Memorial

A couple of weeks ago we had a fire that blazed through 150 hectares of nearby countryside. A dozen of the small planes that bomb the flames with water and powder were buzzing close above our heads and the village priest told us it brought back memories of the war.

Our village remembers its dead with an infantry soldier who wears a heavy pack, tired eyes and a very French moustache and stands guard over the names of 65 soldiers, many of whose descendants still live here.

I was reading the war poems of the English poet Wilfred Owen the other day and realised just how physically close both world wars still feel here in rural France. Perhaps because France was such a battleground, perhaps because it was occupied. Always clear-eyed to the horror and pity of it all, this poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth" was written by Owen in France just before he died in 1918 a week before the war ended.

What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds