Remembering Serjeant Robert Graham – and millions like him

Across Britain tonight lights will be turned off at 10pm to mark the World  War One centenary. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey said upon the declaration of war in 1914: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”. Crowds gathered in Trafalgar Square to enthusiastically welcome the beginning of the war on August 4th. Some were still there long into the night as Britain declared war with Germany.

My Great Great Grandfather saw the start of the war – The “Great War” – but I can’t vouch for his enthusiasm at its outset. Certainly he served throughout most of the conflict, so there must have been some desire to serve. Serjeant Robert Graham fought in the 32nd Kite Balloon Section. Working on observation balloons meant being sent up high above the battlefield on an observation platform, suspended just below a giant flammable balloon filled with hydrogen. Those who worked on observation balloons are widely believed to be the first to use parachutes, so regular was the need to jump from a platform to avoid a fiery death when the balloons themselves came under attack. And that’s before we even get into the nature of the job, perched precariously above the battlefield, waiting to be hit by a stray bullet or a shell.

It wasn’t a bullet that killed him though, nor was it the fiery death from above or the fall from an airborne platform. It was the “Spanish Flu” of 1918, which killed far more people than the fighting itself, exacerbated by the conditions of wartime Europe. He died on November 7th, 1918 – just days from armistice – of the 1918 flu.

His wife must’ve heard about the news days later – perhaps after the joyful end of the war. Perhaps she had thought that the long awaited day was about to come. That Robert would soon be home from the war and they could continue their lives together. But when the news came, and she was left without him in the pit village of Chopwell only a few miles from where I grew up, the pain must’ve been unbearable. She chose the words that mark his gravestone:

“It is hard to break the tender cord where love has bound the heart”

He is buried in Terlincthun British Cemetery on the northern outskirts of Boulogne, alongside some 3,300 others. I don’t know if she ever made it to France to visit his grave, nor his two daughters – aged just 8 and 9. I doubt they did. Most people from Chopwell in 1918 could no more travel to France than they could go to the moon. Yet Robert had gone, spent years in a foreign land doing a dangerous job. He would never return.

Was his death in vain? How on earth can I say one way or another, 96 years later and living in a world that Robert would find utterly alien and incomprehensible. Even the very concept of a “blog” written on the “internet” would prove difficult to explain to him, and I’m not sure I’m any more qualified to comment on his world, his sacrifice or his Britain. I know that I find talk of freedom and liberty jarring though. World War One was about many things, but it didn’t secure a free and fair Britain. Whilst Universal Suffrage may have come for men in 1918, it was ten years before women received equal voting rights and thirty years before the principle of one person one vote was established. Robert’s surviving brothers in arms returned to a Britain that was deeply unfair, riven with divisions of class and gender and race. And that’s before we get onto the prolonging of colonialism and empire.

Robert – and millions of others – did what they thought was right. They signed up to fight a dangerous, mechanised trench war in the world of the cavalry charge. They went far from their families and were often callously sacrificed for the most meagre of reasons. Those who returned and those who didn’t were all victims of the war. As Bill Stone, one of the last Tommys, said “irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims”. I can’t bring myself to say that their sacrifice was worth it – because slaughter of this kind can’t have been. But I can honour their memory. Tonight I’ll remember Robert Graham, and his family back home in Chopwell, waiting for him in vain.

The legacy of the “great” war is that most of us have a Robert Graham in our family.

This evening, we will remember them.