by Michael Bloor
(first published in Literally Stories, September 7th, 2025)
It’s been said that Britain is a country overburdened by history. I’m not very sure what ‘overburdened’ means in that context. But my guess is that, for my generation born seventy-odd years ago, it refers to the enduring damage wreaked by The First World War.
I remember, as a child, asking my mother why there were so few families with children in our street. She itemised the houses. So many of them were occupied by old ladies on their own, widows and spinsters. I already knew why Mr Morton, next door, cycled back and forth to his allotment steering with one arm: the other arm had been left behind many years ago on The Western Front. I also knew how many brothers Mrs Morton, his wife, had lost in the same war. And that Mrs Morton’s mother’s hair had turned white after she heard that her youngest son was also missing in action.
I had two grandads. One lived three doors up the street. The other lived across town and was frequently unwell, having been near-fatally gassed in that war. When he died in 1958, the GP recorded the underlying cause of death as ‘WWI gas poisoning.’ He’d gone to war, leaving behind four young children and a pregnant wife. He was a joiner to trade, building coffins for the Co-op; they were good employers, and kept his job open when he was frequently off sick. But there was no sick pay back then. My dad had to leave school at fourteen, though his headteacher came to the house to plead with my granny to keep him at school, promising a bright future for him. She was apologetic, but she explained how badly she would need my dad’s wages.
There were an awful, awful lot of deaths (886,000 British forces were killed) and an awful, awful lot of wounded (one and a half million), And there were an awful, awful lot of widows and spinsters, impoverished families, and so on, who were collateral damage. Plus all the other casualties from all the other nations: you have to wonder what the families from the other side of the world made of it all, like the families of the 336 New Zealand Maoris who died.
Of course, WWII, which ended only two years before my birth, had caused casualties and damage aplenty. And it brought new horrors: the Gas Chambers and the Atom Bomb. It brought not just the millions of military and innocent civilian deaths, but the bomb sites we played on, the following years of rationing and economic austerity, and so on. But we were told that those casualties and the terrible damage were an unavoidable sacrifice in a worthy cause – the defeat of evil fascism.
Not doubt, if I’d been brought up in Japan say, or Poland, I’d think WWII brought the greater grief. But for me and my friends and family, I reckon that WWI, though more remote, seemed a much greater burden to bear. And that’s surely the case because, unlike WWII, no-one seems to know what caused WWI. And no-one seems to know what it achieved.
How could it have achieved anything at all, if my dad had to go to WWII, a mere 21 years after WWI finished?
As Dylan sang:
“The First World War, boys, it came and it went,
The reason for fightin’ I never did get…”
That’s why WWI feels like an overburden: it was a cruel, cruel futility.