The war to end all wars

The war to end all wars

One of my regular chores at home in the family pub was to leave some customers home each night. One of our regulars whom I befriended was a veteran of World War I. He was one of the two hundred thousand Irishmen who were said to have fought in the ‘Great War’. He was an amputee who got around on two under-arm crutches on which he swung with great dexterity. Our area was not a place where people easily spoke of their time in the British Army despite the reality that many men from the area had fought with British regiments in both World Wars or in the Crimean and Boer Wars of the mid and late nineteenth century. The postmen in the area were almost always ex-servicemen, usually having served in World War Two.

My friend occasionally spoke to me of the circumstances in which he lost his leg. It happened at Armatiers, as in the risqué song of that time; ‘Mademoiselle of Armatiers’. The proper name of this Northern French town is Armentiéres. It was held by the British and was a popular rest-centre for troops. The war was almost over and he was confident that he had survived the worst of it. In October 1919, a month before the armistice was signed, he was shot and badly wounded in the knee. The conditions were such that an amputation of his leg from the knee down was immediately essential. It was carried out in the field, using the equivalent of a tenon saw, without anaesthetic, and with only a daub of tar as an antiseptic. When he reached a hospital that could treat him properly, the amputation was carried out again. His leg was amputated so high this time that he could never wear an artificial limb. He suffered from phantom pains in the stump of his leg for the rest of his long life.

He spoke to me briefly about life in the trenches. One of the images that remained with me was his description of sanitary conditions for the troops. He told me that they would light a fire occasionally, when it was safe or possible. The fire served many purposes by warming chilled and fatigued bodies and heating food. It also functioned as a de-louser. The soldiers would remove their shirts and shake them over the heat of the fire or immerse them in clouds of smoke, in an attempt to remove the parasites that clung so easily to their huddled bodies.

Despite his harrowing experiences, my friend went on to marry and raise a family. He even played football with the lads when he was younger. He was allocated the role of ‘goalie’ and given the concession of being allowed to save with his outstretched crutches in place of diving. Swinging on his underarm sticks, he could serve a mighty kick to the ball on the ground and for this long kick-out he earned the nickname ‘poc’ or ‘pocan’. He was a strong man, made stronger by the constant use of his upper body as he pivoted on the crutches which helped him to adapt to the loss of his leg.

My friend was a very moral person. He set high standards for himself and carried himself with great dignity and character. He confessed to me though, that he once had told a lie and had never been found out. Like many others who headed for the recruitment centres of the time, he had lied about his true age. The recruiting people may have turned a blind eye to this deceit in their hunger for volunteers. It may also have been hard to tell the true age of a teenager who was tall and strong. Whatever the circumstances, it had a happy ending when my friend got his old-age pension at the age of sixty-three, two years earlier than he was entitled to. He did not protest!

Another resident of the town who used to work occasionally in the fields with my father spoke of the father whom he had never seen. He told us that his father was a sniper in the Great War. His story was told in a distant, unconnected manner as he recounted to his fascinated audience of children how his father had been shot in the branches of a tree from where he had been sniping. The story-teller seemed to think that it was somehow amusing that his soldier-father had climbed a tree, only to be shot dead for his trouble. ‘Imagine climbing a tree to be shot…’

There was also the troubling story of the local who had taken the “King’s Shilling” and enlisted. By accepting the shilling he had agreed by law to join up. He went off to spend his ‘earnest’ money and got drunk. In his inebriated state he began to regret what he had earlier done and promised. He fell to hatching a plan to extricate himself from his legal contract and decided on a brutal escape. He went home and fetched the small axe that was commonly used to chop sticks for the fire. He then placed his right index finger on the half-door and with one deadly swing he removed his trigger-finger and left himself useless as a combat-soldier.

