Dan Snow's History Hit - Stories of War with Max Hastings

Episode Date: November 14, 2021

As the country remembers the sacrifice made by those men and women who have given their lives and health in serving the nation Dan is joined by Sir Max Hastings to examine the ever-changing face of warfare. His new book Soldiers: Great Stories of War and Peace examines not just the heroism of those who have fought wars over the centuries but also the suffering and squalor that conflict brings. Sir Max also reflects on his own experiences as a battlefield reporter in Vietnam and the Falklands, the effect those experiences had on him and why battlefields continue to fascinate him and the public.Warning! This episode contains strong language and may not be suitable for children. 

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We've got Sir Max Hastings back on the podcast. He's one of the most popular guests we get on. He's one of the most popular, widely read military historians in the world. He's written some gigantic history books. He has been on battlefields himself. He made his name for himself as a young reporter in the Vietnam War. He was in the Falklands War and he's seen many other conflicts. And that's before he started editing some of Britain's newspapers newspapers his latest book is a kind of reflection looking back on his career some of the most interesting stories some of the most interesting things he's come across in the course of that career some of the most interesting stories

some of the most interesting experiences first-hand accounts of war both by civilians and men and women who took part in the fighting it's fascinating I thought it'd be appropriate to talk about it during this Remembrance Week when our minds are turned to conflict for those who never came home and those who did come home perhaps with complex physical and psychological injuries that require long-term care and support. It was great to have Max Hastings back on the podcast. Let's take on war and on the writing of war history as well. If you want to watch Max Hastings in action, we've got some documentaries in which I go and talk to him over at History Hit TV.

You can also go listen to other episodes in which I've recorded with Max and many other historians and veterans and people who've experienced history. You can do that at historyhit.tv. Historyhit.tv. You go there, you get 30 days free if you sign up today. We've been going for four years now. So I think I have to stop saying

we've got a new history channel. We're four years old next week. So it's not a baby channel. It's now an infant channel, but it's not infantile, I should quickly add. Please head over to historyhit.tv. Go and check it out.

World's best history channel. But in the meantime, here's Max hastings max rakers be back with you congratulations on the new one it's a very different kind of book this one this is not one i've written this is a collection of the best stories that i've come across in all the years, first of all as a schoolboy, and then as a correspondent on the battlefield, and ever since then as a historian, of stories about men and women at war. And what I've tried to do is to illustrate, it sounds a bit pompous, but the condition of the warrior through the ages. And it's changed dramatically that throughout history from David and Goliath onwards, people who fought were heroes. And an awful lot of the early literature about war is about heroes. But I find it fascinating to see how in our own times,

the perception has changed that yes, we still give Victoria Crosses to people who are brave on the battlefield, but somebody christened the age in which we're now living the post-heroic age. And I think people are now much more skeptical about wars and about heroes and about the value of sacrifice. All those old lines, he's gone to a better place. And I think nowadays people look at these vast cemeteries in France and Belgium, and they don't think it was a waste of time. People don't think that. They're pretty sure that it was worth it,

but by God, they don't want it to happen again. And the attitude to soldiers, I think, has changed. So all this in my book, I've tried to bring together some stories that are funny, some stories that are heroic, quite a lot of stories that are unheroic, to just give a feeling that if you read this book from the quotations from the Bible onwards, you're getting some sort of feeling about what it's been like over the last two or three thousand years to have been a warrior. The books like this that I would have read when I was years ago when I was a young lad would have been straightforward tales of heroism I think wouldn't they? You're more

interested in these little episodes that appear in the sources that just tell you what it was really like is it that kind of authenticity that you've searched for? Some of the stories are very moving because they do tell tales of very brave people. One of my heroes and very close friends was the historian Michael Howard, who died at the age of 96 a couple of years ago. And Michael used several stories of his in the book. One of them was at the beginning of the Second World War when he was at Oxford, and he was approached by the RAF band to ask whether he would like to train as an oboist and play for them. And he went to see his tutor, and he said, well, what do you think?

