The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
For some veterans the stress of combat goes on forever
Just before he died in his early 90s, my grandfather shot bolt upright in his hospital bed, gripped my arms and cried out repeatedly, “I can still see their faces. I can still see their faces.”
His faculties might have been slowly crumbling all around him like bits falling off a proud and dignified statue, but this memory in particular was as sharp as barbed wire in no man’s land.
He was beseeching, almost imploring, me to help him wipe it away.
I was helpless, of course. It is vivid for me after more than a quarter of a century.
I knew only too well what was upsetting him – these demons he could never shake off. The horror from 75 years earlier was being run and rerun by his brain like a computer game on a loop.
Former Corporal Jack Knight, you see, was a machine-gunner in the Great War.
He survived and came home when millions didn’t. He was in one piece, but he brought back obvious physical scars like the tiny black shrapnel fragments which moved around his legs for years. He cloaked any lasting psychological damage and this remained hidden from the view of his adoring grandchildren as we grew up with this wonderful caring, gentle old man.
It was like that then. Stiff upper lip and all that, and he worked as an electrical engineer until retirement.
As a society, we are now trying to embrace the special needs of those suffering from conflict, including post-traumatic stress disorder, but only weeks ago the dangers of suicide and other mental problems among combat-stressed veterans today was raised again by an Aberdeen councillor and serviceman who urged more to be done.
It came as the Granite City pledged to make itself the friendliest city in Scotland for veterans.
As we approach this historic Armistice Day, it shows the same psychological horrors are still re-emerging today and posing new challenges for us.
Jack just seemed to get on with the rest of his life and kept any demons hidden. He bought me my first suit when I was a teenager. All
I had to worry about was picking a suit, but when Jack was my age he was fighting for his life. Is there a single family in Scotland which does not have a similar story to tell?
Such was the scale of the conflict that virtually every family was affected in one way or another. It is a common and deep bond that we share across the UK.
Jack volunteered to fight a year before conscription came in during 1916.
When he was younger, he won a book prize at Sunday school. After basic training, he boarded a troop ship in Liverpool in July 1915. Within two weeks he had landed at Suvla Bay and was thrown into the horror of the Gallipoli campaign against Turkish forces. I read one report which recorded his battle group lost 350 men – dead, wounded or missing – in the opening few days. The former Sunday school prize-winner came back at war’s end with a “14-15 Star”– a medal created after pressure by the Australians for a “Gallipoli Star”, but extended to the British who fought there, too.
Jack was 17 when he landed at Gallipoli. That sounds incredible today. How could that happen?
Those were different times. Jack was a volunteer and a blind eye was often turned by recruiting sergeants to age restrictions as they were under pressure to keep up numbers. They were also desperate for reinforcements to relieve troops who had landed earlier in the heroic, but disastrous, Gallipoli campaign but who remained pinned down by the enemy.
I look at boyish Jack, his younger brother and mother posing in the picture. It was a popular thing to do before going off to war. I look into my great-grandmother’s anxious eyes and wonder what she was going through emotionally and how she could let him go.
“Your Country Needs You” mania was sweeping them along.
Years later, we bloodthirsty grandchildren would beg him for gory war stories. When he did say something, it was never about self-glorification or gung-ho. Terrible random memories would spill out which illustrated the carnage and suffering.
Jack remembered moving past bodies stacked on top of each other in grotesque makeshift “walls” of dead, as the living edged towards frontline fighting positions. He huddled in a trench trying desperately to make spiritual contact with his father to protect him (he had died a few months earlier) after orders to fix bayonets for a charge. He once thought he saw his father standing shoulderto-shoulder with him under fire. This was not about glorifying it. He was terrified, like everyone else.
Usually, grandmother would cut him short with, “Shush, you’ll give them nightmares.” What about his nightmares?
In my Aberdeen garden, there is a big wall and behind it is a large cemetery. Among the graves are memorials to those who did not make it – more than 50 men who died in the Great War. One can imagine cries of anguish which rang out here from scores of loved ones who said their goodbyes to young lives crushed before they flowered.
On the other side of the cemetery wall by my garden shed lie the remains of a young man who died from his wounds at the age of 21, but a few years after the Armistice. I often think of him when I sit in my garden. He must have been around the same age as Jack when he was wounded.
Nearby is a memorial for two sons and two sons-in-law from the same family who were killed in action. Just stop and think about that - four from one family. Another records two brothers killed in action within months.
Many of those who survived struggled with the memories for years and today’s combatants still do. I heard a church leader the other day talking about a modern disabled veteran who froze while playing squash when he heard a helicopter and needed assistance from friends.
I still don’t know how my dear loving grandfather coped.
I wish I had found time to ask him when I had a chance.
He remembered moving past bodies stacked on top of each other in grotesque walls of dead