Little OF (alright he's just about caught me for height) has to read All quiet on the Western Front for English this year. So I reread it earlier this year.
The depiction of that war was absolutely brutal. Kids fed into a maiming and killing machine with families have to deal with whatever was spat out the other side.
I'm not suggesting modern warfare is any less brutal. However it feels like the great war is often romanticised. It was hell where rank and file were cannon fodder for causes they didn't fully understand and in all likelihood had little impact upon their day to day.
My pop fought in ww1. For the Poms. Showed me the hole in his arm when I was a kid. He was only 16 and was shot, and a nurse recognised him in the field hospital and had him sent home. He was the oldest kid in his family and they lost their parents before he was 12, so he left school and got some shit job to feed and clothe his younger siblings. The nurse knew this and that was why she pushed so hard to get him sent home. If he'd been in the AIF he would have been too far from home to send back. He re-joined the day he turned 18 and got to the front in Mid-November 2018.
MY Nan was the youngest of heaps of kids (13 maybe?) In a mining town in northern Tassie. She kind of got missed in all the ruckus. But one older brother looked after her - he was her favorite older brother. When she was 8 or 9 he got on a boat to Gallipoli. He made it all the way to Northern France and then 100 years ago last July was on a stretcher when him and the stretcher bearers were hit by a shell. So my 10 year old nan lost her favorite older brother ... and when she was in her late 60s and telling me about it the pain was as raw it could ever be. These days it moves me more than I ever thought possible.
The only thing they had left of him was a faded photo and some medals on the mantle piece over the fire.
Every family that has ever suffered in war has gone thru that and worse.
I still go to Dawn Services every now and then, for my nan. So he isn't forgotten.