In Respectful Memoriam to an Ancestor
72 years ago today a young soldier, aged 28, died in battle at Tobruk, Libya.
He was one of many who gave their lives during WW2 on the battlefields of North Africa. The hot landscape he found himself in was a long way away from the East End of Glasgow and I often wonder what he and his compatriots thought of the scorching sun and heat of that country. This young soldier, dead 19 years before I was born, left behind a very young wife, a small son and an even smaller daughter.
Theirs was not an unfamiliar situation. Many young mothers were left to grieve their husbands and bring up a young family as best they could. His death was a personal tragedy for those who knew and loved him, for those he left behind. His death set in motion a chain of events full of love, twists, turns and happenings that would not be believable in a novel. It is a sad truth that the death of soldiers is the price paid in wars and as such, is merely one more story amid a sea of similar tales.
But each soldier has a personal story and that personal story echoes down the generations. For this young soldier, a cobbler and a blacksmith by trade, life stopped at 28. Yet 72 years later, his absence is still felt. There is an incomplete section in the weave of the ancestral tapestry of our lives. He would not have lived to be 100, no man from his background and time would be likely to reach that age. Yet the role he should have played in a family history as father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great- great-grandfather is a blank canvas. He had so little time with his son and daughter. Would he have been delighted with his subsequent seven grandchildren, seventeen great-grandchildren and six great-great grandchildren? He generated quite a tribe – what would he have thought of us all?
Who he was, what he would have become, what he may have thought – all was lost on June 12th, 1942.
In respectful memoriam to an ancestor:
Gunner Joseph Clark Smith (1914 – 1942)
11 (Honourable Artillery Coy.) Regt. Royal Horse Artillery.
