Robert Fisk’s World: The true eloquence of letters from the front

[IndianaGreen]

Robert Fisk’s World: The true eloquence of letters from the front

Is it their humanity, or fear, that spares real soldiers from the clichés of journalism?

Saturday, 6 March 2010

How come old soldiers don't write in clichés? We reporters fill our dispatches with clichés about "gathering war clouds" and guns "falling silent" – read any (and I repeat, any) newspaper, and you'll see what I mean. Is it their basic humanity – or savagery, or fear – that largely spares real soldiers from the clichés of journalism and the ungrammatical shorthand of the email?

Take Hal Crookall, whom readers last met in this column as he tramped with his platoon over the sand dunes of Dunkirk, the first reaction of his soldiers on seeing the thousands of soldiers on the beaches identical to that of the British sergeant in the movie Atonement. "Fuck me!" they roared. Well, Hal has dropped me another note – and be warned, Reader, this is strong stuff, not for the breakfast table – after reading an article by me on the Menin Gate at Ypres, which bears the names of more than 56,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were never found after the First World War.

Hal's memories were of that same Menin Gate – during the Second World War. Retreating with the BEF rearguard in 1940, he found himself defending Ypres, the very same Belgian city still undergoing reconstruction from the ruins of the 1914-1918 war. And – irony of ironies – he was ordered to take up position next to Lutyens' gloomy monument. "I saw the Menin Gate for the first time, amazed at the number of names on it, with the ghastly thought that maybe our names would soon be added to them."

The stage is set. "I was a very young second lieutenant, and I was sent with my platoon to take up a position to the left of the Menin Gate on what seemed to be a canal bank. There were German snipers on the opposite side ... I got a message from the CO to join him underneath the Menin Gate, for instructions." Second Lieutenant Crookall was almost killed by a German mortar bomb when he arrived and was told that a Royal Engineers unit was placing an explosive charge under the bridge behind the Menin Gate. Hal's job was to take a platoon to the other side of the bridge and hold off Hitler's legions. He ran to the second floor of a house, finding a window that faced up the street with a pile of rubbish under the window covered with a tarpaulin.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-the-true-eloquence-of-letters-from-the-front-1917088.html