Subject: Re: Band of Brothers
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Tue Oct 09 2001 - 03:39:27 GMT
‘... when I asked them the same question & they explained
gently that ‘you probably had to be there ...''
OK, the words are my own.
But. And it’s a big but.
How come that, having said that, they then poured us both
another drink & sat on into the early hours doing their utmost
to show me just precisely how it HAD been; how those days
had marked the high noon of their lives, illuminating & setting
in place all subsequent experience?
Both Paul & Tim tell us they’re grateful not to have been so
challenged. And surely we all feel this in our bones. But I certainly
also feel – along with many of my generation, just too young
for the second world war & just too old for subsequent ones –
that I missed what so many of my elders regard as the defining
event of their lives; & that I’m thereby diminished forever
in some very central way.
I simply can’t get over them:
Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘We have shared the incommunicable
experience of war. We have felt – we still feel – the passion
of life to its top ...'
Leonard Cheshire VC (our nearest approximation to a modern
day saint): ‘Nothing in my life gave greater satisfaction than
strategic bombing ...'
And, a little less articulately, many of my friends.
My guess is that without that mortar wound on the Piave,
we’d never have lived ‘In our Time’ & without the Hurtgen Forest
we’d never have met Holden.
Scottie B.
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