From the Front Line: Family Letters & Diaries, 1900 to the Falklands & Afghanistan, by Hew Pike
‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,’ reckoned Dr Johnson, and certainly every soldier thinks the less of himself for not having seen action. For four generations the extended Pike family has written movingly of the miseries of partings and of the ‘noise, violence indignity and death’ of the battlefield, but give any of them the choice between a cushy command at Catterick and the Normandy beaches and it is no contest.
‘Peace,’ writes the wonderful Reggie Tompson, back in England recovering from a bad wound on 24 December — ‘Peace Sunday’ — 1916, ‘Peace be blowed!’ and it is a sentiment that no Pike would have much trouble understanding. ‘I must say it is an appalling anti-climax and everyone is very disappointed that things didn’t go on for a bit longer,’ wrote his son-in-law — the author’s father — Willie Pike, on the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; ‘we were all so much looking forward to having a crack at the Japs and this has resulted in a terrible reaction’.
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