Thank you.

[rebness]

Light Loss

"Our loss was light," the paper said,
"Compared with damage to the Hun":
She was a widow, and she read
One name upon the list of dead
--Her son ---her only son.

J. Le Gay Brereton 

Comments

[pandorasblog]

My mum just reminded me of a story she'd told me in childhood and I'd forgotten - turns out that a cousin of one of her grandparents was in France, never found. Going to look him up on one of those sites that collects lists of battallions etc....

[rebness.livejournal.com]

Oh, do! I watched some of the feed on the BBC about remembrance day and couldn't bear to look at those old men praying for their lost comrades. The horrors they must have seen...

My grandfather and great-grandfather returned from the wars, but both suffered ill-health and my grandfather severe mental trauma. I don't know which soldiers had it worse; those dead in 'some foreign field' or those who had/have to remember.

[pandorasblog]

I started Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy recently (it deals with that whole subject and the real-life meeting of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at a psychiatric recuperation hospital during Sassoon's protest) and I'm wondering about the same thing.

Part of my interest in this issue is that it figures in the novel I'm writing (one brother lived, the other didn't) and I want to do the subject justice...

[rebness.livejournal.com]

Please let me know if you'd recommend once you've finished. Also warn me if there are any surprise!wars (well, obviously there is going to be war in them, but I mean those fifty-page descriptions of people getting bullets through their brains.)

Good luck on the novel. Sounds interesting...

[pandorasblog]

The first book, Regeneration is definitely worth it, and complete enough to read on its own. There are some descriptions of the events which traumatised the soldiers sufficiently to bring them to Craiglockhart, and some of those things are horrific, though not dwelt upon in an excessive, splatter-movie way.

[rebness.livejournal.com]

I'll give it a whirl, then!