War Memorial – Cliheroe Castle

I was just saying to Paol Soren that I wondered if we have the resilience to live through another world war, when it struck me that history could be approached in a new way these days, by comparing Tripadvisor reviews.

Picture it. My grandfather sitting in the bottom of a trench. It is dark and it is raining. It didn’t always rain in France, but it sometimes seems like it when you read the histories. It could be quite dusty at times, particularly in the chalky areas. One of the few things he ever said about his time in the war was that he had once spent days in a flooded gun pit building up the parapet with dead bodies. As a result of his immersion in filthy water he suffered from skin complaints for over forty years.

They didn’t have snowflakes in 1916, you had to get on with it. While I have recently written a review of a carvery decrying the dried out vegetables, my grandfather was compelled to eat the infamous Maconochie’s stew from a can. This is an icon of the Great War, a tinned stew composed of “sliced turnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, haricot beans, and beef in a thin broth”. It appears in many memoirs and produced a flatulence that is also mentioned several times. When you think of the miasma of death and chemicals that must have hovered over the battlefields it is remarkable that flatulence even rated a mention. It must have been formidable stuff.

As for noisy neighbours, I sometimes get a bit irritated by loud TV from one side and a yapping dog from the other.  The Germans were undoubtedly noisier than any of my neighbours and, to be fair, my neighbours have never tried to kill me. and think of all those package tours where people complain of the Germans getting up early to put their towels on sun loungers. Towels really don’t compare to the poison gas and flamethrowers that were used on the Western Front.

Pot holes are another thing we complain about today. There was a news item about them last night again. I can’r begin to imagine what the roads were like near the front lines, but I do know we had to build 2,000 miles of light railway to transport supplies to the trenches, as the roads were impassable to wheeled transport.

Yes, it’s a shame we don’t have Tripadvisor reviews from WW1 to make us appreciate how lucky we are.

The header picture is the Clitheroe War Memorial. The second is the identical statue used on the war memorial at Slaidburn. It was undergoing restoration the day we visited.  Unlike Knowlton in a previous post, they were neither thankful or brave just two places linked by similar statues and my family history, as members of my family appear on both. On a more cheerful note, my family tree also includes one of the landlords at the Hark to Bounty pub that is pictured on the Slaidburn link.

I will leave the last word to my reimagined grandfather. “I am giving this War one star, not because I think it deserves it, but because there is no option to give it no stars.”

Slaidburn War Memorial