Thread Two
The moth flies in erratic fashion fleeing the notes of multiple bugles at the Menin Gate Memorial tonight. Many visitors are here this fine and warm evening armed with cameras and children held aloft for better views. What is it that they have come to see?
Following the ceremony, the bugles rest, and the assembly lingers casting their gaze ever upward. Name upon name, elders and youth, some frail – others able to leap the stairs two at a time as regimental names provide the subject lines of the missing.
My observations have witnessed two families this evening. The elder father – a former serviceman with married son, daughter-in-law and grandson. They stand for pictures here amongst the wreaths. And yet there is one other family, with a teenager who stops his motion at the top step – turns his eyes towards the right and in an instant you see the understanding he has found. Something on this wall has mattered to this set of eyes. He lingers…we are still learning from the Great War.
——-SNIP———
Previously published Pipes of War website, 6 August 2018