Monday 1 November 2010

At the Going Down of the (Alien) Sun...

Ninety four years ago today, the 13th Battalion of the Pennine Fusiliers vanished from the Somme leaving, in their wake, a great scar on the landscape.

This year, for the first time in living memory, there will be no WW1 veterans gathered at the memorial in the nearby town of St. Germaine or laying a wreath at the site of the Harcourt Crater to remember long fallen comrades, comrades who found themselves, as the Hepton Footage would have us believe, on another world.

Their legacy may yet exist on that nameless alien planet and it may be that "They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old" at least, that is, if the theory of Relativity holds sway.

But today in Broughtonthwaite, at 7.30am wreaths were laid at the foot of the war memorial before St Chads in memory of those who vanished this day, at that time, in 1916.


We will remember them.