A striking image of a soldier kneeling over a comrade at Omaha Beach, Normandy, on 7 June 1944.
The drenched soldier stares despairingly into the distance, while his hand rests tenderly on his comrade’s body.
The dead soldier’s boots protruding from the blanket adds to the image’s poignancy.
For me, the photograph conjures up emotive images in my mind, such as Mary cradling Jesus’ mortal body, after he’d been taken down from the cross.
Despite a battlefield littered with graphic scenes of wrecked hulks, scorched vehicles, and scores of dead, it’s this most human-of-photographs that remains with us eighty years on.
The image of Second Lieutenant Walter Sidlowski was captured moments after his squad had rescued drowning men from a sinking landing craft.
‘We swam out and took a few each time and brought them back to shore,’ remembered Sidlowski.
Sidlowski didn’t recall Walter Rosenblum snapping photographs.
‘We didn’t speak to each other,’ said Rosenblum. ‘For me, it was the picture of heroic beauty.’
I find that depicting these human moments in my non-fiction books and novels best conveys the travesty of war.
In my novel ‘Night in Passchendaele’ the protagonist wraps his coat around a wounded friend, before leaning down and kissing his forehead.
His dazed comrade stares ahead blankly before murmuring, ‘Is that you, Mother?’
This passage reflects similar moments that I’ve read in soldiers’ war diaries – moments that never cease to move me.
‘Night in Passchendaele’ out now:
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