Great-Uncle Harry

There’s a moment in Peter Jackson’s film They Shall Not Grow Old – in which he uses modern digital technology to transform 100-year-old WW1 footage into something you might believe was filmed almost yesterday – when a soldier heading up to the front-line peers back at the camera. 

I’ve seen countless photographs and paintings from that war, and read dozens of books and poems about it. But it’s that one quizzical, slightly curious, scared (?) glance backwards I almost always think of first when I think of that conflict. And I always wonder who he was, and what he was thinking, and what happened to him.

 

Which is why I so admire this book by Michael Palin. By all the available evidence, his great-uncle Henry didn’t amount to much. (You could also say he never got the chance, killed as he was during the battle of the Somme in 1916.)  He was, ‘a man with no particular game, a man just keeping his life together on a day-by-day basis.’ He seems to have rubbed along, not making a go of it India, or England, before apparently settling somewhat in New Zealand until the war broke out. At which point he, like thousands of others, joined up to fight.

Now, working from his great-uncle’s wartime diaries – as well as historical sources – Michael Palin paints a strikingly sympathetic picture of an ‘ordinary’ life thrown into the chaos of a war that took him first to Gallipoli and then to the Somme and his death. The diaries aren’t of any literary importance. There are no great insights. But it’s their very ‘ordinariness’ that makes the man who scribbled them down from day-to-day come alive. And by extension, all the countless thousands of other ordinary men – like that individual looking back at the camera in the Peter Jackson film – who perished.

There are better, more informative books about the war. There are more emotional memoirs. And poems. But I’ve never read one quite as touching in its simple desire to remember an individual whose short life is only marked by a name on a wall in a cemetery in France.

And now by this lovely book.