Under the willow, the willow, I heard the butcher-bird sing,
"Come out you fine young fellow, from under your mother's wing."
Charles Causeley
The song was sweet and seductive and full of
promise: it sang of
adventure, excitement,
heroism. Like rats behind the
pied piper, the boys rushed to follow the
singer.
I watched them, watched them all, their faces scrubbed to a
ruddy glow and their heads held high and proud.
They were young.
They wore their ill-fitting uniforms, like they wore their smiles, with hope and
courage and a
dreadful desire for glory, with a
blithe confidence in their inevitable victory and
unassailable rightness
They waved to lovers and family and friends as they marched away, but they never looked over their shoulders to see the encouraging faces
dissolve into tears or grimaces of
anguish.
That is the picture we kept of them, cherished in our hearts, the way we kept their letters tied in ribbon in boxes and drawers, with the dried, pressed flowers that were all that remained of their gifts tucked neatly into the bundles. When we thought of them, as we so often did, we saw those
jaunty grins, the hope, and the
terrible,
wonderful happiness.
And now they have returned – all those that ever
will return – that is still the picture we see, behind their eyes where the dark shadows
flit. That provides the
counterpoint, the
major harmony to the
minor reality.
We cannot imagine what they saw, what they did, in any
subjective way. When they speak of it, their words are
stilted and
monotone, without
emotion or
emphasis. The photographs we see are
static and lacking in life. We cannot hear what they heard, smell the stink that filled their
nostrils, feel the
desperation or the
exhaustion or the pain or the hatred.
Those whose boys did not come back are the lucky ones. They can
grieve openly.
Every last boy who followed the butcher-bird that day died. It was men who marched home, men victorious, but still destroyed, the course of their
future irretrievably altered. They are not the men they would have become had they stayed here, not the men that the boys we loved were supposed to be. These are harder, colder, more
haunted men.
For the sake of the picture, and the promises we made to the boys in it, we love them, hold them, and share their lives, but we still feel the
loss, and we still grieve.
Every day, we
curse the butcher-bird.