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VE Day

May 10, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink

This weekend has seen the seventy fifth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, the which was celebrated on May 8th 1945 on what was given the soubriquet – ‘VE Day’ – or ‘V-E Day’ – or ‘V Day’ – or ‘Victory Day’ – depending whereabouts on the continent one was.

That this auspicious anniversary should occur in the midst of a global pandemic has, naturally, caused some controversy, since the public celebrations that might have been thought to be the order of the day could not reasonably take place. In the UK at least I can’t help feeling that – even had the situation not been as it is – there would have been some disputes as to the nature and relevance of any celebrations.

David Lloyd George said of the end of the Great War in Europe:

“At eleven o’clock this morning came to an end the cruellest and most terrible War that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.”

There are those among us who believe that such a hope should still be the basis of any and all remembrance. In his notable Zurich speech of 1946, Churchill said:

“We must build a kind of United States of Europe. The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important.”

There are – sadly – those in the UK who happily forget that VE Day was a celebration of the coming together of a continent of nations to defeat a small group of aggressors amongst its number and that the day itself is celebrated by more than just the plucky Brits. These zealots cleave to the image of Britain standing alone (regardless of the fact that she was backed by a huge world-wide empire and openly looked to the New World for salvation) and would love to see VE Day as a celebration of a victory over Europe rather than for it.

The exceptionalism that the UK currently shares with the US has served both nations poorly in their responses to the current pandemic and one of the rich ironies in the UK is that what remains of the generation that fought and won the war is currently dying miserable deaths in the nation’s ravaged care homes. The inevitable eventual inquiry into this tragedy will doubtless record that there had been a number of warnings in recent years as to just such vulnerabilities, the which were – sadly – ignored by successive careless or mendacious governments.

As is so often the case The Guardian cartoonist – Martin Rowson – manages to express in a single image that which I struggle to express in many words.

This moves me – at least – to tears.

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Will there also be singing?

April 7, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”

Bertolt Brecht, motto to Svendborg Poems, 1939

This poignant motto appears at the head of the last collection of poems published by Bertolt Brecht during his lifetime. He was by then living in exile from Nazi Germany in the town of Svendborg on the Danish island of Funen.

The ‘dark times’ to which he refers are, of course, considerably darker even than those which afflict us now, but a search on the InterWebNet for uses to which this brief motto has been put reveals a plethora of such instances in recent times – starting with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and gathering pace since 2016. The latest of which I am aware was by Chris Riddell for his cartoon on the Corona virus lock-down in the UK for last Sunday’s Observer newspaper.

When I first became aware of Normal Lewis’ wartime memoir – through Francesco Patierno’s film, shown on the BBC toward the end of last year – the current COVID-19 crisis did not even feature on the roadmap of impending concerns. Now, of course, contemplation of conflicts still sharp in the living memory has become something of a pastime – or more accurately a ‘pass-time’, since many of us are unable to follow our preferred pursuits and must needs instead find alternative ways to occupy the time that hangs heavy on our hands. It has become quite the thing to compare our current trials and tribulations with those of the generation that lived through the last world war.

There are good reasons for so doing – though even better ones for exercising finer judgement. We do indeed live in unprecedented times. As things stand we have no idea how this is all going to pan out, or into what reality we might emerge on the other side. When we look back we can discern no other period since the last war in which so many people’s lives were simultaneously thrown into chaos by such a crisis – be that through the direct touch of the pandemic itself, or through loss of employment, income or – even worse – of friends and loved-ones.

Writing about my father’s war-time experience in Italy – contemporaneous with that of Norman Lewis – I suggested that he had subsequently spoken very little about his experiences there. My mother would describe how she went outside to watch the vapour trails over south London during the Battle of Britain, but otherwise she likewise gave little away about how the war had affected her and those close to her.

We know – we think we know – from our readings of history, from novels and poetry and from the many film and TV productions concerning the war and its aftermath – just how broken and fragmented was the world in the latter half of the 1940s. Populations had been destroyed or displaced, the greater part of a generation had lost their lives, families and societies had been torn asunder, economies wrecked and great expanses of the old world reduced to piles of rubble. How could the world – the lives – ever be rebuilt?

