November 12th – Also on the Chase on this magical afternoon, memorials of two very different, but conjoined wars.

Since it was Remembrance Sunday, I took in the Katyn Memorial, to the 25,000 Polish people – from troops to doctors, police to teachers – massacred in cold blood by the order of the Soviet Secret Police in the Katyn Forest, Poland, in 1940. The memorial was erected on the Chase some time ago, as Cannock has always had a large Polish population, from migration around the time of the Second World War. 

Shamefully, it took the Russians 50 years to admit to this atrocity, proof that the second half of the full two-part World War play inflicted it’s heaviest cost on Eastern Europe. There were many atrocities committed, by several different forces, all self-encapsulated horrors; it was as if grudges and conflicts unresolved by the First World War exploded and joined together upon the commencement of the Second.

The First world war was of course just as atrocious, but in different ways; the loss of a generation of men in the mud of Northern Europe can never be forgotten, particularly for a war ended by negotiation with no real victors. But the grave of Freda, the mascot of the New Zealand Rifles who were stationed here on Brocton Field towards the end of WW1 is almost whimsical in comparison to the Katyn tribute. But both are eloquent. Both are respected and tended.

And yet, we seem to learn so little from them.