Today we remember its 100 years since the start of The First World War and wed do well to remember these words by Hawtin Munday. Hes not some well heeled writer or war poet, just a local lad called up to fight, he spent his life in Bradwell, and like most of us locals worked in Wolverton Works. Indeed he may well have relatives in this group. These are his thoughts after getting caught in no mans land and tending for a dying comrade before being captured as a prisoner of war. So I kept lighting fags for him, and later in the afternoon he called again. I went to him and he got his old fag tin out, put a fag in his mouth, and then he said, ‘’Ere you are’, with his fag tin. He says, ‘’Ere kid, you have these fags,’ he said, ‘I shan’t want ‘em. He said, ‘If you ever get out of this, he said, ‘tell me mum won’t you? I says, ‘Yes I’ll tell her, I’ll tell her’. Well I couldn’t, I didn’t know who he was. I couldn’t tell. I says, ‘Yes I’ll tell her’. Well within a minute or so of that, I lit his fag, it dropped out of his mouth and he said, ‘Oh God, help me’. And that was the end of that. Well, then I turned round and looked across No-Man’s-land. Well all along No-Man’s-land , there wasn’t a shot being fired, but it was lit up like daylight because all the time, you see, from their trenches and our trenches they kept firing Star shells and that lights up like electric lights in the sky. Well, when we looked across there you could see all our blokes laying dead, all over the place, it was lit up as clear as that. If only a artist, a well known artist, could have only have stood there with us and painted that scene as it was there and theyd took it back and hung it in the rooms or cabinet headquarters of other countries, they never dared declared another war, if they sat and looked at that, and I know, I’m certain - if they could have put all the colouring in you know, the blokes,Germans, in between the first and second line of theirs, and ours laying about, they daren’t have declared a war, not if they’d got any sense and see that hanging up. Years later, when we got old, my old darling, she always used to read the Good Book before we went to sleep, you know. What I can recall mainly was the little bit she used to read; ‘As I pass through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil’. Now then, I always remembered that, you see and the old dear used to read it and I used to say then, ‘ I did pass through the valley of the shadow of death, and I felt no evil’.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 17:48:50 +0000
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