Only Remembered Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Who’ll Sing the Anthem? Who Will Tell the Story?

  Introduction by Michael Morpurgo

  Michael Morpurgo

  On les Aura by Barroux (translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone)

  AT WAR

  War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

  Dame Evelyn Glennie

  Percussion instruments used during the First World War

  Shami Chakrabarti

  ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by Wilfred Owen

  Lord Paddy Ashdown

  ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen

  Frank Field

  ‘Strange Meeting’ by Wilfred Owen

  Malorie Blackman

  Walter Tull (1888–1918)

  Julian Barnes

  ‘The General’ by Siegfried Sassoon

  Ben Barnes

  Regeneration by Pat Barker

  Emma Chichester Clark

  Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

  Charlie Higson

  Charley’s War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun

  Jeremy Irvine

  Albert Ball

  Ben Elton

  Preface to All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

  Caroline Wyatt

  All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

  Cathy Newman

  Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith

  Meg Rosoff

  A Man Could Stand Up by Ford Maddox Ford

  Helen Skelton

  ‘Breakfast’ by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

  Susan Cooper

  In Parenthesis by David Jones

  Antony Beevor

  Duff Cooper

  Richard Curtis

  Blackadder Goes Forth by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton

  Anthony Horowitz

  ‘Bombed Last Night’ (anon.)

  David Almond

  Oh, What a Lovely War!

  Lissa Evans

  Map Reading by Stanley Spencer

  Clare Morpurgo

  Travoys arriving with wounded at a dressing station at Smol, Macedonia by Stanley Spencer

  Ian Beck

  The Great Western Railway War Memorial by Charles Sergeant Jagger

  Emma Thompson

  The Wipers Times

  Klaus Flugge

  ‘Prayer After the Slaughter’ by Kurt Tucholsky

  Jamila Gavin

  Indian soldiers

  Bali Rai

  Sikh soldiers

  Sir Roger Bannister

  Queen Alexandra’s Army Auxiliary Corps

  Michelle Magorian

  Young soldiers

  Mariella Frostrup

  ‘Last Post’ by Carol Ann Duffy

  John Boyne

  ‘The Death of Harry Patch’ by Andrew Motion

  Howard Goodall

  ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrae

  HRH The Duchess of Cornwall

  ‘The Christmas Truce’ by Carol Ann Duffy

  Michael Foreman

  War Game by Michael Foreman

  AT HOME

  Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo

  James Patterson

  Lord of the Nutcracker Men by Iain Lawrence

  Dame Jacqueline Wilson

  A Vicarage Family by Noel Streatfeild

  Theresa Breslin

  Ghost Soldier by Theresa Breslin

  Jilly Cooper

  Animals in the First World War

  Eoin Colfer

  Stay Where You Are and Then Leave by John Boyne

  Anne Harvey

  ‘Easter Monday (In Memoriam E.T.)’ by Eleanor Farjeon

  Dame Gail Rebuck, Baroness Gould, DBE

  ‘In a Field’ by Seamus Heaney and ‘As the team’s head-brass’ by Edward Thomas

  Alan Titchmarsh

  ‘Tall Nettles’ by Edward Thomas

  Joanna Lumley

  Rudyard Kipling’s commemorative scrolls

  Jenny Agutter

  ‘To a Bulldog’ by J. C. Squire

  Sandi Toksvig

  ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’ by Alfred Bryan and Al Piantadosi

  Laura Dockrill

  ‘Many Sisters to Many Brothers’ by Rose Macaulay

  Virginia McKenna

  ‘A War Film’ by Teresa Hooley

  Kate Mosse

  ‘My Boy Jack’ by Rudyard Kipling

  Shirley Hughes

  Gassed by John Singer Sargent

  Jon Snow

  ‘The Soldier’ by Rupert Brooke

  Sir Andrew Motion

  Missing by Sir Andrew Motion

  Nicholas Hytner

  In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

  Miranda Hart

  ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag’

  AFTER

  The Butterfly Lion by Michael Morpurgo

  Morris Gleitzman

  The Sydney Botanic Gardens memorial

  Nick Sharratt

  Jelly Babies

  Jonathan Stroud

  George Davison

  Sir Tony Robinson

  Grandpa Jack

  Sir Quentin Blake

  Dicky Herbert

  Simon Mayo

  ‘No Man’s Land’ by Eric Bogle

  Sir Jonathon Porritt

  ‘Can You Remember?’ by Edward Blunden

  Raymond Briggs

  ‘Aunties’ by Raymond Briggs

  Sarah Brown

  Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

  Michael Longley

  ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Harmonica’ by Michael Longley

  K. M. Peyton

  My father-in-law

  Sir Terry Pratchett

  Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett

  Dr Rowan Williams

  ‘Swept and Garnished’ by Rudyard Kipling

  Roger McGough

  ‘A Child’s Nightmare’ by Robert Graves

  Anne Fine

  The Book of the Banshee by Anne Fine

  Rory Stewart

  ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’ by Thomas Hardy

  Brian Patten

  ‘To a Conscript of 1940’ by Sir Herbert Read

  Chris Riddell

  Drawn from Memory by E. H. Shepard

  Flora Fergusson

  ‘Gone’ by Flora Fergusson

  Maggie Fergusson

  My grandfather

  Carol Hughes

  ‘For the Duration’ and ‘The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers’ by Ted Hughes

  Catherine Johnson

  ‘Y Blotyn Du’ (‘The Black Spot’) by Hedd Wyn

  Frank Gardner

  The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams

  Timeline

  Picture Section

  Useful websites

  Contributors

  About Michael Morpurgo and Ian Beck

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  One hundred years have passed since the outbreak of the First World War.

