Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
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RT @nick_routledge: @culturaltutor Powerfully affected me as a teen, visiting those cemeteries. Most of the dead barely a year or two older than me it seemed and the gravestones went on forever. 'This Dead Sea of arrested lives,' Kipling called them. Have you read his short-story, 'The Gardener'?

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Nick Routledge@nick_routledge · 26 Apr 2022

@kebayf Kipling, one of the First World War's earliest and most prominent public supporters, wrote 'The Gardener' while searching war cemeteries for the grave of his son, last seen on the battlefield at Loos, blinded by an injury, staggering, alone.

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Quoted by@millinerd As a child, war memorials in church helped turn me against religion. Conscripting Christ to sacralize any nation's slaughter struck me as insane. I understand grief and gratitude placed the flags there. The theology is still wrong. Both things can be true.Quoted by@britgardhistory By 1921, 1,362 British veterans, recruited as cemetery gardeners and tied by their own suffering and sacrifice, were tending to dead comrades, buried in foreign fields. The context then, for Kipling's tragic tale. ?s=20