WHEN IT’S ALL OVER
“…what a time we shall have when it’s all
over.”
I have a photo: lips ajar, a
gap
between his front teeth, a
long young face stares
from a spotted mount, half
shadowed, and there’s
the slightest hint of pride -
or is it humour,
sardonic, at the uselessness
of all this,
a sad callow wisdom, prior to
the end.
Late one night, November
2014,
my son and I went to see the
poppies.
They bled through the cracks
in the Reigate stone,
flooded the moat, the fields.
Bloody Tower.
We all become history
eventually
as bricks or pebbles, glass
memorials.
We wondered which bloom might
stand for
G.E. Nunns, Rifleman, age 20,
died first of September, 1918,
a Sunday ‘of unprecedented
dryness’
during a war remembered for
its mud:
My grandmother’s little
brother.
We’d visited Queant Road
cemetery
in September the previous
year.
Smallish, surrounded on all
sides by flat
communal fields below
occasional clouds.
Lavender lined the low front
wall, bees
and butterflies littered the
air with life.
We sought the gravestone.
Found it. Stood. Read.
MY GOD AND KING TO THEE I BOW
MY KNEE.
Why, ok, but how? We don’t, cannot, know.
Where? Best guess the second battle of Bapaume.
The Allies’ One Hundred Days
offensive.
Eight dark yews stood like
sentries, behind us.
Hard as a parent to see the
heroics
in the warrior’s mortality.
My son
and I lean upon the wall,
looking down,
remembering one we never
knew.
It is the early hours. Shouts prick the night.
There’s laughter somewhere,
and so it goes.
Wynn Wheldon
Wynn Wheldon
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