A quiet place.
To an enemy, our hands are the most immediate threat. With our hands thrust as far away from our body as possible, most of us are defenceless, except for those with awesome kicking skills. Here, two soldiers play at war as if they were boys, except the gun and bayonet are real. And the war is real. But so are the smiles, for now.
My submissions for the weekly photo challenge usually come from my father’s war album filled with black and white images. So, in that album I find nothing blue. However, in his sketch books, while he usually favoured green (don’t know why), I found this painting of a seascape with blue sky and blue sea. It’s a photo challenge, so I submit this, a photo of a painting. Before photographing it for this post, I had never noticed the edge of a sunset on the horizon. Nor the signature on the right.
I did, however, submit a photo of real life for the unofficial challenge by Ailsa (see my previous post).
While waiting for the WordPress weekly photo challenge, I’m responding to Ailsa’s challenge to find a photo of reflections. See hers here: http://wheresmybackpack.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/reflections
This one of flamingos in Helwan Gardens, Egypt in 1942, is perfect for the theme. The AIF soldiers (my father was one) visited the gardens when on leave in Cairo.
This photo has a smudged look which resembles my own unspectacled vision of lights. Unable to focus, I can’t tell where a light begins and ends.
The photo comes from my father’s war album and has the caption “King Pharouk celebration”, though the name is more commonly spelt Farouk. At 16 years of age in 1936, he was crowned King of Egypt, its penultimate king. I’ve searched through Google images for photo clues and found one showing him at a celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday, standing near a huge crown with draping lights, as they are in my photo here. The date would be in the early 1940s.
Though Egypt was neutral for most of World War II, allied troops including Australians were posted there and Egypt thus became a potential target for German and Italian bombing, so cities were blacked out at night. But the extravagant King Farouk who lived a lavish life refused to turn off the lights in his palace in Alexandria. His fellow Alexandrians were not happy.
The photo I chose for the ‘Together’ challenge shows soldiers far from home, undoubtedly lonely for family and not wanting to isolate themselves from the local people.
It reminded me of the concluding words of George Sand (pen name of Mme Aurore Dudevant) after spending a couple of months in a deserted monastery in Majorca, separated from almost everyone except her family and her lover, Frédéric Chopin. Two paragraphs express her need, not for solitude, but for companionship:
“In the stormy days of youth, we imagine that solitude is the great refuge against attacks, the great remedy for battle wounds. This is a grave error. Life experience teaches us that when we cannot live in peace with our fellow man, no poetic admiration or pleasures of art are capable of filling the abyss that forms in the depth of our soul.
I had always dreamt of living in the desert, and any simple dreamer will admit he has had the same fantasy. But believe me, my brothers, we have hearts too loving to get by without each other; and the best thing left for us to do is tolerate each other, for we are like children of the same womb who tease, fight and even hit each other, and yet cannot part.”
George Sand, A Winter in Majorca, 1855 (My translation)
In Australia, 25th April is Anzac Day. Anzac stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. On this day, in both those countries, we remember all those who have fought to defend their people and to retain the freedom and peace we love, through all the wars we have been involved in and those we are currently fighting in.
I’ve been submitting photos to this blog from my father’s war album, from his time in North Africa in 1941 and 1942. He wrote a few poems during that time, including one about the Anzacs. It’s several verses long but here I’ll give you the first and last pages. There are some spelling errors and other slips in his handwriting; my transcription following the images will correct them.
Anzacs Forever
This camp’s getting stale,
You could hear the boys say,
Wish they’d make up their minds
And bung us away.
They wonder why we won’t stay in,
Why we try to dodge the parades,
You could see them taking the old French leave,
Not one, but bloody brigades.
Then came one bright Sunday,
One chocked full of surprise.
“Move out tomorrow,” the Captain said,
Then did the gleam come to their eyes.
So, as you strolled past all the tents,
You could hear them chat
Of women, the race horses,
This, the other, and that.
