Digger:
Hello Clive.
Clive:
Hi David, how are you?
Digger:
Very well thanks. And you?
Clive:
Not too bad. It’s school sports day for my son today.
Digger:
Exciting times! Are they allowed to compete these days?
Clive:
They are actually. And even allowed to win at our school.
Digger:
That’s good. I’ve heard some funny stories about
schools being P.C. these days. In my day, we had the sack
race, the egg and spoon race and the two-legged race and
we were all in it to win it.
Clive:
I’m in middle England now and we’re very much allowed
to cheer and to compete and things like that.
Digger:
Good. I heard one story where children ran a race up to
the winning line and then stopped dead because nobody had
explained that they were supposed to run through it!
Clive:
Yes, we went through the period where everyone’s
feelings had to be taken into account all of the time. But
we saw the product of that out in south Africa recently
didn’t we? (England’s World Cup fiasco) There’s no
pride or effort, really.
Digger:
Don’t get me started about the football! The other day
on the news they were trying to explain the dismal
performance and they suggested: “Is it because the
manager is no good? Is it because the players don’t play
together enough and are too tired with our long seasons?
Is it because the structure of football in this country,
and the vast number of overseas players that are here,
doesn’t allow the local talent to develop?” And
so on. And, of course, it’s all of those things and
more.
Clive:
Yes, absolutely. We just have to get on with our lives and
then, as from August, seeing the same faces telling us
what energy drink can you make you best while they’re
picking up £30,000 a week.
Digger:
£5 million Capello is on and at last night’s press
conference he’s saying, in his clipped unintelligible
English, that he has been approached by other teams but
would like to continue as England manager! Of course he
would for £5 million. He should be on a small salary and
then a bonus depending on how far they get. Or not.
Clive:
I’d have thought FIFA should be saying that if you’re
England then you should have an English manager, just like
you have English players.
Digger:
Yes, and it’s not a racist thing.
Clive:
Of course it’s not, it’s about your country's
football. It has to be an English manager and an English
team.
Digger:
There are some obvious names like Redknapp or even
Beckham.
Clive:
I’d rather we went there with Redknapp and
under-performed than went there and did well with a
foreign coach because my Scottish friends wouldn’t let
me forget it if we won with a foreign coach.
Digger:
To the questions then… What is your background and how
did Battle Honours come into being?
Clive:
I come from a military family and my family has always
been in the military. So I tended not to concentrate at all
school. I was the world’s worst pupil.
Digger:
Maybe I was second worst then!
Clive:
I grew up in Welwyn Garden City and there were lots of old
retired soldiers.
Digger:
Why there?
Clive:
It’s a nice place to retire to and people think
they’re coming out to the country from London without
coming out too far. It’s the whole green belt around
London, so a lot of the Great War generation came out
here. So I’d carry their shopping and mow their lawns
and they’d tell me how good army life was. By the age
of sixteen I was in – I didn’t even go back for my
school exam results. I joined as a junior soldier, had
eight brilliant years, but had fallen in love at school and
knew soldering was a single man’s job and I couldn’t
do it forever. So I ended up at Sandhurst as an instructor,
teaching army cadets. And that’s probably where I
learned to speak to people. When a job came up in my local
police force in my home town I took it. I started working
part-time as a bit of a guide for a larger company and was
frustrated by not having autonomy over it all. So, I started my
own tours in 2004. What I really wanted to do was to have
small groups and to really walk the ground. I really felt
that if somebody said “Where were the Germans and where
were we?” on day three or four then I’d failed in my
job as a guide. Ground was such a key part of it and you
struggle to capture that when you’re on a coach. It’s
not the same at all.
Digger:
When you see the death toll in Afghanistan, 300 and
rising, how does that make you feel?
Clive:
Every soldier we lose is a tragedy for someone as well as
for the whole nation. Having been a soldier, we have a slightly
more reticent approach I think. You join the army and you
kind of hang up your right to say “We’re going to do
this and we’re not going to do that.” I still have a
lot of involvement with the British Army these days,
because we have a contract with them taking regiments on
tours because of the sorts of tours we do.
Digger:
Are they a higher quality of soldier than in the past? You
hear so many glowing tributes to them from friends,
family, fellow soldiers and officers and it sounds as
though they are all very big characters and high calibre.
Clive:
Yes, I think that’s the product of the system. The basic
training, where you’re given a raw product from various
different backgrounds from different parts of the country.
