Remembering Great Uncle Harry

It’s impossible for me to imagine what those last Autumn Days of 1917 were like for you in the hell of the battlefields of Passchendaele.
Seeing the photographs and reading the accounts of those days makes me so very proud and yet, so very very sad that someone in my family endured that torture.
I try to find out as much as I can about you as I believe that nobody is really dead as long as someone living remembers them.
I sometimes lie awake and wonder what you went through.
In between the shots and explosions would you and your battalion sit in the trenches and swap tales of your home and your family? Would you talk of your childhood, the games you played, the pets you had and how your mother would sing you a Welsh lullaby and kiss you goodnight?
In your rare hours of sleep, did you dream that you were a boy again playing with your brothers and sisters in the garden? When the dream ended and you woke amongst the stench of death, did you wipe a tear away and wish you could go back to Dreamland and feel your mother’s touch one more time?
Did you and your comrades hold out any hope of survival or did you know that you would soon be in the arms of your Maker? Did you pray that this was indeed a war to end all wars?
It’s 91 years since you gave your life for your king and country but on this Remembrance Day 2008 your family remember you with love and pride.

In Loving Memory of Private HARRY WILLIAMS

282479, 2nd/7th Bn., Lancashire Fusiliers

who died on 17 November 1917

Remembered with honour

TYNE COT MEMORIAL

I fell in a trench. There was a fella there. He must have been about our age. He was ripped shoulder to waist with shrapnel. I held his hand for the last 60 seconds of his life. He only said one word: 'Mother'. I didn't see her, but she was there. No doubt about it. He passed from this life into the next, and it felt as if I was in God's presence. I've never got over it. You never forget it. Never.
—Harry Patch, last survivor of Passchendaele, 12/07/2007

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.