Friday, November 11, 2011
Armistice Day
Today is Armistice Day.
The 11th day of the 11th month 2011.......... 11.11.11.
I learned of the signing of The Armistice in school.....why in an old railway carriage I thought.
I have since visited that railway carriage in a peaceful forest.
Now I just ask "Why?"
The landscape of Northern France and Belgium is green, full of life and hope.Why did man turn it into a living death all those years ago?
What was it for? If it had not happened how different would life be for people nearly 100 years later?
This is the weekend to remember the dead, as I am sure we should.
It is hard to conceive of the scale of death.
There is an outpouring of society grief for each dead soldier brought home from Afghanistan - as it should be.
But the dead from the Flanders fields couldn't be sent home - millions of them.
Private and personal grief for each one - including 3 of our great uncles.
Far, far too many for the media to mention.
But today I have thought about those that didn't die.....fortunately that applies to both mine and Bill's grandfathers.
Did they ever talk about their suffering?
Did they know that they were most probably suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?
As children, Bill and I would not have probed this. I get the feeling that the men didn't allow thoughts or feelings in or out - maybe even our grandmothers were excluded.
It was acknowledged that some men suffered from "shell shock" - the weaker ones. The weakest of all ran away - and if caught were shot by own soldiers.
They were not weak - by today's terminology they were ill.
But even today ex soldiers find it hard to know that their suffering is not a fault and a weakness.
It is the soldiers with physical injuries who become synonymous with the word "hero".
Those with very deep mental scars often suffer deeply and alone.
I am grateful to the BBC for a programme I just watched about art therapy.
I have benefited from art therapy, when I was attending the hospice day care centre. It gave me a feeling of power and self belief.
It is now being discovered that art therapy is also a good tool to help ex soldiers suffering from PTSD.
Many have taken a decade or more to accept that they needed help - a decade of suffering and of a new hell of their own making, but which they had little control over.
We listened as they talked and watched their art developing.
The art is helping to release words.
Art is communication.
The pictures were moving.
The pictures had something to say, both on a personal level and about the universal futility of it all.
I wish our grandfathers could have been led into a land where it was good and right to make pictures. Instead they had to pick up the pieces of a family life, almost as if they had been away for a week or so to nowhere important.
I think our grandfathers did that rather well - though there can be no doubt that they returned as very different men than the young men who went off to war.
So, this weekend I will think of the bereaved families, who have had to make many adjustments to their lives. But even more I will think of the soldiers who came back - from all the wars - in lands throughout the world.
They have had to make extreme adjustments to their lives.
And yes I will think of the millions who have died.
They shall not grow old as we grow old.........their suffering was intense....but their suffering is history.
Labels: rambling thoughts