Yet many of those who lived through that period chose not to – or simply could not – speak thereof… and the world – as it does – moved on.

In this age of instant and incessant ‘communication’ there is perhaps a case for saying rather less and listening – and thinking – rather more…

…and – yes! – I am aware of the contradiction in so writing.

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Naples 44 – part 3

April 2, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Inveterate lingerers upon these pages will no doubt recall (quoth he optimistically) my posting back in January of a brace of articles on the subject of the slim volume of wartime memoirs by the British travel writer and novelist – Norman Lewis – that was published in the late 1970s by William Collins and to which my attention had been directed in the closing months of last year by the BBC’s showing of Italian director Francesco Patierno’s impressionistic film that was based upon it.

To save further lengthy sentences containing multiple clauses elucidating the matter, let me save a little time by referring the gentle reader directly to those pieces – which may be effortlessly located here and here.

The articles in question contained the slightly embarrassing admission that I had not, in fact, actually read the book – though I had located a copy online and placed an order. This tome duly arrived shortly after my postings and accompanied us on our jaunt to Mexico back in mid February, where it took but a few days to consume, providing much pause for thought in the process.

The book is fascinating; thought-provoking, disturbing, funny and moving all at the same time. It highlights the chaos and insanity of war and the vivid description that it contains of a society that has been utterly upended and thrown into disarray – in which all human life must struggle to find a way to survive and even ultimately to flourish – offers important perspective and guidance on our own troubled times.

One of the things that struck me most about the book was how contemporary the prose feels. It does not to me give the impression of a piece of writing from the middle of the last century, nor yet of the 1970s when it was actually committed to paper. In my view this makes it even more pertinent today.

Should you wish to know more about the book I earnestly recommend this ‘Re-reading‘ piece from the Guardian back in 2011.

If you have read the second of my earlier postings on the subject you will know that one reason for my interest in the book is that my father was most likely in Naples – and certainly somewhere in that part of Italy – at the same time as was Norman Lewis. Lewis refers repeatedly to the Allied Military Government (AMG) that had been established in Italy subsequent to the landings there. I am pretty certain that my father had some small capacity in that organisation.

The reason that I believe this to be so is that I have seen a number of documents and other items from my father’s time in Italy which bore – as far as my aging memory can recall – the imprint of the AMG.

Why could I not simply check this before commencing this post?

Because said documentary evidence is – as far as I know – apparently irrevocably locked in the desk compartment of my beloved Davenport!

 

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Naples ’44 – part 2

January 26, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink


In my last post I wrote – probably somewhat unexpectedly – about Norman Lewis’s diary of his time working for British Army Intelligence in southern Italy during the Second World War, the which was published at the end of the 70s under the title – “Napoli ’44“. I did not explain in that post how I came to the topic, promising that fascinating titbit instead for this follow-up missive.

As it happens the book was brought to my attention – as is so often the case with such things – courtesy of the BBC. At the very start of December last year they screened a documentary film entitled “Naples ’44: A Wartime Diary“, the which was – as one might imagine – based upon the book.

The film was in fact made in 2016 by Italian director – Francesco Patierno, himself a Neapolitan – and is a very strange beast in its own right. Patierno was clearly very taken with Lewis’s perceptive and humane memoir of the war years as they affected his birthplace and his screenplay includes extensive selections from the book’s text, narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Patierno assembled an impressive quantity of footage shot in Naples at the end of the war, to which he added dramatised recreations of wartime life and scenes of an actor representing Lewis – who himself died in 2003 – walking through the streets of modern Naples. He also – somewhat controversially – included rather incongruous clips from films such as “The Four Days of Naples“, “Il Re di Poggioreale” and – of all things – “Catch-22“.

To many critics – professional and amateur alike – this somewhat contrived attempt at summoning an atmosphere and creating a mood by means of a collage of no more than tenuously related images and scenes misses the mark dramatically (in all senses!). For me – however – the work had an unexpected resonance – the which I could not at first place. Many of the black and white images in the film reminded me of photos that I had seen as a child in pictorial histories of different elements of the Second World War that my parents had owned.