And his tutor said, well, he stammered, and he said, well, I can see how it may seem a very attractive thing to do. But when it's all over and they ask you what you did in the war and you tell them you played the oboe, it may not sound quite so good. Well, Michael took the hint and he joined the Coldstream Guards. And one of many things I loved about Michael was his honesty. And first of all, his description of the first battle he was in, which was at Salerno in August 1943, when he won a military cross. And he

described the general muddle and confusion of the battle in which luckily for him, most of the Germans, which they didn't often do, ran away. But then afterwards, he told another story about how a year later in northern Italy, he was sent on a patrol with a single Coldstream Guardsman. And just as they approached the German lines in darkness, crawling along, hearing German voices, and suddenly there was a thunderous explosion. And to use use the cliche all hell broke loose and flares and machine gun fire and so on and he shouted the guardsman are you all right and the guy shouted no he said i'm in bloody agony he said i've trodden on a mine and he said my leg's gone and michael thought what do i do he said the guardsman was twice his size. There was no way he could carry him. And in the end,

he turned and ran, he Michael. And somehow he got back to British lines. And after the war, he went back to the grave where, of course, this guardsman had died. And he said he sat by the grave for a long time, wondering what he could have done differently in that situation. And he wrote, I'm wondering still. Now, the point about these stories, they show all sorts of aspects of being a soldier. First of all, Michael described how he became, quote, a hero, but in the chaos of the battle. And then he described how he sort of, in his own eyes anyway, became a bit of a coward and nobody blamed him. And his colonel, when he got back, said he'd done the only thing he could do. But Michael was haunted for the rest of his days. So that's the sort of range of stories that one tells.

And when you go back to history, that's the way it always is, that the honest people who write about war, they know that although sometimes there's what people call glory, there's also so many terrible, terrible moments. What's so interesting about military history, I think one of the reasons that practitioners, so soldiers today, sailors and airmen, and women love military history,

is there are such powerful underlying themes that seem to remain constant in a way that no doubt is true of religious history as well, but it's made so plain on the battlefield. When you went through this book, were you very struck by that? Or do you really come across periods in which people did feel very differently to the way we do now, their descriptions of war are very different? Oh, I'd say an awful lot has changed. That, for example, the norm has changed of what's expected of people on the battlefield. If you look at Waterloo, for instance, 1815, that the stuff that soldiers standing in squares all through that terrible day, being fired out at close range by the French, not many

minute by minute, but hour after hour, and having to stand in the square watching those around them moan down. So that at the end of the battle, as you know so well too, that there were one or two British squares in which the squares were still there at the end of the battle, but the dead were heaped, that there was hardly anybody left alive. And in more recent times, people were just not expected to stand what people stood. I mean, in the Napoleonic Wars, to qualify as any sort of hero, you might sometimes have fought for 10 or 15 years, and you might have been through 20 or 30 battles. Well, nobody nowadays. Nowadays, if you survive for six months in a war zone, you're

thought to have done pretty well. I always remember after the Falklands War, I was at a dinner attended by Harold Macmillan, the former Prime Minister, who of course had been in the First World War. And he was listening to all the speeches about the Falklands and about the Battle of Goose Green, in which 17 men of the Parachute Regiment had been killed. And I remember hearing Harold Macmillan mutter, he said, in my war, he said a battalion lost 17 killed would not recognize that it had been in a battle. One very important change, which again was in the 20th century, because of conscription, you had an enormous number of citizen soldiers, many of them very highly educated and some

brilliant. So you got preposterous figures like the novelist Evelyn Waugh, the novelist Anne Nippol, all the rest of it. They didn't make very good soldiers, but they made wonderful writers describing what it was like with the soldiers. And some of the funniest episodes in my book are the descriptions by people like Evelyn Waugh, or Leo Tolstoy, or Dostoevsky, or George Orwell, of all the stuff that happened to them in wars. And yeah, nobody is ever going to put them in the record books as great soldiers, but by gosh, they certainly deserve to be in a book like mine as wonderful recorders.

