ambulance train

 Words failed me yesterday while thinking of the unknown Punjabi soldier on an ambulance train who would not see his home again.
     The trains with their wounded occupants were extensions of the squalid Western Front, and nurses complained about the language barrier between them and their Punjabi patients. One nurse learned a little Punjabi, giving her patients the priceless comfort of hearing their mother tongue.  

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Macclesfield war memorial, centrepiece of the front cover of In Our Fathers' Footsteps, 2018. A century on from the end of WWI, it​ shows Britannia honouring a fallen soldier against the background of a darkening sky and a black cloud with a silver lining.