*****
For those gallant sons are Aussies
And they’ve ne’er been known to flinch,
It’s just the stuff they’re made of,
They’re soldiers, every inch.
They’ll fight for King and Country,
Protect the friends they know,
They’ll even fight for the weaklings
That are afraid to go.
Let’s hope and pray
It won’t be long
Before they are returned,
To carry on, just like before,
With the freedom they have earned.
They’ll go back to their jobs again,
Some may prefer the track,
But they’ve upheld the name of
The great and glorious A.N.Z.A.C.
R.E. Bruce
© Patricia Worth, 2012
I found this photo of the early morning sun over the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, probably Port Said which faces east. It was taken during the war, in 1941 or 1942.
I selected it because of the sunrays bursting out below darkish clouds. I love the silhouette of the lamppost and the large tent, but what I love even more is what appears on an image like this, one that I’ve looked at for the past fifty years as a Kodak 4″ x 3″ photo in an album, when I brighten it with an image editor and all the detail of the tents, the lamppost, the fence and the man in white becomes evident. The scene was captured by a Brownie box camera, but no one back in Australia knew what was below that morning sky, until now. It’s an exquisite pleasure to draw details from a black and white photo which have hidden there all these years. See a photo I submitted during the February photo challenge, where some words I had ignored, because barely visible on a tiny photo, became plain as day with a bit of image tweaking.
Here’s the photo for the Sun challenge, as it looks in the album:
And below is the photo with adjusted curves. For me, someone with bad night vision, this is what I imagine it’s like to see in the dark.
The subject of this photo is clearly the architecture. But then, I can’t stop looking at its left edge. The photo is one of many in my father’s World War II album, from the months when he was in the Middle East, mostly Egypt. He entitled it “Temple”, though I’m pretty sure the photo was taken in a mosque.
I have a carpet on my floor closely resembling those on the “temple” floor, which makes me feel the 70 years which have passed since the war are nothing in the history of Oriental carpet designs, and nothing in the history of geometrical forms covered in stylised vines and wreaths, all of it hinting at the perfection of God. The written messages fascinate me, all the more because I can’t read them.
The photo I submitted for this week’s photo challenge, Journey, reminded me of a poem in my father’s poetry book about the hats in the photo: The Old Slouch Hat. The name of the hat reflects the way it is worn ‘slouching’ on one side while the other side is often pinned against the crown to allow a rifle to be slung over the shoulder. It was worn by Australian soldiers in the Boer War and World War I, then again in World War II, and every war since.
The handwriting is my father’s but the words are by a ‘soldier in Tobruk’, Libya. My transcription follows these images.
The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly glamorous,
The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly chic.
But there’s something more than beauty,
A glorious tradition,
In the old slouch hat
That will ever to it stick.
*****
The old slouch hat,
It’s not exactly elegant,
The old slouch hat,
It might be rather plain.
But it showed the world the stuff
That Aus. sons were made of,
Did the old slouch hat,
And it’s doing it again.
When I chose this photo of soldiers on-board a ship on its way to or from the Middle East in 1941 or 1942, I noticed, for the first time, the hat shadow. And then I thought about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince. Perhaps Saint-Exupéry had seen soldiers’ hats when he was in North Africa in the 1930s. If the on-board photo is flipped horizontally, the shadow looks just like the Little Prince’s “drawing Number One”:
If you’ve never read his story, you won’t know that the Little Prince showed the grown-ups his masterpiece and asked them if his drawing scared them. “Why be scared of a hat?” they asked. But he tells us, “My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.”
But back to the photo challenge: these soldiers are going on (or have been on) a journey that most of them will regret. Yet they look pretty relaxed here. Actually, pretty hot. They were probably travelling close to the equator. My father wrote some poetic lines about the boredom and wretchedness of being on-board a troop ship for weeks at a time. When you’re 20 years old and volunteer to go abroad to defend your country, it probably feels adventurous. And then you sail off, no turning back.