The ‘No’ days of November

The ‘No’ days of November

I have never heard anyone refer to November as their favourite time of year. It is not a month that has obvious appeal. There is something transitional about this penultimate month. Maybe that is why we mark it primarily with rituals that remind us of the transience of life. It is too early to be thinking of Christmas and too late to attend to the tasks that are proper to autumn. There is little to do outside in the garden or in the fields other than wait for longer days in the New Year and dream of the joys of holiday-time. November is an in-between time; a ‘liminal’ or threshold time. This was expressed by the ancients in their belief that the membrane between this world and that of the spirits was especially thin around the seasonal marker that was known as Samhain.

The atmosphere evoked by a November landscape is one of melancholy. The fall of darkness in mid-afternoon presages the premature end that often blights the bright promises of daylight or of life itself. The greyness of November clouds as they hurry wind-blown across the sky suggests little in the way of silver lining. The thin, rising mists of morning and the dense fogs that refuse, for some time, to go away, throw blankets on our vision, turning our thoughts ever more inward, dampening our spirits and smothering our joy.

The landscape of November is one of rapid change. The stage-hands of nature busy themselves removing the props of autumn. A night of high wind and the back-drop of autumn leaf-art is swept into sheltered corners and piled up in compost heaps, leaving skeletal branches to face the winter unprotected. Those leaves that survive longest, fall like the last illusions of youth, inevitably, softly and for ever. Apple trees, burdened by their crop, brooding and bending like a woman in the last stages of pregnancy, give up their harvest to the fall and stand erect again as their wind-fallen fruit carpets the ground around to await the scavengers of winter.

The acoustics of November are muffled sounds on the ground and clear parting songs in the skies. The crunch of dry leaves underfoot or the snap of fallen twigs soon gives way to the squelch of mulched debris and dulled, mud-logged footsteps. If you are lucky or observant, you may see one of the defining images and hear one of the distinctive sounds of November; a formation of wild geese, honking their carefully choreographed way southward in perfect ‘V’ shape. As children we were told that if the geese happened to fly over a household, it forecast bad news. One member of the family would die that winter; the released spirit joining the migrating geese on the long journey to promised lands. Whatever about the folk-belief, the crisp sound of fallen leaves and the traffic of hurrying geese are warnings of cold days and nights ahead; of top-coat weather and of impending winter.

The sights and sounds of November combine as the bird-world congregates, on wires or in trees, in preparation for migration, or in bird-talk session, as they discuss season past and season present. The collective names given to these avian gatherings reflect the observations of centuries. A ‘parliament’ of rooks competes with a ‘murder’ of crows to caw and croak their complaints about bird-life and the ‘unkindness’ of raucous ravens that has gathered nearby.

The smell of rich autumn woodland in November carries within it the pregnant promise of continuity. Autumn-conceived mammals means spring-born cubs and calves with an optimum chance of survival as they face into next winter having grown strong through the summer. The rutting season has its own logic; the unchanging ways of life and of continuity. The smell of dampness is a November smell too. A freshly-flooded meadow gives off its cloying perfume in trapped droplets carried home on the back of unhurried cows as they head methodically to their parlour-stalls. In school cloakrooms, the rising steam from absorbent overcoats and caps seeps into the corridors and up the nostrils of vigilant teachers.

The thirty days of November are ‘no’ days. There is no warmth; no comfort; no sunshine or shade. There is no cheerfulness; no long days of abandon; no relaxation in the garden. There are no flowers; no delicate butterflies or buzzing, busy bees. There is no swelling fruit; no leaves unfolding; no messy births or hatching eggs. There is no shine – just sleety rain and flitting cloud and mushy snow. It is truly No-vember.

The reign of 'Good Pope John'

Fifty years ago on 28th October 1958, on the twelfth count, the Conclave to elect a Pope chose the man who has since come to be known throughout the Christian world as ‘good Pope John’ or ‘Il Papa Buona’. He took the name ‘John’, he explained because his father was called John and most Pope Johns in the history of the church had not had long pontificates. The name was a little controversial because the last pope called John XXIII had been an Anti-Pope. The new Pope was aware of all this for he had been a trained historian and a history teacher as a young priest.