  To mark the centenary, this beautiful anthology collects favourite words and images from some of the UK’s leading figures.

  Poems, short stories, personal letters, newspaper articles, scripts, photographs and paintings are just some of the elements of this unique and seminal collection – each introduced by the person who selected it.

  WHO’LL SING THE ANTHEM?

  WHO WILL TELL THE STORY?

  Some years ago I came across the grave of a young British soldier in France, one of thousands, one of hundreds of thousands. I had stopped to look, I think, because there was a wreath of poppies lying there. I read on the gravestone t
hat this was a private killed in 1918, only two weeks before the end of the First World War. He was aged just twenty-one. On the wreath was written: To my Grandpa. I never knew you, and I wish I had. Out of the ten million soldiers who were killed on all sides, many were young, some barely out of school. Most never grew old enough to know and be known by their children or their grandchildren. This book is made for them; for all of them.

  In my small village of Iddesleigh, in deepest Devon, there lives the last surviving widow of any of the soldiers who marched off from this country to the First World War. Her soldier was called Wilf Ellis. I knew him when he was an old man. And thereby hangs a tale, the terrible tale of the ten million soldiers, and of the ten million horses, all killed in the First World War.

  Dorothy Ellis, now ninety-three, has lived quietly, and spent much of her life looking after the village church, keeping it clean and bright. Wilf now lies in the churchyard, as do other old men I once knew: Captain Budgett and Albert Weeks. But before they died they told me their stories.

  When he came back from the war, Wilf Ellis played in dance bands on transatlantic liners before becoming an antique dealer in the village, ‘a knocker’. I bought a picture from him once, an old oil painting of a racehorse standing in a stable. The horse was called Topthorn. Topthorn, as you will see, was later to play a part in this tale.

  I didn’t know Wilf Ellis well, just enough to talk to. Thirty-five years ago now, we met by chance in the pub, the Duke of York. We got talking by the log fire. I’d heard he’d been to the First World War as a young man, so I asked him about it. It was a conversation which very soon became a monologue. He told me how his uniform had made him itch when he first put it on. He talked of the trenches, the machine guns and the snipers, and the mud, and the whizzbangs and the wire; how he was gassed and hospitalized, how his life was once spared by a German soldier, of the horses who died the same way as the soldiers, of going out on night patrols – his courage fuelled by rum – of the fear, of the joy of hot food and a communal hot bath, of the relief when it was all over.

  I knew even when he was talking that he was passing his story on to me. Much of it, Dorothy later told me, he’d never spoken of before. And I was a comparative stranger. He took me to his cottage and showed me his trenching tool, some photographs of himself, of his pals. Before I met Wilf Ellis I had gleaned all I knew of the First World War from the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Sassoon and Edward Thomas and Blunden. I had seen the film and read the book of All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque, and the film too of Paths of Glory, and the play, Journey’s End, the musical of Oh, What a Lovely War! But now I had heard it face to face, from someone who had been there, who told it straight, all of it understated, with no artifice. This was simply his story.

  Inspired to know more, a few days later I went to see Captain Budgett, ‘the squire’ of the village, ex-master of fox-hounds, my neighbour, and asked him about his time away at that war. He told me he was there ‘with horses’, and spoke of his horse as his best friend – he’d talk to him in the horse-lines at night, whisper in his ear and tell him his secret hopes and fears, and his horse had listened to him. I spoke to Albert Weeks, farm worker all his life, who hadn’t been to the war, being too young, but who was there when the farm horses were sold off to the army on the village green in 1914, who saw his friends march away, some never to return; and who told me how the world was never the same afterwards.

  So it was, with their stories in my head, that I was able to sit down and write my story, War Horse, the story of Albert, the young farm worker growing up on the farm near Iddesleigh with his beloved foal Joey, how Joey was sold away to the army as a cavalry horse and taken to France, only to be captured by the Germans, along with Topthorn, his stable companion and friend, after the first cavalry charge of the war. Through Joey’s eyes we live through the universal suffering of that war as he saw it and knew it; we endure his pain, feel his longing for Albert and home. Further novels about the First World War followed, all inspired, I have no doubt, by the truth told to me by these old men: Farm Boy, the sequel to War Horse, The Butterfly Lion and The Best Christmas in the World.

  It was the National Theatre that discovered War Horse – a book I loved but until then few had read – and turned it into a huge theatrical event, an iconic play now seen all over the world. I am pleased about that for all sorts of reasons, but mainly because indirectly, through the play and through the subsequent film, Joey’s story, which is of course Wilf’s story, Captain Budgett’s story, Albert Weeks’s story, has been passed on to millions, maybe even ten million. The anthem sung, the story told.

