Thoughts By England Given

Every Remembrance Sunday I make a point of looking through an old photo album I have stored on my computer. When I was in high school I was lucky enough to go on a trip to the Belgian/French border to see the battlefields of the First World War. Though looking at endless war graves isn't every 15-year-old's cup of tea, the trip was particularly special for me as there was one monument I wanted to see.

My mum's been putting together our family tree over the last 10 years, and tracing our involvement in the war. John Hind, my great uncle on my mum's side, died on the Somme in the Battle of the Ancre on the 14th November 1916. Conditions were described as horrendous, with soldiers literally drowning in the mud. John was one of the thousands of soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. Records suggest that he survived the worst of the battle but died consolidating the ground his Battalion had made, most likely from shelling.

It was difficult to appreciate at the time, but I can remember approaching the panel on which John's name is recorded at the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. I recall being very conscious that I was the first person from our family to visit the site - and while John was never buried, it's fills me with so much sadness to think of a 19-year-old lost to war and waiting almost 90 years to know someone from back home came. I can remember hearing my friends chatting amongst the aisles of the monument, obviously numbed by the sheer amount of graves we'd seen that week, while I had a few minutes to reflect.

It's my intention to go back one day and show my mum. I think it would be really important to her.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me;       
  That there's some corner of a foreign field       
That is for ever England. There shall be  
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;        
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,                  
  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,        
A body of England's breathing English air,          
  Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.    

  And think, this heart, all evil shed away,  
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less          
    Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;        
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;          

  And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

    In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.