Love on the Front Line

There is a nice article on the bbc website today about a new exhibition at the National Army Museum called Wives and Sweethearts: Love on the Front Line. As the title suggests, the exhibition, which spans over two hundred years from the 18th century to the present day, focuses on soldiers' relationships through a moving collection of letters, poems, drawings, photographs, images and tokens. The curator, Dr Frances Paton, describes the exhibition simply as being about "what it is like to be a soldier in love or what it is like to be in love with a soldier."

There is an excellent online exhibition space which provides access to some of the letters and photographs on display and tells some extraordinary stories. Highlights include a letter from Lieutenant Walter Newman, Royal Artillery proposing to his future wife, Miss Emma Browne, in October 1860. He replies to her acceptance with the lines:

"I cannot resist writing to say how happy I am that there is no obstacle to me offering you my hand and whole heart."

And there is a fascinating and lengthy letter written from Burma by Lance-Corporal David Banham, 94th Regiment, to a friend in England in 1845, in which he describes his wife as follows:

She occupys [sic] my sole attention as some day or other my life and the honour of my country might depend upon her. It is my muskett [sic] and the only wife I mean to be troubled with during my carreer [sic] of soldiering.

Other sections of the online exhibition cover the lives of regimental women and the experiences of prisoners of war returning home from captivity.

I've only briefly explored the online resources but of course I can't help wondering about the letters that were never written, the tokens never sent and of the experiences of those men who were, and still are, separated from lovers who are neither wives nor sweethearts. It rather made me think of the beautiful and deeply moving poem that charliecochrane wrote for Armistice Day last year called It will not be the same which closes with the lines:

It will not be the same for us as for other lovers.
But you are no less a man because of me
And I am not diminished because of you.

Wallpaper!

How cute is this? Boaty wallpaper!



I think this looks like the kind of wallpaper Mr Bush would use to decorate Hornblower's cabin ;)

There were curtains and cushions — stuffed with oakum — and a coverlet, all gay with
red and blue roses and green leaves painted on with ship's paint by some unknown artist in the ship's
company.

I rather like the boat in the picture too, though I'm not sure about the purple sea! Ohoy wallpaper from Swedish design company Fine Little Day.