From Mons to Gaza, war is a catastrophic waste
He loomed down at us at our childhood dining room table. A walrus moustache, a fierce-looking face, a military hat, and a load of medals: Lieutenant General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow, KCMG, KCB.
He, I discovered at a rather tender age, was my grandfather. At a marginally less tender age – around six – I discovered he had fought in a bloody conflict my parents called the first world war.
Back in the early 1950s people tended only to talk about the second world war, but as my father was too young for the first world war and too old for the second, it was the first world war that hogged the limelight of our lives.
Granddad, it seems, had been the commander of the fourth division under Sir John French.
Even in adulthood, I was never quite clear whether he was one of the donkeys who led the lions, or whether he was himself a bit of a lion. I’ve heard differing accounts.
Leading the retreat
What foxed me was that his most heroic hour seemed to have come at the very beginning of the war, when he was involved in leading a retreat. Even at six, I seemed to understand that going backwards, in a war in which you had to go forwards, was probably not a great start.
But it seems that three weeks into the war, leading the retreat from Mons (which I was amused to discover was “Snow” upside down and backwards) was a heroic deed. That, at least, was the family’s prejudice.
It seems he did indeed save many hundreds of British lives in pulling them back, and eventually regrouping in such a way as to participate in saving Paris. Don’t ask me the detail of the history because I’ve never learnt it.
But as people begin to talk about that war, I conjure the memory of that portrait looming down from the dining room wall. Now I’m probably the age he was when he made his great escape. I don’t have the moustache. And though I have the height, I suspect I laugh a lot more than he ever did.
Terrible sacrifice
It was as a chorister at Winchester Cathedral that I discovered the true enormity of the terrible sacrifice that was made by so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands of British working men and women.
The walls were festooned with lists of slaughter, carved in marble. All they got was names. But the big shots who, unlike my grandfather, did not survive, managed to get head and should busts – some curiously crowned with Roman helmets and togas.
Poppy day was always the most sombre and awesome day, when we would troop round the memorials, singing a monotone litany to the dead. It all left me with a vivid picture of grave suffering.
Finally, two years ago, I made a film about the war artists and stood in northern France amid the rows and rows and rows of gravestones, and thought of the terrible waste of war. War, like that in Gaza even as I write, that is so catastrophic a human waste.
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