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A Reflection on 1914 for Founder’s Day, 2014
Someone once remarked to me that you don’t fully become human until you have lost your parents or had a child. In this are possessed several points: that the development of one’s emotional maturity is dependent on seminal moments in one’s life; and the expectation that there is a natural order and sequence to such events. Each person reading this will have their own personal response to this: for some, neither has happened; for others, both. But for all of us, the journey is an individual one, whatever the different groups, familial or friendly, that surround us at any one time. What then of the Great War? At a talk which I heard recently, the eminent Historian, Prof. Jay Winter talked about the concept of ‘Traumatic Memory’. This was one of the classifications or levels of what was then called Shell Shock, and of what we now term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He, however, applied this term to a generation, and linked the impact with what happened in the Holocaust in the Second World War. 75% of French males of military age during the War were casualties, and these were the ones when the impact was measurable. The costs to Great Britain were lower, but still nonetheless dramatic. Half of all the war dead have no known grave; they are ‘The Missing’, as lost in bodily terms as the cremated of the extermination camps of Eastern Europe 25 years later. That was why their names mattered so much; that was all that was left. 508 Old Alleynians died in the First World War, and 282 were wounded. This was 17% and 9% respectively of the total who served. What impact would this have had on the College and its members? I was reminded of this with news of the sinking of the MV Sewol when more than 200 of the pupils of Danwon High
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