For thousands of families, the poignancy of Remembrance Sunday has its source in a private grief that reaches down through generations. For my family this has certainly been true, but it was a long time before I began to understand it.
The first stories ever told to me were about my grandfather Gordon and the First World War. As I sat beside my grandmother in her little flat, she would tell me how, early in 1917, Gordon had led a small company of men through the wire and up to the opposite lines. On the edge of a German trench something had exploded under him, and he was knocked face down into the mud. Later, after the raid, a search party had gone out at night, but in the wreckage and darkness the men hadn’t been able to find any trace of him. My grandfather was reported missing, presumed dead. He was 23 years old.
Remembrance Sunday: The traumas of war that haunt us still - Telegraph
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