The raid was strategic. The intel was supposedly useful. That doesn't bring anyone back, but people do what they can.
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Today is ANZAC Day in Australia, and I can't stop thinking about a man who wasn't one.
This story must be told by one of his siblings' grandchildren (which I am) not his own for reasons that will be very obvious.
I can't use any names at all, because it feels wrong to lie and these events were specific enough that any detail might narrow it down too much. As it is, any member of my family who reads this will know exactly who I'm talking about. If this is too vague, mods, I apologise.
It's a story about people. About soldiers who don't have the heart for cruelty, and civilians who do have the heart for kindness, and young men who don't come home from war.
There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier
Who wandered far away and soldiered far away
There was none bolder...
Actually, he was a Scottish pilot, but the song keeps playing in my head today.
When the Second World War broke out, a young Scotsman signed up to do his part. It could be said that his family did more than their share - his younger brother joined the army, his sister joined the auxiliaries, his cousin was a Wren (WRN - the Women's Royal Navy Service), the list goes on.
He became a fighter pilot.
He'd seen the glory
He'd told the story
Of battles glorious and deeds victorious
He flew, and fought, and survived, and then he got some new orders. Between then and his departure he saw one of his cousins - not the Wren, this one, but a cousin who lived in England then and did her best to give him a family's farewell every time they said goodbye. She saw him often, because she lived near the base where he was stationed.
She remembered that he'd seemed concerned about his next mission. He didn't seem to think very highly of the plan, but she didn't know what it was until later. After he didn't make it back from Dieppe.
And now this soldier, this Scottish soldier
Who wandered far away and soldiered far away
Sees leaves are falling, and death is calling
And he will fade away in that far land
And now we introduce a new character to our tale: a Frenchwoman, who was living then near Dieppe. Close enough to hear the battle. Close enough to hear the crashes when fighter planes came down in a field near her village.
One RAF, one Luftwaffe. The Allies suffered more casualties, including among pilots, than the Germans at Dieppe, but the Scotsman did not go down alone.
The Frenchwoman picked flowers from her garden and walked out to the field where the planes had fallen. There were two guards from the occupying Germans there, who told her to leave, but the guards were just soldiers, and seemingly had no heart to enforce it, because the Frenchwoman ignored them and they did nothing as she added her flowers to the mound that all but covered the wreckage of the Scotsman's plane, as she stood a minute in silence, and then they let her walk away.
The Scotsman was buried in the cemetery of the village church, his tombstone facing the doors of the church itself.
Because those green hills are not highland hills
Or the island hills, they're not my land's hills
And, fair as these green foreign hills may be
They are not the hills of home
The Frenchwoman saw the Scotsman's name as she walked out of church, and her heart shook with it. The Scotsman was buried with his initials and his surname, all the people who buried him had, but his surname was one she knew. It's a surname that is common in certain parts of Scotland, and not really anywhere else, but the Frenchwoman knew that it was also the name of her mother's father, a man who fell in love with her grandmother and moved to France to be with her long before.
Eventually the war ended, and the Frenchwoman's heart ached for the family of the fallen pilot, the family who shared a name with her grandfather, who had lost a son and brother in a foreign field. She wanted them to know - what had become of him, that he had been buried, that his grave bore his name and that there had been flowers for him.
She wrote to the British Government, to the War Office, and begged to be told how to reach his family. They said they couldn't tell her, but if she sent them the letter for his family they would send it onwards. She did, and they did, and she wasn't sure if she'd hear from them - but then she did.
One of his sisters wrote to her, and they corresponded for a time. The pilot's family had been shattered by the war. It was more than a decade before his surviving siblings could be united again, could travel together to France to meet the Frenchwoman who could guide them to their brother's grave and tell what she knew of his fall.
And now this soldier, this Scottish soldier
Will wander far no more and soldier far no more
And on a hillside, a Scottish hillside
You'll see a piper play his soldier home
There's an epilogue to the story that, well. You'll have to take my word for it that it's true, because the documentation of it - and there is documentation, as it happens - is of course all too revealing.
The Frenchwoman and the pilot's siblings loved one another immediately. It was as if they were family true - and then the Frenchwoman's own son came home, and stood next to the pilot's brother, and they saw that the two were like enough to be brothers themselves.
The cousin who'd said farewell to the pilot before his last mission made a hobby of the family history in later years. She looked for the Frenchwoman's grandfather, and traced him, and found that his family had come from the same area as our own. The records aren't quite conclusive enough to identify exactly where the lines diverged, but it's as likely as anyone could reasonably figure that when the pilot fell, far from home, he fell where his cousin, if somewhat distant, would be there. There to hear him. There to put flowers on the wreckage and flowers on his grave, and there to tell the family where to find him to carry his story home.
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