Tuesday, November 11, 2008

A Remembrance

I don't know which regiment my grandfather was in, or in what battles he fought, only that he was "in the trenches", and a few stray connected facts. That it was a menace that could be used to make children clean their plates. "You'd be glad of that if you'd been in the trenches". That they used candles to clean the lice out of the pleats of their kilts. That Churchill had visited them, and "he had a tin hat but we had no tin hats". That my grandfather had escorted a group of Gurkhas to raid the German trenches at night, fallen asleep while waiting for them, and been woken by one of them dangling a string of severed ears in his face. (Or so went the story.) That he had lied about his age to enlist, found the regiment not to his liking (dirty fellows), feigned deafness to be discharged, then re-enlisted in another regiment. That he finished the war as batman to Sir Thomas Dalling, a veterinarian, in Paris, where he was studying equine diseases, and my grandfather would balance trays of horse eyeballs as if he were a waiter. (Sir Thomas indeed existed, as he is in the Dictionary of National Biography, but there is no point in looking in the records for a Jimmy Campbell from Glasgow.)

And this must come from the Great War:
There's work to be done,
And it's not much fun.
Which I always dreaded to hear from my father early in the morning as I lay in my bed.