By Chris Owen
In a recent WW blog, I made mention of the positive and sometimes negative influences on most writers that have shaped their careers.
I must confess to the same personal influences that have affected my writing experiences.
And also the strange effects writing about a cataclysmic event had upon me which was directly family-related.
I had assumed that being engaged in research about the events of The Great War (as WW1 was dubbed) would be somehow cathartic in some ways in my own personal search for answers as to why my maternal grandfather took his own life in 1963 when I was just 13 years of age.
Scant family records available gave no clue as to his age at the time of his death (approx 70+).
Although there must be formal documentation i.e. – death certificate etc., available somewhere.
Being a rather naive teenager, I had hoped that, in the fullness of time, my own parents would fill in the missing information. However, no such enlightening details were forthcoming from any relative directly affected.
As late as the nineteen-sixties suicide, whatever the underlying motive, was regarded by society at large as shameful and criminal; prompting families to hide such events from public scrutiny rather than probe the reasons for it.
My mother’s family members were never very close, particularly the siblings comprising four daughters, of which she was the youngest.
Grandad Jack was a WW1 wounded infantryman who was invalided out towards the end of the conflict.
All I was told and observed from self-apparent physical wounds was that he was injured in a WW1 battle necessitating amputation of his left leg above the knee.
I knew him as a cantankerous old devil with a heart of gold. A bit rough around the edges but nevertheless a caring soul.
During the war which irrevocably changed him, due to the crudity of surgical procedures and postoperative convalescence, resulting in incurable residual nerve damage, he was left with recurrent pain. This was the root cause, I would surmise, of his long-term mood swings mixed with bouts of depression which eventually claimed his life; as latterly confirmed by my mother. She should know having lived with him for the first twenty or so years of her life in the family home in Birmingham. This could be why it was at times very difficult and challenging for the whole family and could explain my own experiences of my mother during a complex relationship arising from her own troubled past.
These days we take for granted the advances in prosthetics and the modern application of pain management drugs, as evidenced by Paralympian successes. Such disabilities as those borne by my grandfather, are now of much lesser hindrance to the sufferer thanks to modern medicine.
So, imagine the lack of personal health aids back then, circa 1918, when all that was available to the tens of thousands of war invalids were wooden crutches or cumbersome prosthetic limbs, usually made of wood. My grandfather suffered terribly from chafing as the scarred flesh, although padded with a surgical bandage, rubbed against the ill-fitting prosthetic he was issued with causing him to abandon it. This forced him to rely that much more heavily on his army-issue crutch, which severely restricted his mobility.
For a young man in his twenties, this must have weighed heavily on his mind. The only self-administered pain-relief medications, legally prescribed, were addictive morphine-based drugs. That was always assuming you could afford to purchase a steady supply.
The army pension rate was pitifully small back then causing many pensioners to become very bitter and forcing my grandfather to wear his prosthetic in order to go out and seek work to support himself and later his family.
In the absence of a publicly accessed National Health Service (latterly instituted in 1948) where most treatments are free at the point of delivery, the average disabled veteran, from a working-class background, had to pay up or else suffer in silence as my grandfather did.
Obviously, our family was not alone in these shared circumstances where l.5 million veterans were left disabled. Their families suffered alongside the veteran just as much if not more when the emotional fall-out was taken into account.
The Great War claimed over 830K dead in the UK mainland alone and a total of 1.3 million overall when you add in commonwealth countries fighting under the Union flag.
No one to my knowledge has ever collated the post-war deaths from residual long-term causes i.e.- gas attacks, compound wound infections, or additional mental health impairment such as my grandfather’s, which could not be treated at the time yet still resulted in subsequent and inevitable war-related deaths many years after the end of the war.
Antibiotics, i.e. penicillin, for medical use were not discovered till 1928 and only synthesized for mass application ten years later, just in time for the advent of WW2; where their widespread application saved countless lives.
The other strange irony is that the biggest pandemic ever to strike the planet, prior to COVID, during 1920 wiped out more people than WW1 itself. It was dubbed: the ‘Spanish Flu’, after the influenza-like initial symptoms, taking in excess of 50 million lives worldwide although there is not the slightest evidence that it was first contracted in Spain. The only initial evidence was that Spanish or Latin types were more susceptible in the early days of collated figures leading clinicians to erroneously conclude that ethnicity played a part in the disease’s spread and contraction.
This strange new virus struck simultaneously across the globe suggesting a common means of mass transmission.
The prolific spread was probably caused by close contact among WW1 fighting soldiers suggesting the original organism mutated from Trench flu and other sundry infections.
These organisms may then have combined into a lethal cocktail of infections due to the appalling living conditions trench warfare imposed on every infantryman at the battlefront.
Unlike the Bubonic Plague, the nearest pandemic to it, which is still with us today in some areas of the world, this new infection disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived.
The second strange effect WW1 had on me was that upon discovering and reading about the sufferings of deceased war veterans and their families, it invariably produced involuntary tears on my part.
My wife proved an invaluable research assistant but she could only read so many accounts of wartime family bereavements before needing to take a well-earned break.
From an emotional standpoint, we both found it very wearing.
Such awful statistics would wear on any thoughtful and caring human being.
As a historian, my conclusions as to the origins of warfare, lead only to more questions than answers.
The first one is, how can we, as a sentient species, be the architects of wars that cause such wasteful suffering? *
The second is, from across the commonly shared thread of being human, how do we still, even today, justify it as a valid part of existence?
I fear it will remain an insoluble mystery, not only to myself but to the generations that will follow.
* Just to give some context – the following are wasteful war statistics:-
[Known unto god] – Inscriptions carved on anonymous war graves in countless garden cemeteries tended by CWGC (Commonwealth War Graves Commission) across Europe and the world.
Thiepval Memorial and Cemetery, France, records 72,000 WW1 dead listed as missing with no known grave.
P. S. Don’t worry about Grandpa –
I will continue my search for more information about my Grandfather’s life and demise
Private Jack May (1890 – 3(?) – 1963) – R.I.P.
riting. It takes skill, dedication, determination and lots of ideas to become a writer. It also takes a little business sense too. For getting published is all about meeting a market’s needs, whether that need is from a magazine editor looking to please readers and editors, or a publisher, looking to boost profits and keep the accountants happy. Writing, these days, is a business, even if something you do at the end of a long day at work, once the kids are in bed.
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