Your picture really touched my heart when I saw the Helmet on the Soldier in the photo...
My Grandfather served in WW1, he enlisted and spent all his time in Europe in trenches.
If you have seen the movie Legends of the Fall where the youngest one goes on a recon with another soldier marking the emplacements on a map... The map guy gets killed and the young one is blinded by gas, probably Mustard...
That was my Grandfathers job in the Military, he was a Cartographer and responsible for tracking all emplacements and other strategic elements for which he was responsible. If he made mistakes, many men died...He was mustard gassed in a similar incident and lost his hair and had PTSD for which he used alcohol, but he was not a drunk
He told us a story of life in the trench with the Scotsman and their Pipes and Kilts... The water would get so deep that the Scots looked like Lily Pads as their kilts floated on the waist deep water...
It really came home to me in a book store in Texas where I happened upon a book about Trench Warfare with lots of pictures. Body parts and other devastation were daily fare, the horrors that he saw we never experienced as anger or anything to give us a clue what he had gone through..
Had God not watched over him, I would not be here today...
Thank you so much for your story.
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A Consecration
NOT of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years,— Rather the scorned—the rejected—the men hemmed in with the spears;
The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries. The men with the broken heads and the blood running into their eyes.
Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne, Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known.
Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the "road, The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad, The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.
The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout, The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired look-out.
Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth, The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;— Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!
Theirs be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold; Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold— Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told.