Lest We Forget

One of the things which brings home to me the hideous cost of war, through the particuarly awful cost of the war which began for Britain one hundred years ago today, is one of the names which isn't on a war memorial.

As a child I regularly visited my Grandfather's house in Darwen, Lancashire, which is a few yards from Bold Venture Park.

That park is the site of the town's war memorial. Darwen is not a particularly large town. It's population in the last census before the First World War, in 1911, was about 40,000.

Almost every town and city in Britan, and the vast majority of villages, have a memorial to residents of the aree who were killed in the great wars of the 20th century. In most towns and cities the size of Darwen, and in many which are quite a lot bigger,  the memorial lists the names of those people.

But when the citizens of Darwen commissoned a memorial, to those killed in what was then usually known as "The Great War" they did not have that option.

The Cenotaph in Darwen was unveiled in 1921 by a mother who had lost three sons in the war.

Instead of listing the names of the war dead, this is what it said.

 
 
 
I cannot fully comprehend how awful it must have been when a town of 40,000 citizens lost 1,200 people, but I understand enough to know that there would not have been a family in the town who hadn't lost someone close to them.

My grandfather was one of the lucky ones who came back. His younger brother, Fusilier Robert Whiteside of the Lancashire Fusiliers, was one of those who didn't. He died as a result of enemy action in 1918 at the age of 18, just six weeks before the end of the war.

So my great uncle's name is one of those which doesn't appear on the war memorial because a small town did not have room to write down the names of all those who died.

But every one of those people was somebody's son or daughter, and all too many of them were also someone's husband or lover, some child's father.

We must never forget their sacrifice or the price of war.

"At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, We will remember them."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Quote of the day 24th July 2020