I studied history and have written about it for a living, I’d never been remotely interested in war or military history. At school we’d covered the causes of the First World War in our history lessons, but given that I had spent most of them alongside Tim Bennett at the back of the class drawing recreations of the weekend’s better First Division goals in our exercise books, not many of those causes actually went in.
One November an elderly maths teacher who had fought in the Second World War addressed our morning assembly on the last Friday before Remembrance Sunday. It was one of the rare occasions that we all listened, as he described how if every British man killed in the First World War marched two by two in through one door of the building and out through the other at regular military marching pace, twenty-four hours a day without break, it would take three weeks for every dead man to pass through. That was something that stuck.
Studying the war poets piqued a little interest. We were handed a collection called Up the Line to Death, which made an impression on me in that I could remember some of Wilfred Owen’s famous lines, mainly because they struck me as so anti-war in sentiment. I had no idea at the time, of course, but Owen was killed on the same day as my great-uncle, a few miles further south.
I knew names like the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele but wasn’t entirely sure why. I’d laughed at Blackadder Goes Forth and been struck dumb by its poignant final scenes. I’d buy a poppy if I saw one and observe the minute’s silence in front of the television every Armistice Day, but that was about it.
In Sarajevo I stood on the exact spot from where the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired the shots into Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia that killed them both and pushed over the first domino in the chain that led to the largest conflict the world had ever seen, and found it strangely underwhelming. I was more interested in the scars left by the most recent Balkan conflict, which were still evident all around the city, from the shrapnel spatters in the plasterwork of just about every building to the red resin Sarajevo Roses in the streets that filled the star-shaped shell scars from the artillery that had rained down on the city during the siege of the early nineties. This had been a war from my lifetime, one I’d seen on news bulletins as it happened. The First World War seemed so distant; there was nothing in Sarajevo to evoke it for me. Even as I stood on the noisy, fumy Bosnian street corner where it had all started, the First World War remained purely one-dimensional, tangential at best to everything in which I was actually interested.
Stumbling inadvertently across my great-uncle Edward changed that. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, what he might have been through and about how unfair it was that he’d been entirely forgotten. I found myself feeling angry at the pathetic, pointless waste of a young life, and guilty that he’d been expunged from the family narrative. With the deaths of its last survivors still comparatively recent, it’s not long since the First World War passed from memory into history, yet for me it was trying to move in completely the other direction.
I was confused as to why Edward’s death might be affecting me more than any of the others that I found in my family research. There were a number of early deaths equally as tragic and untimely: I’m descended from dock workers, with all the attendant accidents and disease that went with that line of work and the way of life that went with it. I had ancestors killed on quaysides and dying young from diseases and medical conditions that are entirely preventable today: my grandmother’s tuberculosis, my uncle Eric, who died from gastroenteritis at the age of eight months in the 1930s, surely equally as poignant, equally as tragic?
But Uncle Edward’s death in battle came to dominate everything else I’d found. Why should death in combat be any different from other untimely Victorian and Edwardian demise? Why should that be?
War, whether necessary or not, is humanity at its worst. Sometimes it can bring out the best in humanity: compassion, courage and selflessness, but the unimaginable horrors thrown up by the arrogance of certainty are an awful way to resolve awful situations. I can’t bear conflict of any kind. I’ve not been in a fist fight since a disagreement over a cup of tea with Gary Wayman when I was fourteen, and even then I’m not sure he noticed. Maybe Edward Connelly’s death stood out because war is such an alien concept to me, and I was imposing myself on his experience, wondering how I’d have coped, if I’d have coped. The thought of having to create enough hate and aggression to be able to kill a person is a bizarre one – even if it is based on the grounds that if you don’t kill them they’re probably going to kill you – especially if, like me, you’re a yellow-bellied scaredy-cat. And maybe there lies the rub.
When I tried to imagine what he’d been through I was trying to imagine myself in that situation: enlisting, being issued with a uniform, being trained and turned into a weapon of war, travelling out of the country for the first time ever, travelling out of London for the first time ever, being thrown into a war that had already been raging for the best part of four years, being among total strangers in a way of life and a daily routine that was completely alien to me, the subsuming of the individual into the whole, the constant threat of imminent, random death from a shell, a gas attack, sniper fire, a machine gun while advancing through no man’s land, a bayonet in a trench raid – even drowning in a flooded shell hole.
It was me I was imagining there, not Edward Connelly. It was me I was displacing from a comfortable everyday life of DVD box sets, the corner shop, Charlton Athletic, paying the council tax and eating takeaway noodles in front of Coronation Street into the world of mud, trenches, lice, Woodbines, gas masks, artillery shells, bully beef and all-pervading death. My life, my circumstances and my character were not remotely like-for-like comparable with his. Not even close.
The less I knew about Edward the more determined I became to find out. Finding the location of his grave made him slightly less of an enigma. He was out there. There was a headstone with his name on it. There was something tangible of Edward Connelly beyond a scan of a census return on a computer screen. He had left something behind, even if it was just his name chiselled into a piece of Portland stone over a box of his bones in a country that’s not his own.
It struck me that it was unlikely to the point of near certainty that anybody had ever visited his grave. He’d lain there in the Belgian soil for nearly a century, alone, forgotten and unvisited, his grave meticulously tended by committed and dedicated strangers to whom he was just a name among names. His background was one of extreme poverty: his parents would never have been able to afford to visit Belgium even if they’d had the opportunity. It might never even have crossed their minds. All his mother had was a devastating telegram, his posthumous campaign medals and her memories. No funeral, no grave to tend, none of the accepted rituals that go with the death of a loved one, and that’s even before you consider that no parent should ever have to bury their child.
Edward Connelly is a shadow flitting on the very edge of history. He left behind no letters, no diaries, no poems, no sketches – nothing. There are no anecdotes or testimonies to his character or appearance, no eulogies to the cheekiness of his smile, the twinkle of his eyes, the quickness of his wit, the kindness of his heart. There’s no clue as to whether he spent his Saturday afternoons at Queen’s Park Rangers or took the bus to Lord’s cricket ground. We don’t know if he liked a drink, jiggled baby cousins on his knee, argued with his father, brought his mother flowers when he could, tickled his younger siblings until they begged him to stop, kicked a football around the streets with his friends, took my grandfather catching tadpoles by the canal, exalted in the freshness of a spring day, liked to sing songs after a couple of drinks, was perennially late for work, had a sweetheart or paid sixpence at the music halls to hear Vesta Tilley whenever he could. Was he known as Eddie, or Ted, or Ed, or something else altogether? We’ll never know because he’s gone. All of him is gone. He’s a name written on a handful of official documents and chiselled into a gravestone. Edward Connelly has no legacy.
I have nothing in common with him beyond a surname and the fact that his middle name matches my first name. I don’t know why it troubled me so
