“We Didna Forget”….or did we?

by Author on February 17, 2010

“But glad tho’ we be tae show them oor thanks,
when we’ll talk nae mair aboot guns, ships or tanks.
there’re some puir bit laddies we maun keep in min’
They’re lying sae faur,  sae faur frae their kin’.
So mind a wee  prayer, it’s no much tae ask
It’ll help the puir laddies tae finish their task.
They died for oor freedom, oh Lord what a debt,
For the sake o’ these laddies, we canna forget.”

The final verse of the Poem “We Didna Forget”,  Johnnie Mallaghan (The Author’s father)

Even if you have trouble with some of the old Scots language in the poem, I’m sure the message will some come out loud and clear. The poem “We Didna Forget” was included in the “V Fund” (Victory Fund) leaflet that my father produced as a fundraiser during the second war, and which is included on the “The Knitter” web  site (You can take a look on this link).

Reading it again in 2010 really offers some food for thought – the poem seems just as relevant today as it did back in the 1940s, and the questions it poses also seem just relevant today as they did back then.  Listening to the news about the latest deaths in Afghanistan, it does beg a couple of questions though:

  1. Have we forgotten?
  2. Have people changed, and do we “care” as much about wars and the people who fight them?

The last large scale war that even an old pacifist like myself can feel was 100% justified was the second world war.  There have been a few situations since then where intervention would also have been the right thing to do, but unfortunately those also tend to be when we didn’t intervene. Think Rwanda. Thing Cambodia and Pol Pot. The initial response in Afghanistan might also be in that group; what happened after that will never be.

I don’t believe the problem is that we ever forget. From the conversations we had, and from what shines through from “We Didna Forget”, my father’s thinking was similar to mine – or maybe that should be the other way around! Pacifists at heart, skeptical about the motivations of “powerful people”, but whatever the root cause of any war, never blame the soldiers for what’s going on. It wasn’t them who invaded Iraq – it was politicians; and remeber – they work for us. It is all of our faults for letting them do it.

The sad thing is not that we forgot.  “We Didna Forget” the soldiers, but we we didn’t remember the lessons form the second world war, and we still allow our politicians to lead ordinary men into insane wars in our name, for reasons that are rarely to do with protection. My father is sadly not around to share his thoughts on Bush and Blair, but I think I can imagine what he would have said, and the sort of poem he might have written Maybe I’ll write it for him.

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