And life is…
This poem, ‘Into Battle’, was written in 1915 by an officer serving in the First World War, Julian Grenfell. It was published in The Times the day after his death from war wounds. The poems draws on different threads of life as providing strength to the...
Luck be lavender tonight
Lavender is a resistant plant, surviving a generous spectrum of cold and heat, rain and drought. It’s perhaps therefore an appropriate plant to bring you bomb-dodging luck in a blitz. I liked this anecdote by Steinbeck, firstly the details that people remember...
Come back in a few years
Steinbeck’s parting shot on leaving Kiev a few years after the end of the war had razed the country, celebrates their resilience and determination. Their invitation to him to come back also signals a confidence in their own reconstructive capacity. Whether...
Resilience on legs
During their month long trip to the Soviet Union after the Second World War (and during the Cold one), John Steinbeck and Robert Capa spent a few days in the bombed out siege-opolis of Stalingrad, where they found human scenes, some startling in their extremity and...
How to surprise and shake people
Grossman’s war writing is interlaced with subtle and not so subtle pleas for individual kindness, small, humble, random, spontaneous, and free of corrupting ideological pieties. Here he comments on the habit people in war acquire for suffering, whether they are...
Just visiting
In 1946 John Steinbeck, with his friend the photographer Robert Capa, spent a month in the Soviet Union, including the war-ravaged city of Stalingrad. Here Steinbeck describes a touching encounter with a little boy for whom the memory of his lost father was clearly...
The resilience of the gardener
A beautiful image of resilience despite decades of war and years of drought: a green, tended and elaborate garden. Rory Stewart is humbled by this and other signs of precious normality. ‘Despite twenty-four years of war and four years of drought, the grass was...
The joy of peace
I believe we have a tendency to take peace for granted, though every day of it is a gift. Here Iris Origo captures the exuberance they felt when the Second World War came to an end. She was married to an Italian and kept a diary as the frontlines moved to and fro...Yes, sign me up!
