Why?

[poliphilo]

Why so solemn around the war dead?

I'm sure most of them liked a laugh when they were alive. I'll bet most of them said, "Fuck". I'll bet most of them said it a lot. I'll bet most of them hated being soldiers. I'll bet most of them liked singing "Mam'selle from Armentieres" better than they liked singing hymns.

Why transubstantiate them from cheeky chappies and working stiffs and aspiring poets and good husbands and bad husbands and all the other things they were into these gloomy ancestral ghosts?

I know the answer. And it's not a whole lot to do with them.

It's to do with a combination of grief (fair enough) and survivor's guilt (which doesn't do anyone any good)- and the desire to keep on polishing the War Machine.

Comments

[lauradi7dw]

My father did have survivor's guilt (got shot on the first day of fighting so he had been evacuated by the time his friends were killed). Until I mentioned it by name in the 1980s, he and my mother had never heard of it as a thing, and he had assumed his feelings were rare. Those guys didn't talk about stuff much.

[poliphilo]

No, they didn't. Just about the only thing I know about my father's war service is that he was once stationed on Romney Marsh- and rather liked it there...

[lauradi7dw]

That was meant to say first day of fighting on Iwo Jima. They'd been slogging around the Pacific together for a couple of years at that point, so some of them were good friends.
There was a TV documentary when I was a kid. He said "there we were." I said "Which one was you?" at which point he gave up for years, until someone tracked him down and invited him to reunions.