Veterans remember the Somme: ‘all those lads slaughtered, it broke my heart …’

Soldiers returned home from the Great War from 1918, with their battalions ‘slowly dissolving and becoming a mere memory.’

Decades later, some veterans returned to the old battlefields.

Ninety-one-year-old Fred Hocking returned to the Somme in 1988 to commemorate ANZAC Day.

While standing at the Australian National Memorial, Hocking recalled when a shell exploded a few yards in front of him, taking off his commanding officer’s head and wounding him.

A journalist asked Hocking if he had known a certain soldier killed at Pozières. Standing among rows of uniform headstones that converged into the distance, Hocking replied in the only way he could: ‘There were so many killed at Pozières.’

In 1996, Donald Hodge and Mike Lally (pictured) were part of a veterans’ pilgrimage that returned to the Somme.

The men took the gruelling schedule in their stride, laughing and joking, but every now and again something - a familiar hill or wood, a name on a headstone - would transport them sharply back to another time and a place.

‘All them lives, what a waste,’ recalled Lally, then 102. ‘It was the biggest mistake ever. They threw so many men into that battle, it was a complete waste.’

Donald Hodge, then 102, from West Sussex, recalled: ‘The first week of July was a wholesale slaughter, no end of my friends died. The bodies were piled up high … whatever the orders were we just obeyed them, that's how we were then.’

A reflective Hodge said he felt it was his duty to return to the Somme. ‘I must come back for the sake of my friends who lie here. It could so easily have been me instead of them.’

If you like my posts, you’ll love my new novel, ‘Night in Passchendaele’:

https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781761265976/night-in-passchendaele/

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Photo Credit: Jeff Moore ITV News

#nightinpasschendaele #passchendaele #scottbennettwriter #worldwar1 #ww1 #wwi #thegreatwar #anzac #panmacmillan #somme #australiannationalmemorial #anzac

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