Busman’s holiday · Mon Aug 21, 22:43 by Eleri Straker
I’ve just come back from holiday, a brilliant two and a half weeks, just me and my husband cruising around Europe in his Z3 (mid-life crisis car!), the first time on our own for 24 years. It gave us the chance to do some things that our children would possibly have found boring. Like visiting Verdun.
Verdun was the site of one of WW1’s longest and bloodiest battles and apparently, was one of the reasons the Brits went into the Somme – to take the pressure off the French soldiers (in hindsight, ironic or what?)
Verdun is a pretty, riverside town with an astonishingly powerful Rodin sculpture depicting an angel and a dead soldier. The older buildings are still pockmarked with shell holes from the First war. But the truly sobering sight is the Ossuary at Douamont, a huge bunker-shaped edifice housing the bones of some 130,000 unidentified soldiers, surrounded by 150,000 graves of the dead of Verdun. The sheer number is overwhelming. Walking around the uniform fawn graves, I was reduced to tears. Reading the dates on each stone I was forcibly reminded of how young all the men were, many of them little older than the kids I teach. This is what Wilfred Owen meant when he wrote about the ‘pity of war’.
We went on to the fort at Douamont, an eerie reminder of the War where I got a contemporary photo which I intend to show to the classes to whom I’m going to teach WW1 literature. I’m hoping it will show them some of the reality of the war and remind them that there was more to WW1 than Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon.
Being on holiday also meant that I had a chance to read loads of books (absolute bliss!) one of which was a brilliant teen book by Marcus Sedgwick called The Foreshadowing, a moving, spellbinding novel, modernising the story of the seer Cassandra and setting it in the years of WW1. I couldn’t put it down and rather than telling the story from the viewpoint of the soldier (like Private Peaceful –an equally brilliant novel), it is seen through the eyes of a girl, a member of the voluntary nursing organisations. Again, it will provide useful material for my war lessons. Typical! Even on holiday I’m finding stuff to do with my classes! You can take the teacher away from the school, but you can’t take the school out of the teacher….or something.
