Wood Anemone in Wartime

“The ground of that wood was white with the wood anemone flowering as if it was in a peaceful English wood and not in the second battle of the Somme”

— Written by my grandfather, Chalres Langridge, in 1920

My grandfather had intense and deeply blue eyes with a slender frame and rosy red cheeks, a walking cap seemingly always on his head ready to head into the hills. I remember him as quiet and reserved, but my grandfather was always ready to talk about plants. Born in 1899 into the working class in England, he had no opportunity for formal education beyond primary school, yet his knowledge of plants was that of a Professor of Botany. On my few childhood visits to England, we walked through the hills admiring plants we passed, returning to his cottage to identify and press the flowers. During our walks, I gazed at him in awe, at his magical ability to know so many wild beings, and decided my grandfather was the smartest person I knew, that he knew everything.

What I didn’t know about my grandfather on those childhood visits with wildflower walks and “tea time” was he was a prisoner of war, volunteering for WWI at the age of nineteen. Soon after enlisting, he was shipped to France and engaged in an unwinnable battle with the Germans. Taken prisoner, surrounded by wounded soldiers, they were marched, carrying the wounded, to an ammunition dump where they worked all day, herded into a cage to sleep at night. Over the next several months, he was marched across France to clean villages after battles, clear roads, and work in ammunition dumps. All around him death and starvation were looming. Yet, while the other “chaps” were stealing off to find a cigarette butt in the woods, he would steal off to the woods to pick a flower.

I know my grandfather picked flowers as a prisoner because he kept a nature journal. On slips of cigarette paper and a pencil stub purchased from another prisoner using the ½ franc he had left, my grandfather meticulously drew and annotated over three hundred species of plants during his eight months as a prisoner of war. While noting in his journal that each camp was worse than the last, that he was surrounded by sickness and starvation with no food provisions except the small bread ration he received once a day and dried vegetable soup at night, he focused on extoling the beauty of the “glorious” wildflowers.

Bleeding Heart flower drawn by my grandfather Charles Langridge in 1918 while a prisoner of war in France during World War I.

In my own garden, I stop to sketch the bleeding heart that is one of the first flowers to come up in the spring. It is an unmistakable flower, the outer petals form a puffy heart shape with a “drop” of blood falling from the bloom, where the flower hides its reproductive parts. I watch a bee trying to pollinate the flower, using its feet to part the petals that make up the drop of blood. It is almost the same day, over 100 years ago that my grandfather sketched a bleeding heart flower, dissected to reveal these hidden parts, one of the first plants he drew on cigarette paper. He had been a prisoner for a month, and the day before he drew the bleeding heart, while spring flowers were bursting out all around him, the first prisoner died.