Life can sometimes be very serendipitous. Sometime in 2012 or 2013, a gentleman contacted me completely out of the blue about my first husband’s work. My first husband – Ted Bogacz – was an expert on the First World War and Jack had read all of his work and was impressed. He thought I should get it published.
As the anniversary of World War I was approaching, I accepted his offer of visiting him at Ieper in Belgium. Jack was an American citizen who had elected to live out his retirement abroad. He was very involved in the local historical society in Ieper, and spent nearly all of his time being a docent for the various battlefields that dot this part of the world.
For those of you who don’t know, Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. So when I think about the First World War, I think about it from the British point of view, as I was born and raised in Britain and both of my grandfathers fought in that war. The British knew the town of Ieper by its French name Ypres (which most soldiers pronounced Wipers) and it was at the center of this very bloody conflict on the Western Front, which stretched from Belgium into North-Eastern France around the Somme.
Jack was very generous with his time and drove me around. We not only visited Ypres but also the Somme battlefields. When I was there in 2014, the scars of 1914 had largely vanished. Any of you who have seen the many black and white photos of the time cannot forget the blasted trees, the heaped up earth, and the sandbagged trenches running every which way.
It was an experience I shall never forget. Although every town in Britain has its War Memorial, all the graves of the British soldiers are to be found in France and Belgium. As Jack pointed out, this has served to cushion the British from the horrific reality of that war. For as you wander along the straight lines of the white headstones that pick out each soldier’s grave you are struck, not only by the enormous toll that this war took, but on how young these people were. Most of them seemed to be around 20 years old.
The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of British men took an incalculable toll on Britain, which went from being a rich country in 1914 to a poor one by 1918. It was not just the expense of paying for the war. It was the loss of all those young men, which meant that so many British women had to forgo marriage as there were not enough men to go around. (Both of my grandmothers were very lucky, but the men they married were scarred for life. Sidney Caveley’s lungs were damaged when he inhaled burning creosote while onboard a ship that had been torpedoed by the Germans. Hal Haggard lost his leg in action off of Jutland in 1916.)
It was supposed to be the war that no-one should ever forget. It was supposed to be the war that ended all wars.
But just twenty years later, Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, after the Nazis refused to stop their invasions of Poland.