Then the penny dropped! My father and I had never talked very much about his war-time experiences. I was aware that he had had a ‘good’ war (if such a thing there could possibly be). I believe that he had done his basic training; that they had allowed him to fire a gun once, before rapidly taking it away again (Father’s eyesight and hand/eye co-ordination had been left poor by measles when a child) and that – with his studiousness and banking background – he rapidly found himself working in the military administration, well enough out of harm’s way. He loved languages (and in particular classical ones) and had been eager to travel, so spending much of the later years of the war in southern Italy suited him very well. (He would certainly have loved to have revisited the country subsequently, but never did. My mother did not care to travel and he would not go without her).

So – Father must have been in the region of Naples during the time that Norman Lewis was there and writing his diary. No surprise then that the words and images in Patierno’s odd film struck such a chord.

Now – of course – I must read the book and it is, accordingly, on order from an online bookseller…

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Naples ’44 – part 1

January 21, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I started this post way back before Christmas but found myself sidetracked by other things… one of which was, of course, Christmas itself. I found myself a little reluctant, however, to just let it go – for reasons that will become apparent later. It has thus sat here in very embryonic draft form for nearly two months.

I think that it is time that I put it to bed.

Back at the tail end of the 70s the slim volume illustrated at the top of this piece – “Napoli ’44” – was published by William Collins (and later – in 1983 – as a paperback by Eland Books). It was written by the British travel writer and novelist – Norman Lewis.

Lewis had been a sergeant in the Field Security Service of the British Army Intelligence Core during the Second World War and had kept a diary – the which forms the basis of this book – from September 1943 to October 1944, on his posting to southern Italy following the allied landings there. For much of this period he was based in Naples – hence the title of the book.

As though being part of the British/American administration in the chaotic wake of the invasion and observing the Neapolitans struggling to make their lives work again in the ruins of the heavily bombed and water-less city were not a sufficiently apocalyptic experience already, on the 19th March 1944 Vesuvius erupted in spectacular fashion, shadowing all other concerns with clouds of ash and streams of molten lava. Lewis was sent out by his masters to check on military installations under threat from the lava flows. On arrival (under volcanic bombardment) in San Sebastiano he found that a lava wave was forcing its way relentlessly down the main street, consuming buildings large and small as it went and with the cupola of the church riding on its crest.

I find it difficult enough to imagine what living through such a traumatic and disorientating period must have been like without the volcano, but the point at which Mother Nature ran out her cannons and added her own destructive power to the show must truly have convinced some that the end of days was at hand.

Lewis’s account has been much praised over the years and is all the more remarkable for not having been written for nearly three and a half decades after the events that it memorialises.

Now – I must admit at this point that I have not actually read the book (nor indeed have I found a copy – shame on me!) – and the gentle reader may thus at this point be chafing at the bit somewhat. Patience – patience – and I will explain just how and why I come to be writing about it.

That needs must, however, await the second part of this post…

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Altamont at 50

December 5, 2019 in Life as we know it | Permalink

I remember just how startled I was when I first watched the Maysles brothers’ 1970 documentary on the Rolling Stones 1969 tour of the USA – ‘Gimme Shelter‘ – the which culminated on December 6th of that year with the hubristic free concert at the Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco. I don’t remember exactly when it was that I saw the movie for the first time, but I have watched it many times since.

Now – I never was a great fan of the Stones, though I do get a little of what the fuss is all about. I have only seen them live once – pre-millennium at the old Wembley Stadium in London. I recall being fascinated by Jagger’s ability to control an audience but otherwise being generally somewhat under-whelmed. The best thing they did that day was a cover of ‘Like a Rolling Stone‘.

I do think – however – that ‘Gimme Shelter‘ is a classic song and would be up there on my all-time best list.

I can’t deny that there is a fascination with that particular period in their – and our – history. I have read pretty much all that there is to read on Altamont – from Stanley Booth, Joel Selvin, Saul Austerlitz et al. There has for a long time now been much talk about the event being the antithesis of Woodstock – the end of the 60s – the death of the hippie dream and suchlike, but the main thing that I get from the inevitable golden-anniversary musings is that no-one is really at all clear as to the true meaning – should there be one – of this peripeteia.