The first thing you need to do is get everybody down to a
base level. So, for example, I had a guy from Portsmouth
in my room, eight Glaswegians, myself and a guy from
Cornwall. And the Cornish guy was going to be eaten alive
within the first 48 hours because he didn't have the same
social skills as the rest of us had from an urban
background. And by the end of the basic training, where we
all had been made to feel as though we were rubbish but
then passed at the same spec. Well, then we all passed on the square and
he was as competent and confident as the rest of us. And
what that short, sharp, army system does is it delivers a
brilliant product and it’s one of the few jobs in life
that you’ll be in where you can’t hide and you can’t
bluff your way through. Once you’ve passed off the
square you know you’ve got a certain standard of
individuals. And when you get to your working unit you know
you can rely on absolutely everyone. Because the chaff has
been weeded out. In civilian life, that’s not acceptable.
Digger:
There is a bit of weeding out, is there?
Clive:
Yes, there is. I started with 75 and ended up with 28.
Digger:
There’s quite a lot then.
Clive:
Yes, absolutely. It’, about mental strength with these
sixteen, seventeen and eighteen year old lads as much as
physical strength. The door is always open and people can
leave at any time. And that’s what makes it unique,
because it’s a volunteer army and so everyone who is
there wants to be there. And they can rely on each other
and they’ve all got the same sort of ethos in life. They're
as good as Wellington’s army and as good as General Haig’s.
And until someone says that the Sergeant Major must
tuck them up into bed and make them a cup of tea and not
hurt their feelings, they always will be.
Digger:
That was interesting, when they were talking about the
credit crunch, and that with the armed forces everything
was up for discussion. It couldn’t be taken for
granted that the three services – army, navy and air
force, would survive as they are, at least theoretically.
Clive:
Absolutely, well I’ll tell you where we have suffered
over the years as a military. We’re given a job to do
and we do it, occasionally we don’t do it in the same
way the media would like it to be done. But equally if you
look at Iraq we get involved in a long and sustained
campaign and then we leave and we hand over to the locals to
run the place. Now, invariably what happens, is to pay for
that bill they cut a couple of regiments. That seems quite
natural but it’s the opposite of performance-related
pay! That will happen again, but we’ve been what you can
regard as high-tempo for the last nine or ten years. At
some stage in the last government it was accepted that
there was something called the military covenant that
dates back hundreds of years. It’s never been written
down but there’s been an understanding – a sort of
gentleperson’s agreement, between those that run the
country and those that serve in the armed forces. To kind
of look after each other’s interests. And it was only
under the last government that it broke down and that’s
quite hard for me as I’m a traditional Labour voter.
Digger:
Yes.
Clive:
I’m from a fairly working class background.
Digger:
There again, it's not traditional Labour anymore is it?
Clive:
No, no. Not at all.
Digger:
Very difficult to separate them these days.
Clive:
It’s not the Labour party my grandfather would have
supported and fought both wars for. Because my Englishness,
and my passion for being English – I’m very proud of
the fact, but it comes with the rider that it doesn’t
make me any better than anyone else and I don’t see
myself as superior. And on St George’s day I just think
we should all listen to Billy Bragg's Between The Wars as
much as we should listen to anything else. It’s not necessarily
all about Land Of Hope And Glory.
Digger:
I wish we did celebrate our Englishness a bit more.
Clive:
It’s becoming more popular now, isn’t it? The taxi
drivers have put their foot down in London. For a long
while it was probably stolen by the BNP and that’s not
really acceptable. Englishness isn’t necessarily what
country you're born in, it’s what culture you embrace.
It’s hard to say what it is because we’re a hybrid
anyway.
Digger:
We are. I’m half Irish.
Clive:
That makes you half English as well! (Both laugh)
Digger:
I can see both sides. I can remember being in Belfast in
the early 70s when I was a young teenager and I was a
Catholic Brit, so I needed to be quick in making a
decision if somebody challenged me. But it was
intimidating over there with the army pointing guns at you
and the searches. We stayed at The Europa Hotel which had
the highest security fence and then fencing coming off
that to stop people lobbing explosives or whatever over.
And everywhere there were bollards to stop car bombs.
Clive:
Thankfully, it did take us a few years but by my time in
the late 80s we did have a different approach to policing/soldiering
in northern Ireland. In the early days we were as naïve
as the terrorists were, I think. So it does take a while
to settle it down to some semblance of normality and there
is still a bit of an atmosphere there, isn’t there? It
will take generations to make it right. It’s got to
start with the children, really, growing up as northern
Irish rather than Protestant or Catholic.