I mean, I think one of the stories that still makes me laugh out loud is the account of Auburn War, Evelyn War's son, when he was a National service subaltern serving in Cyprus in an armored car troop in about 1958 and one day they were out on a patrol on a UN peacekeeping mission they stopped and he said he suddenly noticed that the machine gun on one of his armored cars was out of true and he leaned up and grabbed the barrel and pulled it down so that it was straight as it was supposed to be and he said suddenly i noticed that it was firing at me and hitting me in the chest so he said i jumped aside pretty sharpish but not before i think five or six bullets had hit him in the chest and his account of this experience he said for those who are

frightened of being shot i can tell you that for the first half hour, it doesn't hurt at all. And you laugh out loud, but of course it was ghastly. And he was taken to hospital where by miracle he survived, but they removed one of his lungs and part of his kidney and his spleen. And he said he delighted the surgeon when he woke up, who told him he'd removed his spleen. Bronvor asked him, will it improve my temper? And all these stories, that's the comic bit. But of course, there are also all those ghastly tragedies about all the young men and young women who terrible fates befell. And of course, now in modern times, I've tried to write a lot about, now that women are becoming

ever more important on the battlefield, to try and describe what war is like for them. And it is different. It is different. It's no good pretending that for a woman in uniform at war, that it's all exactly the same. I'm afraid blokes going on being as difficult and bloody as they always are in peacetime. And some of the accounts by American women soldiers of what they went through with the hands of men in places like Iraq,

just being the usual sort of blokes that blokes are, it makes pretty cool reading. But if you want to understand war and modern war, you've got to get to some of that stuff as well. It's funny with military history. Lots of people say that there's some sort of voyeuristic enjoyment that people get from sort of reading about these tragic events of the past, these great battles, or perhaps a sort of weird fantasy element, you dream yourself onto those battlefields. As a military history fan, as a fan of your writing,

I don't get that. It's funny that people mischaracterize it like that. This book is not designed to fill people with a great sort of excitement and thirst to go to war, is it? I hope that some of the stories in it will entertain people. Others, I hope, will teach them a little bit more about what war's really like. That I've included some pretty squalid stories, because you have to include that. There's one particularly vivid and horrible account of a man who was badly wounded at Arnhem, very badly hit in the chest. And suddenly, while he's lying there, well, they're all trying to think,

what can they do to keep him alive for another hour or two? Of course, the Germans firing from all directions. And suddenly, this incredibly badly hit guy he says i want to shit and they look at each other in complete bewilderment one of the blokes said no you don't and they were in somebody's dutch house because they still had some of the inhibitions of peacetime life that they felt well we can't just let him make a mess all over the floor. So two of these blokes, they lean up. The only thing they could find to let him shit on was a saucer. And the officer in charge, he said, a saucer.

He said, this is insane. But these two men hold him up. And it's ghastly. It's horrific. It's incredibly squalid. But if you want to understand what war's like, you have to understand what war's like, you have to understand things like that too.

So I hope that nobody's going to accuse me of glamorizing war. Why do we read about it? War, all the cliches are true. It's the extremes of both the best of human nature and the worst that goes on fascinating us. I think most men who've never been in battle wonder how they behave. I'm often asked, because when I was young and stupid, I went to a lot of wars.

And nowadays, people often ask me, what's it like? What does it feel like? How do you think I'd behave? And I always give them the same answer. I say, I think you'd find you'd probably behave a bit better than you think you would. But it's very hard to explain to those who haven't been there what it's like.

I had a very close friend who was about a mile from me on the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War in Israel in 1973. And he was in a car, which he was moving the car when it was suddenly hit by a Syrian rocket. He was killed. And I was with a mutual friend of ours the other day. And it sounds an almost mad thing that I said to him. I said, our mutual friend had been the one who went and checked his body and took his passport and went back and told everybody he'd been killed. Actually, it was a photographer,

Don McCullough. And I said, Don, what did Nick look like when you got to the car? And that sounds a sort of mad question to ask anybody, but Nick was such a close friend of mine. I'd been haunted almost for 50 odd years thinking about that and thinking about Nick's death. So at one level, I hope it's nothing as cheap as voyeurism that makes people like me write books like this or rather collect collections like this and also write the books that I do. So I hope it's a bit more than that. But also all the time, we're exploring the limits of human experience and wars are about the limits of human experience. You're listening to Sir Max Hastings talking about war.

