This blog is usually an irreverent snap-shot of the CB’s and my travels (and anything else I can think of). For this piece I intend shelving the irreverence because the subject matter is far too serious. On Friday we visited the El Alamein War Memorial and Cemetery. If that place doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, you’re a harder man than me, mate.
In what was probably once an inhospitable desert wasteland and now is adjacent to holiday homes and resorts and a few buildings that wouldn’t be out of place in Singapore there’s this beautifully manicured but entirely unfortunate place. It’s such a shame that these places even need to exist but they do and kudos to the Governments of Egypt and Australia and the other countries with war-dead there for the respectful upkeep. It’s the least we could do.
As I wandered around reading the occasional gravestone – there are thousands – waves of emotion swept over me. If I could digress for a second, when I write reports for my employer, certain words often remind me of songs or comedy sketches or even poems and, this will be hard to believe, quotations from Shakespeare. So I reference and link them in my reports. If anything, they give the intended audience a reason to read the report if they are not interested in the coal and iron ore markets. So I always have my music with me and on this day the most appropriate feeling was Comfortably Numb. Pink Floyd aficionados will recognise this song from The Wall, appropriately enough, in the circumstances, an album with many references to war although this particular song is about being medicated to be able to perform a concert. Notwithstanding this, there are lines in the second and fourth verses that fit the mood perfectly.
So the emotion was “coming through in waves” and you hoped for their sake, at that pivotal moment as these young men (I didn’t see any female names on the stones) slipped from one life which they had hardly sampled into the next phase of existence that, “there is no pain you are receding”. Gilmour’s soaring guitar solo in the middle of the song will forever remind me of that revered place.
The ages of the occupants ranged from 19 to 42 that I saw. One of our travel companions said she saw a 17 year old. At least the 42 year old got to live part of a life. Not so the teenagers and twenty-somethings. What a bloody waste.
They were buried in individual graves mostly but occasionally multiple graves. One I saw was the resting place of five. God knows what happened and what the aftermath looked like for those poor buggers. It doesn’ really bear thinking about other than to pay respects to those who quite literally picked up the pieces after the shelling and fighting subsided to afford these young men some semblance of a respectful laying to rest.
Winston Churchill said the allies had not won a battle prior to El Alamein and didn’t lose one after. So in a world that is fast approaching a point where we don’t deserve the freedoms these men fought for, we need to be reminded of the achievements of the VC’s, the MC’s and the DSO’s, the airmen, the infantry and the engineers, the privates, the sergeant’s and 23 year old captains. And thank them.