A very humbling pilgrimage: BEL MOONEY'S moving account
of how she retraced her grandfather's footsteps on the Somme
By Bel Mooney (Daily Mail)
My grandfather used to like putting my blonde hair into tight pigtails.
Hed joke that it was like plaiting his beloved horses tails
and manes when he worked as a carter before World War One.
There were about 53,000 horses on the Western Front, too, but he didnt
like to talk about that. Whats more, I never asked him. How I
regret never teasing memories from the man who loved me so much, and
who fought in two wars to secure the freedoms we take for granted.
Thats why, last month, I decided to make my first-ever journey
to Picardy in northern France, where Grandad served with the Lancashire
Fusiliers. This year is the 95th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme:
it was time for me to make a pilgrimage.
Poignant: Bel Mooney holds a photograph of her grandfather and his collection
of medals at the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme
But how? Ive never made the time (more regrets) to research where
exactly Grandad was. All I know is he fought at the Somme (1916) and
Ypres, the following year. To wander in an ill-informed way from graveyard
to graveyard would be strange, since he was one of the lucky ones who
went through hell, yet lived.
Poetry has always played a central part in my life.
So what better introduction to the battlefields than to a join a tour
to the Somme organised by the War Poets Association. A tour called,
hauntingly, Fall In, Ghosts.
The aim was to study the poetry and contrasting battlefield experiences
of two men: Isaac Rosenberg and Edmund Blunden, the former two years
younger than Grandad, the latter two years older.
They couldnt have been more different. Rosenberg
was Jewish from a poor East End background, an ordinary Tommy
who experienced some anti-Semitism in the ranks. He was killed in April
1918.
Blunden was a young officer-poet who fought, like my grandfather, at
the Somme and Ypres. He was gassed, but survived the war to become a
distinguished academic and writer, haunted for ever by his battlefield
experiences.
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Loving relationship:
Although Bel was very close to her grandfather,
she never got to speak to him about his war experiences
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We headed to the Channel Tunnel on a coach carrying more than 40 people,
the oldest over 70, the youngest (Blundens great-grandson Jack)
just 13.
Forty disparate strangers, lovers of history and poetry - including
Blundens daughter, Margi Blunden, and Isaac Rosenbergs nephew
- on a shared journey of discovery. It was to be one of the most moving
experiences of my life.
Inside my handbag I carried my grandfathers picture, taken in
1919, his medals from two wars, and his Army Service Book and Prayer
Book, from World War Two. Inside my mind was the poetry which, for me,
gives a voice to working-class men like my grandfather who answered
the call and marched away to war.
Men like him werent good with words, but what the poets had witnessed,
they saw and suffered, too.
My grandfather, William Alfred Mooney, was born in Edge Hill, Liverpool,
in 1898. His Irish grandfather had crossed the sea from Dublin, as so
many did, in search of a better life. His father, also William Alfred,
was difficult and a drinker unsuited to bringing up the family
after his wife died giving birth to her sixth.
Grandad was 13 then and, as the eldest, he took responsibility, drove
the cart delivering hay and straw, and looked after his siblings. My
father believes that his dad went to war in his own fathers place.
That often happened, the names being the same, and the recruiting officers
not being too fussy.
By autumn 1915, there was already a desperate need for men, and conscription
began in January 1916. I sometimes wonder if Grandad was glad to get
away. For young men like him, ignorant of the horror in store, to cross
the Channel would have been a thrill.
I have a recollection of him telling me he knew Arras, where our tour
group stayed. That was when I was learning French, and he was pleased
to be able to tell me what an estaminet (which he pronounced esstayminette)
was.
Young soldiers like him would have been drawn to such scruffy bars for
a beer - a respite from what Blunden called the maniac blast of
barrage.
'He was a handsome young man, with dark hair and a long, sensitive face.
I imagine him wearing his khaki with pride, shining his buttons, shouldering
his 80lb pack, and obeying orders without complaint. He was that kind
of man.'Theres a family story that when Grandad went back to France
in 1939 - then in the Royal Army Medical Corps - he revisited one estaminet
and was recognised by the lady behind the bar, who called out: Its
Willie, the little Fusilier!
He was a handsome young man, with dark hair and a long, sensitive face.
I imagine him wearing his khaki with pride, shining his buttons, shouldering
his 80lb pack, and obeying orders without complaint. He was that kind
of man.
My father recounts how, when Grandad was crawling across No Mans
Land, he heard groaning and spotted, in the flash of a shell, the insignia
of the Lancashire Fusiliers on a slumped body nearby. Risking his life,
he stood up to haul the badly wounded man on to his shoulders and get
him back to the line.
As our coach travels through the peaceful countryside of Picardy, lit
by the autumn sun, it is almost impossible to imagine the carnage that
haunts our national consciousness.
Yet, when we stop, our tour leader points out a faint white zig-zag
streaking across the ploughed earth of a field across the valley. This
is the mark of a German trench, still visible after 95 years.
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Over the top: British troops in action at the start of the Battle
of the Somme - one of the bloodiest days in military history
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The ground displays its wounds to those who know how to look. All over
the battlefields of the Somme are small, faint signs of colossal human
suffering and strife.
When we visit our first cemetery, at Le Touret, near Bethune, Im
suddenly overwhelmed by numbers. There are 915 burials in the peaceful
colonnaded spot but on the memorial panels there are more than
13,000 names of men who fell in this area before September 25, 1915
and have no known grave.