I have a fascination for those turning points of history, regardless of the age from which they hail. They are frequently associated (probably understandably) with some form of a loss of innocence – though, given our long and ignominious history, how we as a species can yet manage to hang on to any shred of innocence is beyond me.

Fifty years – seems a good time to reflect on all such that has occurred.

Fifty years?! Where did that go?

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Following curiosity

November 29, 2019 in Life as we know it | Permalink

“Doing a documentary is about discovering, being open, learning, and following curiosity.”

Spike Jonze

In the UK there is currently a general election taking place. This is not – of course – news to those who reside there. Canada has just been through a very pale shadow of what the UK is experiencing with its own federal election, following which those who are of a mind with me (and those like me) breathed a sigh of relief at the outcome. It could have been much, much worse.

I am not going to say anything at all about the UK’s election (for now at least) except that I fear that the old country is not going to be as lucky as much of Canada feels itself to be at the moment.

Elections do bring out the very worst in people though – and I am not just referring to the politicians and their lackeys (and masters!). One area in which this manifests itself in the UK is in regard to the BBC, against which even more bile is directed than usual.

Now – I have become slightly dismayed at the loss of nerve suffered by this august institution over the last few years, though I fully understand the reasons that this has happened. However, I do feel that those in charge simply have to stand up for themselves a little more and dig in against the constant wail of criticism from those who abhor public services of any kind; more specifically those who bitterly resent paying for something that they absolutely do not (and should not) control.

It is no secret that I am a huge fan of the corporation and have over the years admired significant swathes of its output. In particular this year I have been most impressed by the breadth and depth of its documentary offerings, particularly at a juncture at which knowledge – and thus truth – are at an all time premium.

I have – for example – in the recent past praised within these musings the BBC’s strands on the anniversary of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; important and invaluable contributions that are most timely. Here I want to mention two more offerings with which I was much impressed of late:

The first concerns one of my heroes – the author Bruce Chatwin – and is entitled ‘Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin’. When Chatwin was dying of AIDS, his friend Werner Herzog made a final visit. As a parting gift, Chatwin gave him his rucksack. Thirty years later, Herzog set out to make this film of his own journey, inspired by Chatwin’s passion for the nomadic life. The 100% positive critics’ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes should tell you all you need to know about the film.

Chatwin’s ’The Songlines’ was an enormous influence on me. I have purchased the book a number of times and each time lent it – terminally as it turns out – to others to read. I guess it is time to buy another copy!

The other inspirational program was the taping of this year’s ‘Dimbleby Lecture’ from the Design Museum in London. Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave a stark warning on the direction that his gift to human-kind – the  World Wide Web – has taken of late and a call to arms to put in place a remedy that might hopefully restore its original promise. I could write much more on this topic and at some point might just do so.

In the meantime I urge all of like mind to support the BBC – whilst it is yet possible so to do.

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Lest we forget

November 11, 2019 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Remembrance day is with us again.

I have written on the subject of Remembrance Day itself more than once before in these musings and feel no need to add to those thoughts here.

I have been aware this year, however… or maybe actually for the past few years… of a seemingly increasing number of anniversaries that demand reflection and which give us pause for thought.

Now – to my way of thinking these febrile times mean that  ‘pause for thought’ is no bad thing and I have indeed myself been taking the opportunity to reflect on a variety of past events and occurrences which – for many reasons – merit our attention.

Last year brought to an end the four year cycle of commemorations of the centenaries of the many momentous events from the Great War on which we rightly reflect. 2018 also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the happenings of that most startling of post-war years – 1968.

2019 – however – boasts its own share of dramatic commemorations. It is fifty years since the moon landings – and who of my generation can forget that extraordinary accomplishment. It is the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock and – yet to come – of Altamont, as well as of the start of the troubles in Northern Ireland. It is also the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten. I have written in these pages several times of the urgency of remembering these latter events and of how they came about… in the urgent interests of preventing them from so doing again.