Digger:
It’s always a strange thing to do, splitting a country
arbitrarily along lines. Very odd to have a majority and a
minority.
Clive:
That’s why there’s no easy answer. It’s not as easy
as packing up and saying “Go on, the whole place is
Ireland.” It would be upsetting the silent majority in northern
Ireland that don’t want to belong to the south plus I
would think a majority of the south who can’t afford the
north..
Digger:
The irony is there are lots of Church of Ireland people in
the south and very protestant.
Clive:
Yes. And in both wars they really batted above their
average and punched above their weight. I think it’s 27%
of the British army in both world wars were Irish. You wouldn't
want to join the Irish Defence Force anyway because
they’re flying old planes and don’t get to do anything
but there’s always been quite a profitable recruiting
base for the British army in Ireland despite the troubles.
Digger:
What makes Battle Honours different from other 'war
walk' companies?
Clive:
I’ve not actually come across anyone who is a pure walks
company. Some add walks to their brochures as sort of
specialist events but that’s ALL we do. Our whole ethos
is to get people out on the ground and to see and
experience things from a soldier’s point of view. So, we
would always look to walk any battlefield in any part of
the world.
Digger:
You’re doing a walk at Arnhem, aren’t you?
Clive:
Yes, again there’s no reason, unless you have physical
restrictions, to go to Arnhem and not walk it. I can’t
see what you would gain by getting on and off a vehicle
there. Soldiering is generally done on foot and still is,
and to get the most from it you need to understand the lie
of the land, dead ground, forgotten places. Maybe way off from
the main road where you might not be able to get a cup of
tea and the toilet, but you might find an almost pristine
machine gun bunker or a cave that was concerted into a
chapel with graffiti in it.
Digger:
I’m trying to remember the name of where the British had
to retreat to finally – it was a really small area in
the end with a river to the south and surrounded by the
Germans on all other sides...
Clive:
Coming back from Oosterbeek. I've actually been back there
with veterans before and sat on that bank and listened to
their stories about crossing that river.
Digger:
There's some famous footage whenever there’s a
documentary about Arnhem and there’s the Paras being
paraded by the Germans to show off they’ve been
captured. They look really, really p****ed off! And really
tough as well.
Clive:
There’s the famous one where the soldier does a 'v' sign
to the German cameraman. It’s quite a famous shot. I
mean, these are British paratroopers and they were tough,
tough guys. This idea that because it was all in black and
white they were all poets. You just have to look at some incidents
in downtown Cairo in the second world war or the Battle of
The Wozza that was just before the Gallipoli landings.
They were pretty much destroying towns drunk in their disapproval of
the price of beer going up. Wellington once said “I don’t
know what they do but they sure scare the hell out of me.” You've got
to have some idea of the chaps you’re dealing with and
to get these old chaps back at Arnhem is quite amazing.
The quietest guy of all was an artilleryman who, because he
wasn’t a Paratrooper they came on the other side of the
Rhine in the winter of ’44 with a 25 Pounder field
gun. He hadn’t said much at all, but because he wasn’t
a Para he felt he shouldn’t be talking. But when he got
down to John Frost Bridge he came alive and he picked four
of us out at a time - there were twelve of us on the walk. He went
through all of the gun drills with us and taught us all
the shortcuts and how to do things and at the end he was hollering
at us like a Sergeant Major. You could see, just for that
moment, that he came alive and, of course, by him doing that,
that’s what we see as added value for a tour. We always
look to find something slightly different that we
wouldn’t advertise but that we can include.
Digger:
What is the range of tours that you do and where do your
experts come from?
Clive:
We walk anywhere, chronologically speaking, from Waterloo up
to The Falklands, so it’s as wide as that really and
even then we’re looking to go further back as the years
go on. There’s no industry standard as such for guides,
but The Guild Of Battlefield Guides, which is an
international organisation, run a validation programme
where you get to wear a badge if you jump through all
their hoops. It’s a twelve part process and the equivalent
to a degree level in guiding, similar to a Blue Badge
Guide. And I think I’m right in saying that we were the
first company to insist on the fact that all of our guides
had gone through that process. So I use four or five
guides and they’ve all achieved their badge and that can
only be a mark of competency. The Guild will never say
that if you don’t have a badge you can’t guide, but
the day will come when the public says “Why hasn’t my
guide got a badge?”
