Thursday, August 03, 2006

REVELATIONS

The little Highland Scottish town that is my home and that of my immediate and extended family has a very proud memorial in the central square. Every year on Remembrance Sunday it is the focus for remembering our war dead including now, servicemen and women who have served and died in more recent times. There are the names of those who fell in two major world wars carved on the memorial, many local families have a story to tell.

The striking feature of the memorial is that it tells you just from looking at it, how decimated our small population of menfolk was during the 1914-18 war, because, by the time 1939 came and the second world war was in flow, the memorial indicates that there had been little regeneration. There were not many young men, in particular young men of a suitable age to conscript from this place. The numbers of names carved on the memorial for the 1939-1945 conflict are very few, when compared with the relatively large numbers remembered from the first world war.

It is such a sad revelation.

1 comment:

landgirl said...

I went to memorial service at our little statue here in Reay. Yes to all your comments.
Calum recently lent me a book of an anthology of world war 1 poets called, I think Anthem for a Doomed Youth. It is brilliant. Both sad and somehow also buoyant about a war described in the introduction as "a very killing war"