He paved the way to honouring all those soldiers who had died in battle only to be buried in massed graves and never to be identified. However, it would be his actions following the war that would ultimately prove to be his greatest contribution. Indeed, he even received the Military Cross for rescuing an officer and two men under heavy fire on the Somme in 1916. Whether this meant following them into the trenches to provide support, into hospital to check on their recovery, or ultimately to stand witness to their sacrifice at the graveside, Railton was always there. Whilst many of the Army Padres had avoided the frontline, he had felt duty- bound to go wherever the fighting men went. The mind of the world was in a fever.’Īs an Army chaplain on the Western Front, The Reverend David Railton had supported countless soldiers in their darkest hours of need. The endless shedding of blood ceased but there was no real peace in the souls of men or nations. Do you recall that dreadful year of reaction? Men and nations stumbled back like badly wounded and “gassed” warriors to their homes. Even then, it may have taken significantly longer if it had not been for the inspirational idea of one man, Army Chaplain The Reverend David Railton.īy the end of the First World War nearly 900,000 men and women in the United Kingdom had given up their lives for King and country. It would take almost two years before the nation was able to take its first steps towards recovery. He finished up – he was a great athlete, a good boy at school – he finished up in a lunatic asylum and died only within a year or two of the finish of the war.’Ī contemporary account of the return of a First World War Veteran. ‘One of my friends who went out there, when he came back after the war he was accustomed to shut himself up in his home or in his garden and he wouldn’t come out at all and nobody could get him to. The brave tormented souls who suffered from this did so largely in silence, even shielding their pain from those closest to them. This was an age where there wasn’t any understanding of Post - Traumatic Stress Disorder there was simply ‘shell shock’. Months on end of enduring heavy artillery bombardment in the trenches had left many mentally scarred for life. Against this backdrop of discontent and poverty a generation of men who had witnessed so much death still had to somehow find some reconciliation and peace within their own minds.
Nonetheless, for the ex-servicemen promised a ‘land fit for heroes’ by the Lloyd George Government, they returned to a country rife with unemployment, where social tensions rested on a knife-edge.
0 kommentar(er)