The development at this juncture in the calendar that we perhaps remember as having the greatest emotional impact on those of my generation occurred thirty years ago. I still find it difficult to ruminate upon that extraordinary period in which the Berlin Wall came down and the communist empire that was the USSR dissolved before our disbelieving eyes without finding myself once again moved to tears and I know from the testimony of others that I am far from alone in this reaction.

When I was growing up – turning slowly and belatedly from a callow teenage youth to a young man – there were a number of situations around the world for which we just could not see any hope of resolution. There was the cold war – apartheid – the Arab/Israeli imbroglio – Northern Ireland. These situations we had grown up with and we were resigned to their perpetual continuation.

The fall of the wall thus came as an unexpected and joyful shock that moved grown and hard-bitten men to tears. That it should be followed in the subsequent decades by the ending of apartheid and the (hopefully) permanent resolution of the Troubles in Ireland were more than we could rightly hope for. The middle east? Some things are sadly just too intractable for such hope of success.

One of the many reasons that I could never agree with the frankly ignorant critics who would carelessly destroy the beleaguered BBC is the continuing and excellent quality and relevance of their many documentary strands, the which have enabled me and many others like me to come to understand more fully the essence of these events, as well as to remember and to commemorate them in our own ways in the light of that greatly needed and massively appreciated knowledge.

In memoriam…

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The old lie – 2

August 30, 2017 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Image by Acuration on Wikimedia CommonsIn my last post I enthused about Peter Parker’s 1986 book – “The Old Lie” – the subject of which is the generation of young men who left England’s public schools to fight – and in many cases to die – in what became known in its immediate aftermath as ‘The Great War‘.

Parker’s thesis is that in great part the nation’s apparent excess of enthusiasm to go to war in Europe in the early part of the twentieth century arose from illusions whose roots lay the attitudes emanating from England’s great public schools. To understand why this should be the case he chooses (as might we also) to look back into the nineteenth century to determine how it was that these schools came to embody the ethos and ideals whence such notions arose.

Of the drivers for the widespread reform of the public schools that was effected during the nineteenth century two in particular are pertinent:

The first such was the influence on these schools of Thomas Arnold – head master of Rugby School from 1824 to 1841. Arnold’s avowed aim – of producing a “school of Christian gentlemen” – was to be achieved by the inculcation of his values of piety, discipline and high-mindedness into an elite coterie of upper school boys (Arnold has frequently been credited with the invention of the prefectorial system) who would then act as his instrument in shaping the younger boys, for whom Arnold personally had little time. So successful was this approach that as the ex-members of his Rugby elites spread out into the world (along with acolytes amongst the Rugby masters who subsequently applied for posts elsewhere) other schools rapidly adopted Arnold’s aims and methods.

The second driver was the Victorian policy of expansionism. As the Empire grew so did the need for the ‘right sort of chap‘ to enter the nation’s service in the administration of its far-flung territories. This (along with a slowly increasing militarism in the public schools which eventually found an echo in the extension of the Officers’ Training Corp (OTC) thereto) led to the espousal of values that promoted both a local and national patriotism – for house, school and country (in that order!).

It is perhaps in the nature of such establishments that these new values (new at least to the public schools!) were quickly subsumed in the mystique and self-mythologising which has long been their stock in trade – much of it based on Classical virtues and ideals (remembering of course that for the longest time such schools taught little other than the classics!). For the young adults in the sixth forms of these schools the notions of ‘good form’,’ playing the game’, ‘keeping a stiff upper lip’ and so forth became the mark of the man. By the time the continent slid inexorably into the cataclysm that was the First World War a generation of such young Christian gentlemen were eager to put their new-found values – and themselves – to the test… in the service of their (house, school and) country (still in that order!).

To understand how it was that influence of these developments within elite institutions spilled over into the outside world – touching those for whom an education at such an establishment was never an option – it must be remembered that the social structure of nineteenth century Britain was utterly hierarchical. Those in positions of influence and power still came largely from the upper classes that the public schools had been created to serve. Young boys of middle and working classes were encouraged to follow the example of their ‘betters; with the public school ideal being promoted as the quintessence. ‘The ‘school novel’ became a successful and popular genre and glowing articles in periodicals aimed at young men espoused the values and virtues of public school heroes much as did later ‘comics’ with sportsmen, explorers and astronauts.

