Richard I'm a big fan of Michael Morpurgo but haven't read Private Peaceful. Will now do so. On the return journey from Le Mans Classic in my dear old mog I fulfilled a long postponed promise and visited the Australian National Memorial to the fallen of WW1 at Villers-Bretonneux in the Somme valley. The memorial lists more than 10,000 names of Australian soldiers with no known graves and as well there are more than 2,000 graves of soldiers and airmen from commonwealth countries. A friend and I spent several hours there on a beautiful summer's day. We had intended to go on to the memorial at Pozieres but simply ran out of emotion and tissues and so headed home. Too difficult to comprehend by far.
Kerry,
Thanks for sharing that memory and emotive photograph they just fill you with a sense of helplessness and awe at the same time the sheer scale of it all and this picture encapsulates everything.
This book I thought was very encouraging from Harry Patch.
Henry John Patch (17 June 1898 – 25 July 2009), dubbed in his later years "the Last Fighting Tommy", was a British supercentenarian, briefly the oldest man in Europe and the last surviving combat soldier of the First World War from any country. He is known to have fought in the trenches of the Western Front.