Digger:
Do you bump into Germans doing guided tours in the other
direction as it were?
Clive:
That’s the one sort of group we don’t, strangely
enough. It’s not a tourist thing for them and not part
of the travel industry out there. We do find Germans who
come out individually on pilgrimages to find their
relatives, but they will only be able to find the relative.
They won’t be able to put him into the perspective of
the war, the regiment and what they got up to. And
there’s been a few times where we’ve managed to get
them to join our tour and have taken them out and they
probably learnt more with us than they would have done
back home. It’s changing, because there’s a bit of a
cult following, particularly from America, where people
are interested in the German soldier from the first world
war. But we’re all not ready yet to embrace the
Waffen-SS and say they were only doing their bit. And I
hope they never do.
Digger:
No. It makes me very cross when history tells us about all the
massacres the SS were involved in. From Dunkirk onwards,
both British and American troops were slaughtered and also
civilians like the incident at Oradour sur Glane and
countless others.
Clive:
Yes, there’s that terrible baby’s pushchair in the
church with the bullet holes. And actually, if you go to
Arras, the firing post at the back of the Citadel can be a
very moving place. When you see the names of the people of
Arras that were shot for various things. Accused of being resistance,
or maybe even were resistance in the last war. Among them
you can see Chef du Jardin, which is Head Gardener
– a war graves gardener shot by the German Gestapo and
SS who were in Arras at the time.
Digger:
Some people try to say that, for the most part, many of
the SS were regular professional soldiers acting under
orders but it just doesn't wash. These were often brutal
and indiscriminate acts of terror or disproportionate punishment
for resistance.
Clive:
No, no, no, no, no. You don’t put that badge on unless
you know what you’re up to. It’s like there’s a hero
worship thing for this Michael Wittmann character out in
Normandy. No doubt a very able tank commander, better than
me, but to turn his grave into some sort of shrine that
people put crosses on? The guy was an out and out Nazi and
it’s not really appropriate, is it? There probably were
many Germans who were doing their bit for their country
and tying to make their lives better, but we need to
remember that Hitler took power via democratic process.
Digger:
There was a bit of German resistance.
Clive:
A bit of one, probably not as healthy as we’d like to
think and probably not as big as our own one would have
been if they’d got here.
Digger:
The theory goes that if they had invaded here it would
have shortened the war by at least three years because of
the resistance we could have achieved and the blockading
of the German supplies by the navy. You saw what happened
to the German troops in the Channel Islands when they
were blockaded.
Clive:
I think probably, by now, we would all perhaps have been
happy to live and may well have seen it as a war of
liberation. It’s a long time now and the precedent for
that would have been the Alsatians who were annexed as
part of the 1871 Franco-Prussian war. Then, in 1914, when
the French rolled across the border in revenge and they
expected everyone to come out with flowers and bunting
they were actually opposed by an Alsace-raised German unit
saying: “My dad may have been French but we’ve been
German for forty years now and I’m quite happy being
German thank you.” It’s interesting to see how our grandparents
would have seen it – I’m visiting my grandfather this
afternoon – he’s 89 and fought in Normandy in
the last war. And if I’d been going around saying “What
a result yesterday, eh Granddad? 4-1 to Germany, it’s fantastic
isn’t it?” (Both laugh) He might have a
different view.
Digger:
What are your most vivid memories of tours that you have
taken in the past?
Clive:
There’ve been individual cemetery visits where I’ve
been able to take people back to see a relative's grave
that have been particularly poignant. Gallipoli especially,
because it’s a long way to go to get someone out there.
And most people will just roll up a piece of paper with
Gallipoli written on it and throw it in the waste paper
basket and say “What a waste of life.” They haven’t
actually ever studied the campaign and how close it was. Even though there was the folly to think it up
they’ve not looked at the Heath Robinson tenacity of the
men who were there and how much they achieved while they
were there.
Digger:
It’s the lions led by donkeys criticism, isn’t it?
Clive:
I think, in this case, it was lions led by lions, but maybe a
donkey came up with the idea in the first place. That’s
probably a more realistic viewpoint.
Digger:
They didn’t consolidate, because they achieved the
beachhead and sat around. The troops were swimming every
day while the Turks regrouped and dug-in.