  The title of this book, Only Remembered, is also the song that begins and ends the play of War Horse. It was written by John Tams, the great folk singer. Here is a verse of that song:

  Only the truth that in life we have spoken,

  Only the seed that in life we have sown.

  These shall pass onwards when we are forgotten.

  Only remembered for what we have done.

  Here in this book you will find truth, which comes in many guises, in history, in stories, fictional and non-fictional, in poems and songs and pictures. My deepest thanks to those who have contributed, in particular to Annie Eaton, Ruth Knowles and Rachel Mann of Random House.

  As for myself, I should like to offer, as my contribution to this collection, a piece translated from the French, from the book On les Aura, illustrated by Barroux. It comes from the recently discovered diary of an unknown French soldier as he goes off to war and into action in 1914. It is simply told, very much as Wilf Ellis and Captain Budgett and Albert Weeks told me their stories in the Duke of York pub in Devon all those years ago.

  MICHAEL MORPURGO – Author

  WEDNESDAY 5 AUGUST

  This time, it’s the great send-off. We’re up at 04:00 hours because parade is at 05:00 hours. After collecting our haversacks filled with bread and a rabbit cooked the previous day, it’s time for farewells.

  All five of us shed a tear. After promising Madame Fernand that we’ll stick together, we leave with heavy hearts, but our sense of duty makes us hold our heads high and soon we’ve joined the ranks, ready for the off.

  The unknown soldier heads to the trenches

  Once the regiment is on parade, the colonel has us salute the flag and he gives a rousing speech, which is met with cheers. Then we march to the station with the band playing.

  07:00 hours: The train whistles and sets off in the direction of Paris. What a cruel irony! After a stop at Corbeil, the train departs again but this time heading eastwards. At the stations, the ladies from the Red Cross bring us food and drink. We pass through Montereau, Romilly and Troyes. Where are we going? Who knows.

  From Line of Fire: Diary of an Unknown Soldier, Barroux

  AT WAR

  Goodbye-ee, Goodbye-ee

  Brother Bertie went away

  To do his bit the other day,

  With a smile on his lips,

  And his Lieutenant’s pips,

  Upon his shoulder bright and gay.

  As the train pulled out he said,

  ‘Remember me to all the birds.’

  And he wagg’d his paw

  And went away to war,

  Shouting out these pathetic words:

  ‘Goodbye-ee, goodbye-ee,

  Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee,

  Tho’ it’s hard to part, I know,

  I’ll be tickled to death to go.

  Don’t cry-ee, don’t sigh-ee,

  There’s a silver lining in the sky-ee,

  Bonsoir old thing, cheerio, chin, chin,

  Nap-poo, toodle-oo, Goodbye-ee.

  If You Want the Old Battalion

  If you want the old battalion,

  I know where they are, I know where they are,

  I know where they are,

  If you want the old battalion, I know where they are,

  They’re hanging on the old barbed wire

  I’ve see
n them, I’ve seen them,

  Hanging on the old barbed wire

  I’ve seen them,

  Hanging on the old barbed wire.

  FROM WAR HORSE

  Like all army horses we were clipped out like hunters so that all our lower quarters were exposed to the mud and rain. The weaker ones amongst us suffered first, for they had little resilience and went downhill fast. But Topthorn and I came through to the spring, Topthorn surviving a severe cough that shook his whole massive frame as if it was trying to tear the life out of him from the inside. It was Captain Stewart who saved him, feeding him up with a hot mash and covering him as best he could in the bleakest weather.

  And then, one ice-cold night in early spring, with frost lying on our backs, the troopers came to the horse-lines unexpectedly early. It was before dawn. There had been a night of incessant heavy barrage. There was a new bustle and excitement in the camp. This was not one of the routine exercises we had come to expect. The troopers came along the horse-lines in full service order, two bandoliers, respiratory haversack, rifle and sword. We were saddled up and moved silently out of the camp and onto the road. The troopers talked of the battle ahead and all the frustrations and irritations of imposed idleness vanished as they sang in the saddle. And my Trooper Warren was singing along with them as lustily as any of them. In the cold grey of the night the squadron joined the regiment in the remnants of a little ruined village peopled only by cats, and waited there for an hour until the pale light of dawn crept over the horizon. Still the guns bellowed out their fury and the ground shook beneath us. We passed the field hospitals and the light guns before trotting over the support trenches to catch our first sight of the battlefield. Desolation and destruction were everywhere. Not a building was left intact. Not a blade of grass grew in the torn and ravaged soil. The singing around me stopped and we moved on in ominous silence and out over the trenches that were crammed with men, their bayonets fixed to their rifles. They gave us a sporadic cheer as we clattered over the boards and out into the wilderness of no man’s land, into a wilderness of wire and shell holes and the terrible litter of war. Suddenly the guns stopped firing overhead. We were through the wire. The squadron fanned out in a wide, uneven echelon and the bugle sounded. I felt the spurs biting into my sides and moved up alongside Topthorn as we broke into a trot. ‘Do me proud, Joey,’ said Trooper Warren, drawing his sword. ‘Do me proud.’