The War of My Forefathers

On remembering and re-membering

Since I was a young boy I was drawn to war. I liked to play with toy soldiers, I played all the war games, I watched hundreds of hours of war documentaries. My paternal grandfather, Leonard Kishere, had fought in the jungles of Burma against the Japanese. He was raised by an Australian who had also fought in France in the First World War.

I was always fascinated by the box of my grandfather's artifacts that my dad kept in his wardrobe. Inside it: an old battlefield bandage, a comb, a pocket watch, and some Japanese war currency issued during their invasion. Alongside this, my dad also kept his father’s bayonet—long and still sharp. I never knew my Grandfather Leonard Kishere, he died whilst I was in my mother's womb. He had taken some bullets, got a skin graft from a phosphorous grenade, and lived with the gut bacteria from the jungle diseases. It was said that he had been saved from a Japanese bayonet by his belt buckle. He had killed in brutal hand-to-hand combat and seen men killed around him. The war lasted a few years of his youth but seemed to have defined him as the soldier in our memory. Sometimes I would take my father's air rifle and play soldier, modeling myself with it in the mirror, pointing & shooting. I loved the feeling of holding a rifle. There was a sense of power and purpose, some sort of clarifying dignity in the role of the soldier. My brother and I both loved to watch the show Band of Brothers and during our teens he joined the Cadets and aspired to join the Army. With that said, we went 'full metal jacket' and there were many other shades to childhood including skateboarding, an aversion to fighting and growing out my hair like a hippy. However, reflecting back, it seems that my brother and I were attracted and drawn to war because there was something deep within ourselves that wanted to be known.

Another time during my boyhood, I went with my maternal nan and grandad to the war museum in my home county: Dorset, South England. In the museum, they had a terrific trench experience that you could walk through. It was filled with life-size model soldiers hiding in dugouts under barbed wire, with rats, flashes of light, the sounds and smells of artillery. At the end, there was a model of an old Belgian street lined with red cross nurses and men on stretchers. It was there I remember my grandmother began to cry and my grandfather had me wander off whilst he tended to her. I did not understand. That day I was mostly keen to see all the military artifacts and play with replica rifles. For my nan, the experience touched on something deep. The common refrain “Don't talk about the war" had summed up the attitude of her generation grew up in. My nan's father Aubrey Jenkins was born in 1914 and was orphaned by the war at 2 years old. His father Frank Jenkins was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916.

[Sgt. Frank Jenkins before or between deployments, his wife Rosina and my (infant) Great Grandfather Aubrey Jenkins]

Alongside Frank Jenkins, some 57,000 British casualties and 20,000 British men were killed on the Somme.

The battle of the Somme would continue for 140 days claiming hundreds of thousands of men. The horror and loss of life on the Somme epitomised a generational loss of innocence. The tragic juxtaposition of youthful patriotic eagerness with reality-splitting death, trauma & carnage. The British on the morning of the Somme had expected the day to be a success. Accounts spoke of a unique sense of confidence. The men, many newly recruited, were encouraged believing that the relentless British artillery barrage had destroyed the German positions in the preceding days. They were wrong. The Germans were well dug in. The artillery failed to cut the lines of barbed wire. As the men headed over the top, the Germans re-occupied their machine gun dugouts and cut down the British in droves. They fell in lines.

British Soldiers advancing on the Somme

Today I live in Germany in an old alpine village called Marktschellenberg. When I walk through the old town square and the cemetery, I pass the memorials to the first world war. They are just like those seen in every English town and village. Even the words are the same. As the English country boys fought for God, King & Country, so the German farm boys fought für Gott, König und Vaterland.

Marktschellenberg Town Square

Part of what made the first world war and battles like the Somme so devastating was that many units were 'pals' battalions formed locally by men of the same town, factory, or rugby club who enlisted together. When these battalions went into battle, many towns and villages lost all of their young men. Husbands and fathers did not come home. What happened at the Somme & Verdun and the fields of Flanders sent ripples through space and time that would be felt far from the battlefield and by children yet born. The traumatic stress of ‘shell shock’ suffered by returning soldiers was so novel and devastating that it could not be understood by the existing paradigm. Many who returned were not just physically scarred and lingered as a generation of ghosts. The war so palpably tore at the fabric of the culture & psyche that it precipitated the radical development of new fields of psychotherapy under people like Freud & Jung. The ultimate futility of the war for many veterans was the recognition that they suffered the mud, horror, and shell shock to fight men no different from themselves. Sons, brothers & fathers killed sons, brothers & fathers.

As I went on my research journey into the Somme, I was struck by the Youtube comment threads. I found countless stories there, shared by people whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had fought and died in the war. French, British, and German alike were there together to remember, to give account to these powerful stories that lived on in them. As I read these accounts I felt the sense that there are stories in the ground that want to be told. When I was a boy the first world war seemed so far away but now it doesn't seem so far. Looking back on the long day of human history, the horror on the Somme happened this morning. Some historians have remarked that it was 1916 not 1900 that marked the true beginning of the 20th century.

Millions of men were irrevocably shaped by what they saw on the fields of battle. The darkness they carried was not healed. For the Germans and the Russians, the trauma was further accompanied by the bitterness of national defeat and humiliation. Undoubtedly many seeds of war and tyranny were sown in the first world war. The seeds of the next war. It is astonishing how much pain and destruction was wrought on two consecutive generations. There must be still some great reservoir of pain in the soil of humanity from these generations of war. It is that soil we are now rooted or perhaps un-rooted in.

Since 1918, remembrance has been a part of national culture. Every year, lest we forget, we remember the past in order not to repeat it. But in what way do we remember it? Does our remembering heal the wound or simply remember it. Perhaps we can remember without re-membering. When we re-member, we re-connect the living present body with that past experience fully. Someone who experiences a terrible incident can ‘remember’ it, swears against it being repeated, and yet never quite gets to the root. Without absolving it they are somehow drawn to re-experience it until they do. It is in the re-membering that we transform the past into presence.

Last year, I had a profound experience of healing with my partner Hannah. For the first time, quite unexpectedly, I felt myself fully immerse in the anguish of war my grandfather Leonard had experienced. There we an overwhelming realisation of war as a violence against the soul. I entered into a somatic experience and vision in which I felt myself the perpetrator of war' and its victim. I felt myself cradling that soldier and being cradled. At the end, I felt myself setting something free. I felt that I told that man, still lingering in war, that he could finally go now.

These past days, as I’ve delved deeper into the first world war, I’ve felt things moving in me again in a subtler way. In rooting into this past, I feel my heart more rooted in the present.

On a number of unexpected occasions this past year in Germany, past stories that wanted to be told have spontaneously emerged in my presence.

Perhaps when we can really re-member we create the space for the stories that want to be told. Together we can better welcome the darkness that wants to be made light.

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