During the next couple of days, this feeling of awe would sweep over
me again and again. How on earth could my grandfather have survived
going over the top?
Every German machine-gun post taken cost 2,000 lives. Those guns fired
650 bullets a minute, and on that first terrible day of the Battle of
the Somme July 1, 1916 20,000 men were slaughtered by
perhaps 100 German machine-guns.
In the hideous wasteland, there was no place to hide. By 5pm, when the
German guns stopped, 58,000 British soldiers lay dead or dying. As Rosenberg
put it: Their shut mouths made no moan.
You can read the devastating statistics, but there is nothing like standing
in one of the military cemeteries of northern France to make you silent
with an inconsolable, universal grief. And also to feel deeply proud
of the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which honours
the dead still, on a scale no other nation has achieved.
The pale, Portland stone tombstones stand shoulder-to-shoulder. The
grass is clipped and shrubs bloom before each stone, even when the inscription
says Known only to God.
During lulls in the shrieking horror of battle, both Isaac Rosenberg
and Edmund Blunden heard birdsong. I hope my Grandad noticed it, too.
Touching: One of the cemetery at Delville Wood on the Somme
As we travel, sharing poetry aloud among the graves where scarlet roses
nod in the breeze, I marvel at beauty created from horror. Yet that
feeling of peace is accompanied by a profound sense of accident. What
if these men had lived? What if William Mooney had been killed? Humbly,
you realise you owe your identity to the sheer happenstance of war.
The picture I carry with me wasnt taken until 1919. On the back,
it states that Bill Mooney was then with the Queens Own Cameron
Highlanders, serving in Cologne. A Scottish regiment. But why?
After the Somme, he served on the Flanders coast in mid-1917 but moved
into the terrible Third Battle of Ypres, known as Passchendaele, in
October. They had a monstrous time fighting around the village of Poelcapelle
and facing Houthulst Forest, in the Ypres moonscape of deep mud and
flooded shell-holes.
I think his regiment moved back to the Somme and saw action against
the enormous German offensive on March 21, 1918. So heavy were the casualties
that the Division was withdrawn from the battle-line, reduced to a training
cadre from which it could be re-built.
I do not know where or how he must have celebrated on that first Armisitice
Day, when the guns fell silent. But from the date of that photograph,
he must have re-enlisted after the end of the war, when hed surely
have longed to go home, and been assigned to the new regiment as part
of the army of occupation.
There was a financial incentive not to demob and Grandad needed money,
for he was to marry his sweetheart in 1920. One day, in the trenches,
hed received a letter out of the blue. My grandmother, Ann Lewis,
a maid, had switched to factory work for the war, and the girl on the
next machine told her about her neighbour, a young soldier with nobody
to write to him.
That soldier was William Mooney.
They finally met when he went back to Liverpool on leave, and their
love lasted until she died in 1971.
As a child, I played with the silken postcards hed sent her from
France, thrown away when Nan and Grandad moved to Wiltshire in 1961.
They wanted to forget.
But I am remembering with gratitude, as our party moves towards the
massive Thiepval Monument to the missing of the Somme.
In the calm, healed landscape which still contains an unfathomable weight
of shell and shrapnel, eight deer bound across a field in golden light,
making me reflect on the fleet souls of our beloved dead.
There were moments on this journey I will never forget. We stood by
the grave of Isaac Rosenberg and heard his sisters son (who had
never visited the grave) struggle through tears to pay tribute to his
uncle then read his greatest poem, Break Of Day In The Trenches.
Standing by the grave of one of Edmund Blundens comrades, we hear
a lyrical poem by great-grandson Jack, who begs war not to visit.
At last we arrived at Thiepval, one of the fortress villages held by
the Germans. Blunden recorded that: Thiepval wood leaps with flame.
It was chosen as the location for the Memorial to the Missing, to commemorate
those who died in the Somme sector before March 20, 1918 and have no
known grave.
There are more than 72,000 names on the panels of the massive arched
monument. My husband and I find the Lancashire Fusiliers. I gaze on
the names of the fallen whose families could never lay them to rest.
There are 20 columns containing nearly 2,000 names. I look for the Irish
ones, the Murphys, OBriens and Rooneys, and imagine our
Bill striking a Lucifer match to share a Woodbine (cupped within
his hand) with J. Moodie or A. Moore.
Did you know any of these poor men, Grandad? I whisper.
And then, on the ground, I notice the poppy wreath - one among many,
because were so near Remembrance Sunday. But something makes me
kneel to read this ones label, which says: In memory of
the grandfather I never knew.
My eyes flood, and all poetry seems contained in those words. As Wilfred
Owen memorably wrote: The Poetry is in the Pity.
That grandchild never had plaits made by gentle hands, or was given
a shilling to spend on sweets. How lucky I was. My grandfather survived
- a good man who walked along a beach with me collecting pebbles, told
silly jokes, dreamed of winning the pools, grafted hard (working on
ambulances after WWII), and lived for his family, surviving to cradle
two great-grandchildren in arms which once carried weapons.
He never talked about the Somme, or being wounded at Dunkirk. He enjoyed
his half pint on a Friday, and humble delights of the present, and died
with his stories in 1984.
What can you say about men like William Mooney - and the ones who never
returned? Only that We will remember them.
Taken from the Daily Mail 7th
November 2011
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