Shrouds of the Somme

I went to east London (Stratford) last Friday with Jackie, a friend, to see the Shrouds of the Somme commemoration exhibition. It's very difficult to put into words the emotions that such a commemoration instills in you. Seeing over 72,000 small shrouded dolls lying in rank after rank is not only brutally moving, but also really brings home the vast scale of the slaughter a hundred years ago.

One of the officials there told us that the small figures represented only the soldiers who had not been formally identified. These were the ones who had been lost in No Man's Land, never to be recovered. 72,000. And I should add that a similar number of Germans were never found either. He added that the total number lost (including all soldiers) approached 1 million.... on the Allies side alone. Double that if you add the German casualties. And all on the Somme.

When you recover from those figures and walk around the 'exhibition,' you reach a one hundred yard stretch of small crosses, which represent the number of Allied soldiers killed on every single day of the war. From start to finish. Again, the numbers every day are quite mind-numbingly awful.

The whole commemoration exhibition really leaves you thinking hard about what we consider big problems today. They all pale into insignificance, when you simply see the number of dead and the long list of names of soldiers who never returned.

It's all very sad and just left me thinking about the stupidity of it all.

Ironically, the Shrouds of the Somme exhibition lies in the shadow of the Olympic stadium, now the home of West Ham United football club and reminded me of the one much-talked about moment of sanity in WW1 (the football match in No Mans Land between German and British troops).

I remember my grandfather talking about his experiences briefly when I was a boy. He was a 'spotter' in a bi-plane which flew low over the German trenches. His job was to sketch machine-gun and gun positions. A whiff of mustard gas ended his war though and he lived to a ripe old age. He was very much one of the lucky ones, as he always said. On my mother's side, my grandfather (German) drove troop trains to the Russian front in the Second World War and amazingly survived the continual British and American air attacks until the very last week of the war, when he was killed. He was not one of the lucky ones.