The social hierarchy naturally extended into the armed forces. Officers came from privileged backgrounds – enlisted men did not. Though there might be a germ of truth in the widely held critique of the British infantry as being “Lions led by donkeys” (sent to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent leaders) and it is certainly true that some of those in positions of command did remain safely many miles behind the front lines, this was certainly not the case for the junior officers who led men on the ground.

Parker makes the chilling point that whereas the mortality rate for all Britons involved in the conflict was a little under 12%, for public school educated officers it was more than 17%. The eager young subalterns (armed only with a service revolver and wearing a distinctive uniform) leading their troops over the top presented all to easy a target for the German snipers, who were well aware that without the leadership of their officers the British infantry was literally headless.

At this remove we can but study the histories; or perhaps more appropriately to read the poetry, written by the young men themselves once disillusionment set in as the conflict progressed and the extent of the lie became apparent.

Many of these young men, however, went to their tragic deaths with no opportunity to gain such enlightenment.

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The old lie – 1

August 22, 2017 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Image by Roger McLassus from Wikimedia CommonsI have recently finished reading Peter Parker’s 1987 book, ‘The Old Lie‘ – which is helpfully subtitled ‘The Great War and the Public School Ethos‘. I came to it – as happens with many of the tomes to which I am drawn – through a reference in another book, though I can no longer recall the details of that volume nor the context in which it referred to Peter Parker’s book.

For those perhaps unfamiliar – should such there yet be – the title refers to Wilfred Owen’s first world war poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est‘ – which ends:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”

The Latin quote which Owen brands ‘The old lie‘ is by the Roman poet, Horace, and translates thus:

It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country

It is necessary also to understand that the public schools of the subtitle are those of England and Wales, which are pretty much the antithesis of public schools anywhere else in the world. As Wikipedia informs us:

A public school in England and Wales is an older, student selective, fee-paying independent secondary school which caters primarily for children aged between 11 or 13 and 18. The term “public” should not be misunderstood to mean that these are public sector schools: they are in fact private sector. Traditionally, public schools were all-male boarding schools, although most now allow day pupils, and many have become either partially or fully co-educational.

Public schools emerged from charity schools established to educate poor scholars, the term “public” being used to indicate that access to them was not restricted on the basis of religion, occupation, or home location, and that they were subject to public management or control,in contrast to private schools which were run for the personal profit of the proprietors.

The Clarendon Commission of 1861 – a Royal Commission set up to investigate the state of the nine leading public schools in England – concerned itself with seven boarding schools (Eton, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester) and two day schools (St Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’). The ‘Public Schools Yearbook’ was published for the first time in 1889 – listing 30 schools – and by 1902 the publication further included all schools that were members of the Head Masters’ Conference (HMC).

Given that to obtain a commission in the armed forces at the turn of the twentieth century it was necessary to be wealthy, to be well educated and to come from the ‘right’ background it is little surprise that the great majority of the junior officers in the service at the start of the war had been educated in these schools. As the war progressed many more of them joined up directly from school and, even when the numbers required for the ever swelling force argued a widening of the constituency, this was achieved by offering ‘temporary’ commissions (for the duration of the war only) to those from the middle classes with grammar and independent school backgrounds.

The eagerness with which many Britons rushed to war in 1914 is widely recognised, and perhaps none were keener than those who had recently left – or were about to leave – England’s public schools. Even as the war progressed and the full horror of modern mechanical warfare became apparent there was no shortage of young men who believed that this moment in history was just that for which they had been born, raised and educated.

Just why these young men should have been so intoxicated by this zeal to serve and even, perchance, to die for their country is the subject of Peter Parker’s book. I will delve further there-into in a subsequent post.

My particular interest in this subject? I spent greater part of the last two decades working for two of the schools listed above and have many colleagues and friends who gave their service to the others.

 

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