Editing can add to the quality of portraits. Over the past couple of years, much effort has gone into the editing of new photo shoots. This goes especially for removing at least a part of the glare in the lenses of vintage glasses used during my photo shoots. These four photos of Claudine are notable exceptions. Here the reflection of the sky is kept in situ to express that even in days of sorrow and shock, there is always light, somewhere above the dark. Hope for the future, especially when one has an open mind and is willing to learn from history. Admittedly, this is hard because of the endless repetition.
Claudine is posing here in a section of the graveyard where seven graves of British soldiers from the First World War are kept in perfect condition, even after almost a century.
When we arrived at this section of the graveyard, I heard music running through my head. Holidays in Ireland, 1979. A then famous group called the Furey Brothers had a gig in Dingle and this offered me the opportunity to see Finbar Furey playing the pipes. However, the memory from that concert that will always remain is the moment when Finbar started announcing a song he would sing next:
"The next song was written by Eric Bogle and it's one of the greatest anti-war songs of all time. Eric wrote it when he was a young man, hitchhiking through France. He was supposed to sleep in a hostel in the next village but he was very drunk, so he decided to climb over a wall and sleep in a field. And the next morning when he woke up, he realized that he'd been sleeping in a graveyard, using a grave as a pillow. So he sat down and wrote this fantastic song about what he saw, all around him"
The song Finbar sang was unknown to me at the time but it turned out that they were just back to number three in the charts with it. The name of the song is "Green fields of France". In the lyrics, Eric Bogle talks to the soldier who lied buried under the gravestone that the songwriter had used as a pillow. When singing the song, Finbar had his precious pipes on his lap. During one phrase in the final verse of the song, he became so moved that he beat the stock of the pipes with his fist:
"Young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
and again, and again, and again and again"
Aside from its universal beauty, the song was special to me as my own grandfather fought in the same war. Unlike Willie McBride and millions of other soldiers, my grandfather survived the war without any physical damage. However, he had a nightmare that kept coming back throughout the rest of his life. When he was in his seventies, I often shared the only bedroom in the house with him and kept myself quiet, pretending to sleep each time he surfaced from his recurring nightmare. He never talked about it but I managed to put the fragments together and finally understood what his recurring nightmare was about. He was lying in the trenches in France and two of his friends were lying some twenty yards on his right hand side. They asked him if he had matches with him so that they could smoke a cigarette. My grandfather crawled to them, handed them his matches and then crawled back to his own position. A few seconds later, a big shell hit his friends and they were torn to pieces. The worst thing was that they did not die instantaneously but only after minutes of agony.
In later years, I often sang "Green fields of France" on stage, dedicating it to my late grandfather. Needless to say, the story about that sad but great song came back to me yesterday when preparing myself for the posting of this photo shoot. Yesterday I was unable to find words but now the words are back.
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