Clive:
We sent the wrong people in to lead because by then the
western front was the only place where the war could be
won. We couldn’t afford to send the right troops in and
we did find three or four divisions that could have made
the difference we just put General Stopford in charge –
the less said about him the better. Like most military
historians, not even most but all military historians,
you’ll find that we’re quite fair and we’re
certainly not scathing of the high command in The Great
War. We certainly understand what they were going through.
You can’t compare Haig with Wellington, for example.
Wellington had 200,000 men under his command and Haig had
2.5 million. So Wellington would have been a corps
commander in the first world war and the same with Montgomery.
I’ve just taken a school on tour – I do one school
that I’m very fond of and one of the questions they were
asked to study before they went away was: “Was Haig the
butcher of The Somme?” Which sounds like a very reasonable
question to ask until it’s pointed out that, actually,
Haig wasn’t in charge of The Somme, Haig was in charge
of the whole British army across the Western front. One
of his generals, Rawlinson, was in charge of The Somme and
every now and again Haig would check with him to see how
it was going but he also had his eyes on other things
going on across the country. Therefore, the better
question would be either “Was Rawlinson the butcher of
The Somme?” or “Was Haig the butcher of World War
I?” And if you are going to say he is then you have to
analyse his performance in 1918 where the British army had
180 days of continual victories. And only one side crosses
no man’s land with a white flag, and it’s not us.
It’s not so easy as to just put a white van man’s
stamp on it and say "That bloke's a butcher."
Digger:
And retrospect is a great thing as well.
Clive:
Yes, it is and military historians – we’re often referred
to as being revisionists when, in fact, history shows us
that we are revertists because what we’re trying to do
is bring the country back to the conclusion that they made
between 1918 and 1923. Which is when we had the enquiry
where they looked into the war and came out with the fact
that we had actually won the war on the western front and
therefore actually won The Great War, albeit at a huge cost.
Digger:
After a few years have elapsed things are seen totally out
of context aren’t they? These myths become reality.
Clive:
That's right. The revisionists were led by people like
Alan Clark – lions led by donkeys and the movie Oh! What A Lovely
War which is a great piece of cinematography and says more
about the sixties when it was made than it does about The
Great War. That’s when the revisionists came and said
“Let’s re-invent what happened.” But from the 1980s
onwards, there’s been a general mood to simplify things a
little bit and, by the way, when these guys came up with
these new theories in the sixties no records were released.
At that time they were still classified. Now you can
go down to the national archives and you can look at the
staff work that was involved in one regiment on one day. And to think that somehow they were sipping champagne in a
chateau thirty miles behind the lines just doesn’t add
up. And when you see that, statistically, whether it’s
from the rank of Brigadier to Lieutenant General you had a
higher chance of dying in The Great War than any other
rank. Because we lost nearly 400 Generals in The Great
War.
Digger:
The officers were often very clearly marked and the enemy
would try to pop them off first.
Clive:
Yes, very much so. It was 100 years ago roughly and then it was only 100 years between The
Great War and Napoleon and Wellington waving at each other
on the field of battle. And we’ve now come 100 years on
from that again and so Waterloo was as old fashioned to
the people in The Great War as that is to us. Waterloo is
now ancient history but there would have been people in
the trenches talking about their great grandfathers who fought
at Waterloo. It’s a fascinating subject, isn’t it? To
come back to your question though, I think one stand-out memory
was when we took a Canadian regiment back to Dieppe and unveiled
a memorial and we had twelve veterans on board at Dieppe.
And since that time, eight of those guys have passed on. We
won’t get again twelve veterans in one place and time
talking about their experiences. We had the local
population, who remembered the Dieppe raid, and one nun who
was 95 who at that time refused a German order to only nurse the Germans.
She said “I’ll treat everyone.” And she almost
risked her own life to treat these Canadians. And we got
them all reunited again and had a pipe band playing on the
beach and even arranged for a Spitfire to fly over for
them and they were all crying as much as me. So that’s
one memory that will stay for a long, long time. We flew guys
back from Afghanistan who are serving today to take part
in that ceremony. I’ve taken Lancashire Fusilier veterans
back to Monte Casino who were present at a Victoria Cross action
and to go through the ground with them and find out
exactly what happened is fascinating.
Digger:
Didn’t New Zealanders take it in the end?
Clive:
Yes, they were there. It was a very international affair
and some of the bravest fighting was from Indian and
Ghurka troops. Also French Algerians as well. The
Americans crossing the Rapido river was the American’s
most severe loss until then. If it hadn’t have been for Omaha beach
later it would have been a landmark disaster in the
history books and a text book 'how not to do it'. They had a
rough, rough time out there.
