[John Whitworth]

Come on, Nigel. The Guardian is not left wing? Is The Daily Mail right wing? These are descriptive terms, not abuse. The Guardian is not as left wing as Marxism Today. The Daily Mail is not as right wing as whatever the organ of the BNP is called. Would you accept 'left-leaning'. Oh and I'll stop trotting out old canards about the skirmish at Bannockburn when the Scots stop rabbiting on about it.

[Bill Carpenter]

A Renascence

by Robert Graves

White flabbiness goes brown and lean,
Dumpling arms are now brass bars,
They’ve learnt to suffer and live clean,
And to think below the stars.

They’ve steeled a tender, girlish heart,
Tempered it with a man’s pride,
Learning to play the butcher’s part
Though the woman screams inside—

Learning to leap the parapet,
Face the open rush, and then
To stab with the stark bayonet,
Side by side with fighting men.

On Achi Baba’s rock their bones
Whiten, and on Flanders’ plain,
But of their travailings and groans
Poetry is born again.


A Mystic as Soldier

by Siegfried Sassoon

I lived my days apart,
Dreaming fair songs for God;
By the glory in my heart
Covered and crowned and shod.

Now God is in the strife,
And I must seek Him there,
Where death outnumbers life,
And fury smites the air.

I walk the secret way
With anger in my brain.
O music through my clay,
When will you sound again?


.

[Nigel Mace]

You are the only person known to me who goes on about Bannockburn, John - so if you stop....

As to The Guardian's political credentials, I neither think 'left-wing' pejorative, nor accurate.
It once was a consistent shade of warm pink but now is merely pale beige with some fluorescent pink, deep blue and occasional green spots; its purple passages are largely confined to some of its coverage of the visual arts - but it does give some good black ink to Timothy Garton Ash, who remains not only the best but almost the sole reason - book reviews aside - for buying it; well, that and the awfulness of all the English alternatives.

As to remembrance, I always find two things running through my head.

One is a piece of film showing in Britain's cinemas in the autumn of 1938 from Edmund Goulding's outstanding remake of "The Dawn Patrol". Donald Crisp, in his magnificent performance as the Adjutant at the end of the film, as he receives the heroically dead squadron commander's (Errol Flynn) flying helmet and goggles says; "This says that a very brave gentleman died today - and what have all these deaths accomplished, in this war and in the wars that are to come?"

The other is the inscription on the monument at Montemaggiore al Metauro at the spot where Churchill, Alexander and Leese watched the final battle for the Gothic line in August 1944. It records that this battle awakened the memories of that other 'decisive' battle of the Metauro against Hasdrubal over two thousand years previously and regrets that so little has been learned in that time.