The Quiet Man.

The final part of ‘The Middle Children of History’.

I always raise an eyebrow when martial arts people start using ‘warrior’ tropes, the kinds of things that appear in social media; you know, like quotes attributed to the historical samurai ‘hero’ Musashi Miyamoto, example, “The truth is that strength lies in the interior of the warrior, in his heart, his mind and his spirit”. The ‘TRUTH’ is that Musashi never actually said that, it was just made up by an American martial arts huckster from New York.

‘Warrior’ is a lazy generalised description, it is a word I very seldom use, even in historical contexts. When people get sucked into large-scale conflict, they are often victims of circumstances, or puppets of their political masters; drawn in by a sense of duty and an obligation to ‘do their bit’. This doesn’t make them any less heroic, any heroism often comes out of immediacy, or expediency. This isn’t a criticism, just something that needs to be looked at through the long lens of history.

As previously mentioned, for the purpose of this final piece, this particular person, (who I will call ‘Tommy Atkins’), is a composite of a bunch of people who I came across either directly or indirectly. Bear in mind that I was born only 13 years after the end of WWII.

Tommy’s story.

Tommy seldom spoke about his experiences in far-flung places; after six years of war he was happy that he lived in a world of peace and had survived while many of his friends hadn’t.

In 1956 they tried to press the Queen’s shilling into his hand again, remobilised to address the call of the Suez crisis, but he just threw the letter onto the fire; he’d done his bit.

Tommy had fought across North Africa, crossed into Sicily and gone the whole length of Italy chasing the Germans northwards. He had seen the ruins of Monte Casino and had been at the liberation of Bergen Belson, witnessing its horrors first-hand. A version of Tommy had been on the D-Day landings, and when that job was done was then sent over to mop up in Burma, dealing with Japanese prisoners of war, who, by his account were grateful to Tommy and his comrades and glad to be out of the terrors of the jungle.

If anyone had stories to tell it was Tommy – but he didn’t. My recollection is that he would only feel comfortable talking about the humour he had with his friends in the regiment; the nicknames, the leg-pulling, practical jokes, but never a mention of those who didn’t come back and the circumstances of their deaths.

(For examples of Tommy-like humour I could recommend the autobiographical writings of Spike Milligan or George McDonald Fraser).

Tommy never polished his medals; he stuck them in a drawer for other people to find after he had passed on. Oh, when pressed he would go to the annual reunions, but even those thinned out as more and more empty chairs appeared.

It was clear to me that Tommy had spent six years engaging with a determined enemy who were militarily as good as him and, in many cases better equipped. They weren’t the tribesmen that the colonialists had fought, they weren’t villagers with pillaged or cheap weaponry, the AK47’s snaffled from the Russians, this was Junker JU 88’s, Tiger Tanks or Japanese on bicycles who cleverly and completely wrong-footed allied defences. Until El Alamein they were on the back foot, they were losing, that was until Montgomery turned it round and Tommy dug his heels in.

In normal life, in civvie street, there was nothing to ever suggest that Tommy had been in the military; there was no flag hanging outside his house; he didn’t stand up when the national anthem came on the telly, he knew the difference between gestures and reality – Tommy was a realist; after that experience, how could he be anything else?

Tommy was content to let the historians tell the stories and felt no compulsion to fill in the gaps. He had no desire to revisit the past, he just carried himself with a quiet dignity and tried, as best as he was able to act as an example to the next generation, even though the youngsters were now in the fast lane and he was left choking on the dust.

I suspect that Tommy had no need to project these experiences into his perceived identity; a bit like how we want to be recognised as human beings and not defined by our jobs; when someone asks, “What do you do for a living?” it’s an easy way of slapping a label on you. The Tommy that I knew would consider ‘soldier’, ‘sailor’, ‘airman’ way down the list of how he’d prefer to be recognised.

Ecce Homo!

Photo by Tony Liao on Unsplash