Digger:
If someone is thinking about embarking on one of your
tours, what sorts of things should they do to prepare for
it?
Clive:
They don’t need to do any background reading because we provide
that and we send out a reading list anyway. They need to
bring a pair of boots, a sense of humour and they need to
be aware that we have a wet weather programme that
involves them... getting wet! (Both laugh)
Digger:
Have you ever had anyone complain abut the mud or the
rain?
Battle
Honours Guided Tour
Clive:
No, there’s only once we had to stop a tour because it
was that bad but, do you know what? The same people that
evening said “Can we go out again now because it’s
stopped raining?” We did a twilight walk. We provide all
the relevant knowledge that people will need.
Digger:
Nobody fell in a trench?
Clive:
We’ve had a few little hiccoughs. You can’t be in a
industry like ours without having a few glitches. Stolen
passport, lost medication, road accident. These sorts of
things happen in life, don’t they? But really, because
the guides are usually ex-military or ex-emergency
services or ex-teachers and all have got their Gilt Badge,
so you’re in safe hands. They are not afraid to make
decisions and are risk-aware and not risk-averse.
Digger:
In what direction are your planning to take Battle Honours
in the future?
Clive:
The one that it’s currently on which is one of –
consolidation's the wrong word really in this climate.
We’ve not been effected by the climate like the larger companies
have because their margins are wider. And we’re fairly
high-end, really, when it comes to pricing because of the
quality of the product. But we will continue to chug along
offering tours for small groups walking all around the
globe, up to twenty tours a year. That way I’ve got
control over the quality of the product. What I wouldn’t
want to do is expand, become more accessible but then
dilute what we do. Because I think we’ve got it about
right and we’re starting to become the tour company for
tour guides and we have quite a few guides booking as
passengers on our tours. Some people say they may be
seeing our trade secrets but I think that’s the best
compliment we can get.
Digger:
That’s a really great plaudit that they're dong that.
Clive:
Yes. So we get a good mix and bunch of people on our tours
– there'll be enthusiasts, quite a few first-timers but
you find, with The Great War especially, there's no such thing
as a one-timer. It gets into your skin and you may come on
the tour for closure but it opens up more questions and
you want to go back and back and back.
Digger:
I still plan to go to Arnhem. I don’t know why but I
need to go there but something is drawing me there. I have
some great Dutch friends and they’re very Anglophile
aren’t they?
Clive:
It’s quite an over-populated country as well. You think
we have problems with our roads but as soon as you go
across the border from Belgium to Holland, I’m
invariably in a contra-flow in tailbacks somewhere and
it’s really frustrating.
Digger:
I went to a celebration where three villages met in a
hall, which was like a big warehouse, and they drank and
partied. Now, I’m over six foot, but most of the people
there, ladies include, were as tall or much taller than
me. I don’t know why they’ve all inherited the tall
gene.
Clive:
My grandfather’s memory of Holland is crowds of people
coming out and cheering them wherever they went. He was
liberating people all the way through and he ended up, in
the winter of ’44, at a place called Valkenswaard. He
was an 'advance airfield maker' for the RAF and they would
go into a field, create an airfield, and then the Spitfires
or Mustangs and Typhoons by that time would land and
he’d re-arm them and make sure the airfield was up and running.
One day, he wandered up to the Dutch boy who on the fence
nearby and starving, and he managed to get him some
chocolate from his mates. Now, that chap became the mayor of
Valkenswaard. He's called Tise and in the late 1970s I used to
get the best Christmas presents ever off of him. He still
comes over from time to time to see my grandfather who’s
90-odd now and not in the best of health and won’t travel
again. And Tise will never forget that one incident. A lot of the Dutch people don’t forget what
happened.
It’s funny, the school trip I’ve just been on and
their French teacher came, who was French, and a lot of
the children will see a cemetery with 12,000 graves and
think “What a waste of life.” Then, when you take
a French person like her there and ask her what she thinks
-
that the dead came from different countries to liberate
France from an invader and she said. “Waste cannot be
the word we use.” Duty and sacrifice aren’t words that
come so easy to us these days, are they?
Digger:
No. And on that key note I’d like to thank you for that insight
Clive and wish you the best of luck with your future plans
and endeavours.
Clive:
Thank you David. You too.
Battle
Honours Ltd
