I'm just back from a school trip to the 1stWW battlefields around Ypres. It was an amazing trip in so many ways, from the fact that, quite horrifically, there are cemeteries everywhere - you drive along and almost every way you turn you can see the rows of neatly tended crosses, either close to the road or way distant in the fields, with the Cross of Sacrifice drawing your eye, to the fact that the boys came home laden with trophies - pieces of barbed wire, shell casings, pieces of shrapnel - all just picked up from anywhere the earth was disturbed. Ordinary life survives, houses are built and people live as people do anywhere, but with the knowledge that at any time a plough could turn up a body - or a bomb. The pretty Flemish houses and the rows of potatoes and corn are there skimming over a charnel house, washing dries flapping by tombs and I suspect that farmers try not to look when their ploughs dig deep furrows...
Lots of the boys asked me about books - they'd had a reading list as part of their pre-trip pack, but they ARE boys, so no one had looked at it - and there are a few to choose from about the 1stWW, from Morpurgo's
Private Peaceful and
War Horse to
Biggles or Breslin's
Remembrance (my own favourite is probably Lawrence's
Lord of the Nutcracker Men, though I think that's now out of print) but in comparison to the wealth of poetry - or the amount of books about the 2ndWW - there's not that much. Is too difficult to write about? Or is that there's a perceived idea that no one will want to read about something that happened that long ago? Or, will it be that after the success of War Horse as a play as well as a book, there'll suddenly be a spate of Trench-based stories.
After all, there's so many stories to tell. One grave we visited was that of a boy, just 13 and three quarters when he was killed, another was of a Chinese boy, part of the Chinese Labour Corp. Toc-H and the respite it gave from the front line. The miners. So many stories. One grave we saw was that of Private Peaceful himself, the name that Michael Morpurgo saw and that sparked his imagination. Maybe we should bus writers out there - and just see what happens...
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