Lest we forget the horrible futility of war, I am including this photo of Donald John McPherson Smith of the 44th Battalion. This handsome man was killed at Paeschendale in 1917.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row.
Tragic. So many men, creative lives cut short. Another was the composer George Butterworth, killed at the battle of the Somme. Handsome. moustached, enjoyed the gentle masculinity of folk songs and morris dancing.
ReplyDeleteThe Somme was an unimaginable catastrophe. The male populations of entire villages in Scotland and the North of England were almost wiped out. They ran out of room on the monument in my ancestral home town in Scotland because men kept dying of wounds years after the end of the war. Such a tragic waste!
DeleteYes, utterly tragic. In my childhood heard about many brothers of great uncles and aunts "lost", still quite raw for them 50 years later.
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