George Evans
A Normandy vet who dared to question war
George Evans settles into his chair by the fireplace, beneath the photographs of the Wrekin, the “little mountain” he climbed regularly until he was 89, and of him dancing with his late wife, Naomi, on their 60th wedding anniversary: “Well, not so much dancing as propping each other up.”
He may be 92 and, in his words, “ancient”, but the mischief has not gone from his eyes. “When you’re my age,” he says, “you can get away with anything.”
But perhaps only up to a point.
And that point was possibly reached this week, when, after 25 years in the role, the Second World War veteran was “sacked” from reading “For the Fallen” at the Remembrance Sunday parade in his home town of Wellington, in Shropshire.
The old soldier’s “offence”, it seems, was committed at last year’s ceremony, when Mr Evans, who had survived combat in Normandy and witnessed the liberation of Belsen, added “The Lesson”, a short poem of his own, to proceedings. He recites it again now: “I remember my friends and my enemies too/We all did our duties for our countries/ We all obeyed our orders/ Then we murdered each other/ Isn’t war stupid?”
Accounts vary – irreconcilably – about how this poetic embellishment was received. Mr Evans describes applause rippling from the memorial all the way down Church Street.
A frustrated local Royal British Legion member talks of only five people out of a crowd of 200 clapping, of Mr Evans being “selectively deaf”, of outrage among the public, Legion members, serving soldiers, Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, at what was taken as an implication that soldiers were murderers.
“You can’t call them murderers. They were human beings caught in a terrible catastrophe, poor buggers who paid the price for politicians’ stupidity.
“Of course wars are stupid. No one who has ever been in one would ever say they are a good idea. They are the triumph of stupidity over diplomacy.”
And apparently Mr Evans wasn’t sacked at the meeting to organise this year’s Remembrance Sunday and 11 November commemora- tions: “He walked out. After he was offered the [alternative] November 11 ceremony, provided he stuck to the script. Because you’re supposed to remember the dead, not stand there playing politics and pontificating about how to change the world.”
In his armchair, Mr Evans insists he was sacked, while freely admitting he won’t be confined to “the script”.
This “script”, some might argue, ensures that you don’t break certain taboos.You don’t question the point of war at remembrance ceremonies for fallen soldiers. You don’t wear a white poppy, and if a certain left-wing politician does – or might do – you vilify him.
But if such taboos exist, Mr Evans seems remarkably relaxed about breaking them. He grins. “My granddaughter tells me there are thousands of people on Twitter saying I should be given my job back.”
He finds it all terribly amusing: “Such a fuss over a little local ceremony!”
And the “fussing” would never have happened, he says, had he not mentioned his “sacking” in passing to a local journalist who had phoned to ask about the young Jeremy Corbyn’s time in the Shropshire Committee Against Racism. Mr Evans had been the chairman, at a time when, he says, it marked him out as “the funny old fella who likes Pakis”.
He has granted us an interview and decided to play along with our interest because: “I want to tell the rest of the world: War. Is. Stupid. Don’t do it.”
And yes, he says, there should be “pontificating” about peace at Remembrance Day parades: “Because I have become sick of all the triumphalism. ‘We won the war’: It goes with ‘Two world wars and one World Cup.’ It’s bloody silly, simply a way of denigrating other people.”
He’s also a bit peeved about something else: all those newspaper reports mentioning him alongside the words “war hero”.
“I’m not a bloody hero,” he says. “The only unusual thing about me is that I survived.”
So “all” that Mr Evans did was to land on a Normandy beach, under sniper fire, two days after his 21st birthday, “and smell the stink of decomposing bodies, and realise this was serious”.
His only physical war wound is hidden beneath his luxuriant white beard. He points to just above his lip: “Mini shrapnel. Didn’t bleed much, wasn’t seen to. The medics had more important things to worry about.”
Other scars, you sense, took longer to heal. He talks of fear, of his wounded friend Denis, joking about being permanently “legless” on one day, dead of secondary shock the next – “And would you write to his parents, Evans?”
He talks about Belsen: “Human skeletons, walking about in striped pyjamas, no idea what was going on, the walking dead. It was horrible. Horrible. I nearly went and got my gun and went looking for the guards.”
But he didn’t, because of what happened beside a Normandy farmhouse, on the road to Caen.
“We had fired at the Germans, they had fired at us. Then, a couple of days later, they had retreated. We went down to where they had been. We noticed a very bad smell. We went round the corner of the farmhouse, and there was the pile of German bodies, neatly arranged, four to each layer. The maggots were