More coming up. Land a Viking longship on island shores. scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

I, having visited far less battles than you, but I do find you can understand how it's both dreadful, but it's also very compelling, isn't it? When you're out there, you think, I'd do anything to be at home in Britain and look at hedges and sunsets and peaceful lay-bys. But then strangely, when you get back to Britain, you sometimes have this strange desire to go back into that extreme environment. And soldiers surely have got that same thing. They're desperate for wars to finish, and yet Nelson's captains would raise a toast to a bloody war again. You get these two competing emotions. Let's be realistic. The British army is finding it far more difficult to recruit young men today for a citizen army than they did when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were going on. And sometimes stupid people tell frightful lies about this. They say, oh, these poor young men going out to fight in

these hopeless wars. These young men, I regret to say, were gagging to do it. And I was rung up not so long ago by a very serious-minded American academic who said, had I suffered post-traumatic stress as a result of all the wars I went to when I was young. And I gave her as courteous an answer as I could. And I think she'd probably been shocked if I gave her the crude answer, which was no. One question in my mind, which somebody who's dealt a lot with soldiers and post-traumatic stress said to me, he said, did you ever kill anybody? And I said, no. He said, I think it does often change things for people if you've actually killed people yourself, which I never have, thank God.

But it's hard to describe. When you're young, I'm afraid, many of us are reckless and stupid and frankly sensationalist. I first went to Vietnam when I was 24. And I thought it was absolutely wonderful that somebody was prepared to pay me, BBC in this case,

to fly around in helicopters and go up to Hong Kong once a month on R&R and all the rest of it. And of course, one was absolutely terrified some of the time, but I'm afraid that was a reflection. I've spent most of my life discovering that all the nonsense my father and the other men in my family talked about what fun they had in World War II. War's nonsense. And trying to grow up a bit in one's attitude to war. You talked about different periods. I'm very struck recently by how much work's been done on volunteering. Nelson's Navy, the 18th century Navy, Churchill, well, the famous misquote, rum, sodomy in the lash, awful. And yet actually, there was quite a lot of volunteer.

him in the lash, awful. And yet actually, there was quite a lot of volunteer, the slums of Georgian London, the drudgery of working in the fields. Sometimes war and the military did offer, you could understand a kind of attractive alternative to that life. During the Falklands War, one day during the air battles at St. Carlos, I was on the bridge of the command ship Fearless. And her captain, captain Jeremy Larkin he turned to me and he pointed to the young Bofors guns crews out on the bridge wings and he said isn't it amazing you look at these kids 17 or 18 years old and he said in England they'd be soccer hooligans and here they are doing this fantastic job and I said afraid, Jeremy, it's always the same, that tragically for mankind, mankind's never found a way of motivating, especially very young men, more than the

challenge of war, that, as you just said, it is this peculiar contradiction. On the one hand, you realize it's ghastly. On the one hand, you want to be safely at home, sleeping in a warm bed. But on the other hand, you do get this terrific charge out of doing it. And that's when you're very young. And sometimes the people I feel sorry for are the older people who've discovered how ghastly war is and been at it a long time. As for example, if you were a Russian soldier in 1941, and by 1945, you'd had enough. You wanted to go home. You'd had more than enough. But of course, nobody was going to let you go home. You had to go on and on. And another of the stories I've told in the book was a quotation of a British infantry officer in Holland in about

December 1944. And he was saying they'd been at it since Normandy, and suddenly he heard that a young officer, enormously popular, Billy Hartington, the son of the Duke of Devonshire, had been killed. And he said he felt this terrible hollow feeling. He said, this is what it means to be an infantryman. You just go on and on until you're killed. And a lot of people who manage to

find your first battle thrilling, very often by the time you get to the last battle, that you've had more than enough. Another of the stories that I'm always fond of was one that Harold McMillan told me when I was sitting next to him, a very nervous young man, at a dinner, and we started talking about Field Marshal Alexander. And Alexander had been the Allied commander in Italy in 1944-45, when Macmillan was the senior representative of the British government out there. And Macmillan said to me at dinner, he said, the last time I saw Alex, we were going into the theatre together, And I said,

one of those old man stinks to him. I said, Alex, wouldn't it be lovely to have it all to do over again? And Alex turned to me and he said, oh no, we might not do nearly so well. So what I'm trying to say is it is possible. You can have the jokes and you can have the comic moments, such as Evening War, for instance, described at length, but you can only justify having those comic moments if you also include the tragic and the horrific moments. Speaking of horrific, we're so used to thinking of the First World War as the kind of nadir of the military experience

that humans have ever been through. The Western Front, the Italian Front, the Mesopotamian Front, arguably even worse. How do you think it comes down when it comes to war fought at a distance, that kind of mechanical industrial warfare that Ernst Jünger talks about, Storm of Steel, arbitrary death from miles away, or the Shield War at Hastings?