He was born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo, in rural Italy in 1881. He was the fourth child in a family of fourteen. The domestic structure was that of an extended farming family. They made their meagre living by share-cropping. The future Pope was said to have remarked that their family was so poor that, ‘the children had no wine’. ‘There are three ways of ruining oneself’ he observed, ‘women, gambling and farming. My father chose the most boring’.

In his early days as a priest he had served as a Bishop’s secretary and as a teacher in the local seminary. During World War I he had been drafted into the Royal Italian Army as a sergeant, serving in the Medical Corps as a stretcher-bearer and as a chaplain. He put on the army uniform and, in what he later described as, ‘a moment of weakness on my part’, grew a fat, bristly moustache. After the war, in 1921, he was recalled to Rome, to work in a Curial Office. In 1925 he was consecrated Bishop and sent to Bulgaria as Apostolic Delegate. He took as his motto ‘Obedience and Peace’.

He later served in Turkey and Greece and in 1944 he was sent to Paris as a diplomat. 1953 saw him return home to Italy as Patriarch of Venice. A glimpse of the future Pope’s approach can be ascertained in an address he gave around that time. He said, ‘Authoritarianism suffocates truth, reducing everything to a rigid and empty formalism that is dependent on outside discipline. It curbs wholesome initiative, mistakes hardness for firmness, inflexibility for dignity. Paternalism is a caricature of true fatherliness. It is often accompanied by an unjustifiable proprietary attitude to one’s victim, a habit of intruding, a lack of proper respect for the rights of subordinates’.

Pope John XXIII was almost diametrically opposite in style, appearance and approach to his predecessor, the distant, ascetic Pope Pius XII who had appointed all but eleven of the cardinals who voted in his successor. Many people believed that John had been elected as a ‘papa di passagio’, a transitional pope. He was seventy-seven years old.

John XXIII’s personal warmth, his good humour and personal kindness captured the affection of countless people in a way his predecessor had failed to do. Once again he joked about his election to the papacy at such an advanced age. He was aware of the potential for cynical comment and exposure especially in the left-wing Italian press. He was a short man, overweight and heavy-featured, with a prominent, hooked Roman nose. He thought out loud saying that God surely knew from the beginning of time that he, John, would one day be Pope. Surely, he mused, ‘he could have made me a little more photogenic’. Despite these apparent physical drawbacks he became a media favourite because of his charism, his sense of humour and his exciting vision for the Church and for the world.

His sense of humour once led him to utter a famous reply when he was asked, ‘How many people work in the Vatican?’ ‘About half of them,’ he replied. He visited prisoners in a Roman gaol, telling them, ‘You could not come to me, so I came to you’. Another story told of how reporters descended on his bemused family following his election as Pope. One of his bachelor brothers looked unimpressed and a reporter asked him why he was so unexcited at his brother having been elected Pope. He replied that, in their part of the country, so many young men had become priests that it was, ‘bound to have happened sometime’. Good Pope John could also be emotional and tender in his dealings with crowds or with individual guests. Many recall his extraordinary capacity to establish an intimate relationship with tens of thousands without being mawkish. Once he asked the crowd in St. Peter's Square beneath his apartment window to take his caress home to their sleeping children.

Good Pope John could hardly have imagined the tide of change that has swept Europe and elsewhere since his election. He was part of that change but he was an unlikely liberal. His episcopal motto, ‘Obedience and Peace,’ does not suggest a radical outlook on life. What endeared him to people was his ability to receive them with grace and courtesy. Visitors often left his presence feeling that they were the important person rather than the Pope. He often greeted visitors saying, 'I am your brother Joseph' (Guiseppe was his second name). He was an eternal optimist too. His opening speech to the Second Vatican Council on October 11th 1962 contained the following pertinent words: ‘In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse, and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, nonetheless, the teacher of life. We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.’