and never returned.  I'm sure that the fact that the day was always treated with great seriousness and solemnity by my parents when I was a child is one of the reasons why I feel so very furious with President Trump's childish and petulant and self-serving behavior in France today.  And surely someone told him he was meant to wear a black, not a bright red tie???




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