I mean, is it possible to talk about better or worse or different experiences? Some experiences, for instance, although the Falklands War was horrible for some people for short periods, the whole business only lasted six weeks. You can't compare that to those that went on for years. That people who think modern weapons inflict especially terrible wounds, I think to be stabbed with a spear or hacked about with a sword, to have limbs removed with swords, was every bit as bloody. The idea that somehow to be killed at the Battle of Hastings

was a less ghastly experience than to be killed at the Battle of Somme. And my own great-uncle, who was at the Somme, and who was a very thoughtful man, in fact, he somehow, amazingly, he won a military cross, but he contrived to enjoy parts of the First World War. But he wrote me a long, very thoughtful letter in the 1960s, and he said the more he studied other wars, and for instance, he thought those who went through the Waterloo campaign,

it was every bit as ghastly as the Somme, and he thought it was absolutely ridiculous to complain that it bit as ghastly as the Somme. And he thought it was absolutely ridiculous to complain that it was especially ghastly. What was different in the First World War? It was the first huge war waged by citizen-soldiers and very literate citizen-soldiers. So they recorded their experience in a way that the soldiers of the past, mostly illiterate, had not. And people also, the British have got this. I tried very hard, as did some other historians, during the commemoration of the centenary of the First World War, to try and convey the message to the British public that the

idea that this is a uniquely ghastly experience is complete nonsense. If you were a Russian soldier in World War II, the casualties were far higher than they were in France in 1914. But people have this fixed idea in their minds, and it's very hard to shake them from it. What you had in the First World War in France, you had some exceptionally sensitive and articulate, in some cases brilliant, writers the caliber of Siegfried Sassoon or Robert Graves telling their stories. And I've included examples of all these in the book. But it did create a misleading picture in the minds of the modern British public

about that they feel there's a uniqueness about the First World War. And actually, there was a uniqueness in some ways for the British, but the Russians suffered far more. You take even the First World War, if you want to get down to numbers, Serbia lost a million dead, which was a lot more than us. In the Second World War, people like the Yugoslavs and the Greeks lost far more people killed than we did. But inevitably, we still see things through a nationalistic prism. And although this book, in this case, because I'm English, it is a rather Anglo-centric book. Once you've got past the Bible and classical Greece and Rome, most of my stories tend to be

about the British. But in general, when I'm writing about wars, my books about wars, one's always trying to get people to think outside the nationalistic box, to just try and see things a bit beyond it. I mean, my father sincerely believed, he went through the nationalistic box, to just try and see things a bit beyond it. I mean, my father sincerely believed, he went through the Second World War, but he sincerely believed the British had won it, with the Americans providing the chewing gum and the Russians out there doing God knows what. Well, thank goodness we've all moved on a bit from that. I agree.

I mean, the 18th century, you read descriptions of the Valkyrie Expedition or the Cartagena, people of dysentery, typhus, starving to death. Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, I mean, those are among the most horrific things you're ever going to read. Therefore, it's interesting we have this idea of the First World War as being such a moment of discontinuity. You mentioned Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. I'm always fascinated that the modern French people still think so well of Napoleon when he lost around about 400,000 dead from the Grand Army. Admittedly, quite a lot of them were foreigners and not French, but nonetheless, his army, he lost 400,000 dead, which is more than we lost in the Second World War.

And yet the French still think he's wonderful, whereas we're not so keen. So the idea that somehow the First World War experience was worse, and also if you went through Normandy in the Second World War, the Normandy campaign, not D-Day, which wasn't actually particularly bloody. Far more people were killed in the days and weeks after D-Day than were killed on D-Day. But if you went through that experience, you went through something quite as bad as the Somme or Passchendaele. And people's casualties, one was absolutely stunned when I wrote about the Normandy campaign. And you looked at the number, some infantry battalions which lost half their strength, that it was absolutely mad idea that that was unique. But in those days, it was the fact that the witnesses were so much more articulate.

