That's as with people claiming to recall past lives. Always a glamorous past life. Never a coward or the guy who cleaned the stables.
The date of the alleged desertion and the official end of the war were so close that possibly soldiers were just saying “let’s go home”....but,we’ll never know.
You are right, though. People for the most part want to think only the best of their forebearers.
My mom was from the South and was heavily into the genealogy bit. On our living room wall we had two frames with coats of arms in them, denoting that we came from some great European bloodline. We heard about that day and night until we were SICK of that stuff.
One day my brother called me and said that he did some digging on his own and found that one of our relatives on her side was hung as a horse thief. I felt better about our bloodline after that - we were, after all, just regular folks.
As a sidebar, my dad got off the boat from Germany back in the '20s. He claimed he had enough of "class", having been with a bunch of "von this and von that" at the naval academy and thought them all cretins - just living off their heritage. He loved America because "You start with a clean slate. They don't care who or what you were in the Old Country - they want to see what YOU can do."
Naturally she was somebody famous -- a Roman courtesan I think but I can't remember which one.
I pointed out that her Latin was faulty and that everybody was always somebody famous, nobody was ever just a slave who pulled the fan cord in the triclinium.
Of course, that was when I was an Episcopalian. I haven't met anybody quite that silly in the Catholic choir . . . .
But if everybody who said their ancestor was one of General Lee's honor guard had actually HAD an ancestor there, the South would have won the war by sheer numbers. And don't even get me started on all the people who claim their ancestor was one of George Washington's personal bodyguard, or Bonnie Prince Charlie . . . .
RIMMER: I'll tell you something. Something I've never told anyone. When I was fifteen, I went to Macedonia on a school trip, to the site of Alexander The Great's palace. And for the first time in my whole life, I felt ... I felt I was home. This place was where I belonged. Years later, I got friendly with a hypnotherapist -- Donald -- and told him about the Alexander the Great thing, and he said that he'd regress me back through my past lives. I was dubious, but I let him put me under. It turned out my instincts were absolutely correct -- I had lived a past life in Macedonia. That palace was my home. Because, believe it or not, Lister, he told me that, in a past incarnation, I was Alexander the Great's chief eunuch.
LISTER: Do you know something? I believe you.
RIMMER: He didn't say that I was Alexander himself, which is obviously what I wanted to hear. But it explained everything: I'd lived a previous life alongside one of the greatest generals in history. No wonder the military's in my blood.
LISTER: No wonder you're such a good singer.
RIMMER: Well, maybe it's rot, I don't know. But it's funny -- to this day, I can't look at a pair of nutcrackers without wincing. And why is it, whenever I'm with a large group of women, I have this overwhelming urge to bathe them in warm olive oil?
LISTER: I have that urge, Rimmer. It's got nothing to do with past lives.
RIMMER: Well, why is it, then?