Lest We Forget

My dad

Denis & Patsy McCann (nee Howard)

We have built a lot of romance around Remembrance Days. Perhaps too much. My dad was not considered a war hero, not by my young school friends, nor by me. This even though he lost a lung in the Second World War as a sailor in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He didn't lose his lung by getting 'wounded' like real heroes. He wasn't even a gunner or anything that would impress my seven-year old friends who sometimes boasted about what their dads did "in the war." He had just been one of the stokers in the engine room. It was very hot, he said. You had to drink lime juice all the time.

Sometime in the early days of the war his ship was in Durban harbour where they were stationed. I don't even know what ship he was assigned to, HMSAS Something-or-Another. Most of the crew had some hours of shore leave including all the stokers except my dad. Then a U-boat was sighted off-shore of the Durban beaches. My dad was ordered to start getting up a head of steam while the men on shore were rounded up. The returning stokers found a ship with a full head of steam and my dad unconscious with a collapsed lung. How non-glorious. They didn't even catch the U-boat.

After my dad recovered he declined discharge and did guard duty at the Bluff Battery.

When I was in my early teens we could afford to buy a used car and on two or three occasions my dad took my step-mom and me for a drive out to the Bluff and he would park for five minutes in a spot close to the Battery and just sit quietly looking out, not saying a word.

It has taken some years, but with the passage of time my dad has become my hero.

Remembrance Day

John McCrae's wonderful poem , In Flanders Fields, is generally the poem of choice for Remembrance Day. My only reservation is that it presents just one side of a valuable coin. I think the other side needs to be looked at too, which is why I am posting
"Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfrid Owen (1917). 
(Five-Nines refers to German artillery fire.

"Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori" is Latin for, "Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's fatherland.)

Bent double, like of old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind:
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in sonic smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not talk with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.