They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
It’s a poignant memory that verse, ‘They shall not grow old …’ because at my father’s ex-servicemen’s club (like a VFW post) they would recite it weekly at a short service before opening the bar. I was a lad; this would have been 20 or so years after the end of the war. I was surrounded by these strong men who had seen fierce combat and come home and made a life for themselves and their families: and I would see tears in their eyes each time as they remembered the fallen. It always moved me. Only recently talking with lifetime friends from my first year at university did we muse on the fact, which astonished us, that our fathers never spoke about their wartime experience. Why, we wondered was that? Modesty? Trauma? Stranger still, we hardly asked them about it, and how we regretted that now, when it was too late.
The only thing I remember my father saying about his experiences was at a Fourth of July fireworks display one year. He hated the ones that make a shrieking noise and then explode because they reminded him of the incoming German rockets in England, before he was shipped to North Africa and Italy. Gone these sixteen years now. Rest in peace, Dad.