Lest we Forget, by Babs Nicol
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The women spies who served in the most dangerous places to gather information for the war effort.
Violette Szabo, was a Paris born British Citizen, her father was Charles Bushell.
From switchboard operator to a post with the 481st Heavy (Mixed) Anti-Aircraft Battery, she waded into the war effort.
She married a French Foreign Legion officer, Etienne Szabo who was later killed in the war.
Because of her ability to speak French, she was trained as a spy and was parachuted into action. Her husband wrote her a poem when they were in love, it was this poem that she later used as a code between headquarters and herself.
She was captured by the Germans and after being tortured, was sent to a concentration camp and shot.
Her daughter later received a posthumous George Cross for her mother. I know the poem off by heart, it is beautiful.
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have, is yours
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.
To all the souls who are buried in the long green grass, and to those who are still living among us.
My greatest thanks for giving up everything for our freedom.
XXXXXXXX
Twice in twenty years families across this nation were rent asunder by a war with Germany. Fathers, who had fought in World War One watched their sons go to another War in Europe giving lie to the myth they had fought in a War to end all Wars.
So many sons did not return.
War between nations is a most terrible thing, for most of us it beggars the imagination as to what these men endured.
The Head of Science at my school was a very hard man indeed. He was very hard with us youngsters. He intended to make men of us, men of whom he would be proud.
After six years at that school, on our last day, we few gathered around his desk, sitting on bar stools around his elevated desk. "Is there anything you would care to ask me before you inadequates launch yourself into the world?' He had a booming voice.
'Sir, I've heard you entered Belsen after the War.'
Although then sixty years old he was a big muscular man, a military man. Yet he put his face in his hands and cried before us. 'It would have to be you who would ask that.' It was me who posed the question.
Our Head of Science, an NCO, was behind his Officer when they liberated Belson. I cannot imagine that experience for him. But in the end it broke him.
His last words to us school boys were, 'Churchill said, Jaw-Jaw is better than war-war. Let that be your abiding motto.'
If I have a motto in life, that is it.
When he came home, at the train station he bowed Japanese style to all his crying relatives. He couldn't cope and became an alcoholic and died too soon before his time, unable to forget. We must never forget.
Feeling weepy now!