If you go back, although the Peninsular Campaign and the Napoleonic Wars, there were a lot of very articulate British eyewitnesses there. Generally speaking, the further back you go in history, you go back to the Battle of Crecy, and most of what's the so-called eyewitness descriptions, you can't believe a word they say. They were mostly made up afterwards. What has changed is just you are getting now these incredibly articulate descriptions. And I say I'm really struck. I read a lot of American women's memoirs of Iraq and Afghanistan.

And gosh, that gives you a different perspective too. Inevitably, heroism is talked about in this book. We're in a period now where heroism is a very contested concept out there on the mean streets and the culture war. How should we think about people in the past we once described as heroes who were imperfect, awful in many ways, and yet did things that were heroic in the moment, or we may still find inspirational in that narrow sense. How should we think about heroes in our post-heroic generation? The first thing we should always recognize is that every society desperately needs heroes when there's a war on, and your country has got to be defended.

But the longer I study heroes, they were very often incredibly brave men who did amazing things. Not many of them we want as household pets. Many of them were deeply unattractive human beings who were pretty horrible to their wives or their children or whatever it might be. And a lot of them were very unhappy people. I mean, I've studied some of them very closely. I've met quite a number of them, the ones who survived. So we start by saying, by gosh, we need them. So never sell them short. But on the other hand, I always remember again to revert to my favorite historian, Michael Hyatt, who won the military cross at Salerno. Michael once said to me, he said, when you're 20 years old, there is almost no folly you will not

commit in order to win the military cross. And what I've come to understand, which I didn't understand when I was young, is physical courage comes really quite easily to a lot of very young men because they're stupid, because part of being young is being stupid. But as you get older, first of all, you tend to get a bit more cautious. first of all, you tend to get a bit more cautious. And secondly, in my case, I've come to believe that I was brought up by my father, especially to overvalue physical courage, whereas moral courage is much rarer and more important. And in my experience, women more often possess it, that I never see. In fact, this morning, I was having some stupid little medical procedure at a local hospital.

And while they were doing it, they said, does it hurt? And I said, well, no, not significantly. And I said, as I've just been reading an account of Lord Uxbridge taking great pride in having his legs sawn off after Waterloo without making a sound and just asking everybody if they didn't admire the fact that he was not making any fuss about this. to asking everybody if they didn't admire the fact that he was not making any fuss about this. And secondly, I said to the nurse who was doing things to me, I said, don't you usually find that women make far less fuss than men? And she said, absolutely. And I think this is true. And I've got a book upstairs that I loved when I was a child called Stirring Deeds of the Great War

about all these sort of boys' own account of these young men who did amazing things, and they were amazing things. So it wasn't that I'm shortchanging what they did. I haven't forgotten an account of a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain who said in those days, we were all little John Waynes. We were 19 years old. We didn't give a shit about anything except getting back for a few pints in the pub in the evening and trying to find a girl who was stupid enough to go to bed with you. And I'm

afraid young men do tend to be effectless. And this does not mean I don't respect heroes, but we have to see that there are many other virtues that matter at least as much in our society. Last question. I've been asking lots of people this recently. If you could be a fly on the wall, this is such a book of such a huge scale. so if you could have witnessed any of these moments, which do you think you'd have liked to have seen? I suppose I'm ashamed to say almost every historian is fascinated by the Battle of Waterloo because it was one of the most extraordinary moments. Wellington, in my view, was Britain's greatest ever military commander. And that set piece of Waterloo, where Napoleon went head to head with Wellington and lost. And if you have the slightest trace of patriotism or any spirit of affection for

the British Army, such as I have, I do believe it was the British Army's finest hour, even though I'm very wary about making too much of glory on battlefields. At the same time, there was glory at Waterloo, and by gosh, one would love to have seen it. Thank you very much, Sir Max. The book is called Soldiers, Great Stories of War and Peace. Thank you.

Not a bit, my dear. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks.

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