IN LOVE AND WAR
My Real Life Inspiration
Battlefield tours are commonplace today, but it is not so well known that within months of the end of the war organisations and companies like Thomas Cook were already taking thousands of visitors to Flanders and The Somme. These tours were controversial and there were furious arguments in the press about the way in which these ‘sacred places’, where so many died, were being ‘desecrated by commercial tourism’.
It is almost impossible to imagine the level of devastation: hundreds of towns and villages destroyed, roads churned up into mud, land littered with, trenches, hastily-erected graves, barbed wire and unexploded ordnance. Yet it is easy to sympathise with those who undertook such perilous pilgrimages, seeking the places where their loved ones died, or desperate for news of those who had disappeared in the chaos of war.
The bodies of one in four casualties were never recovered and this tragedy is close to home. One of these was my husband’s uncle Lt Geoffrey Trenow, who died at Passchendaele. He was 21 and had been awarded the Military Cross for bravery. He and his childhood sweetheart were married just a few months earlier. His name is inscribed, along with fifty four thousand others, on the Menin Gate in Ypres.
I wanted this to be a story of reconciliation although as I wrote the final chapter I found myself having to acknowledge that just a couple of decades later the world would face a further terrible war.
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