= Сообщение: 11036 из 12492 ===================================== ENET.SYSOP = От : David Rance 2:203/2 15 Nov 21 19:04:11 Кому : Dmitry Protasoff 15 Nov 21 19:04:11 Тема : The richest people on this planet FGHI : area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:203/2+6192a11a На : area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:5001/100.1+61918973 = Кодировка сообщения определена как: UTF-8 ================================== Ответ: area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:5001/100.1+6192cf75 ============================================================================== On Mon, 15 Nov 2021 01:06:26 Dmitry Protasoff -> Ward Dossche wrote:
WD>> We knew the first world war ended June 26 1919 with the Treaty of WD>> Versailles, not Nov.11th. My kids were convinced nov.11th was the end WD>> of WW1 ... and now it is "What's a world war?"
DP> Who cares?!
I care!
My Uncle Harry died in the trenches in July 1916. All my mother would tell me was that he was (and I quote) "blown to pieces". That wasn't quite true. I found out later that a German shell landed in his trench and he died about five days later of shrapnel wounds.
This so affected my mother that she couldn't talk about it. In her writing desk was a letter that he'd written a few days before he died. I found and read it when I was still a child. When I had grown up and she had died, I looked for it again but it had disappeared. Did she destroy it when she knew I'd seen it so that I shouldn't see it again? I don't know. It was too late to ask her.
Some decades later, I went to visit Uncle Harry's grave on the Somme. I was the first person in our family to do so as none of them could face visiting the grave themselves. It was an incredible feeling that I experienced. To think that someone with my related DNA was killed and was buried there along with so many thousands of others. It was too much for me.
Of course, I never knew my Uncle Harry as I wasn't born until 1939 but it was something that cast a shadow over his brothers and sisters (my aunts and uncles) but which they wouldn't, or couldn't, talk about.
Uncle Harry had a brother who was one year younger than himself, my Uncle Arthur. Arthur was also in the trenches and was also wounded by a shell, but he didn't die. I did know Uncle Arthur and, when I was a boy, I used to play chess with him. One thing I noticed about him was that his hands shook quite violently, especially noticeable when he moved chess pieces. It was as though he had Parkinson's disease - but it wasn't Parkinson's. I asked my mother why this was. "Oh," she said, "he suffers from shell shock." That's all she said. WW1 had been over for thirty years but he still suffered the after-effects, even though he didn't lose any limbs. His wounds were invisible.
His youngest daughter is still alive, my Cousin Mary. She is nearly ninety years old now. I've asked her about Arthur's time during the war but she said that he just wouldn't talk about it. It's as though those years didn't happen for him - apart from the physical and mental damage.
DP> Why do you think they need to know anything WW1 in details?
That is why.
If, as the generations go by, we lose a sense of the horror of war and what it does for tens of years afterwards, then we are likely to allow it all to happen again. I wasn't born at the time of WW1 but my family and I have lived in the shadow of it.
Cousin Mary and I are the only ones of our generation still alive. All our mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters have now died. But our children, grandchildren (and I even have a great-grandchild) want to know about the details of the wars of the 20th century because they are taught about it in school and they want to ask me what my memories of it are. Am I to tell them that it doesn't matter and that they shouldn't care?
Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
That applies also to the collateral damage of ruined lives and families.
David
-- Formerly ICHTHUS (Reading) UK (1987-2007 R.I.P.) (2:292/854.110)
