{"id":11807,"date":"2013-07-03T11:46:35","date_gmt":"2013-07-03T10:46:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=11807"},"modified":"2013-08-03T18:17:45","modified_gmt":"2013-08-03T17:17:45","slug":"my-introduction-to-the-great-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=11807","title":{"rendered":"My introduction to the Great War"},"content":{"rendered":"

For my recent birthday, some friends gave me the box set of the groundbreaking 1964 BBC series on “The Great War”<\/a>. There are 26 episodes and I have already viewed six.<\/p>\n

As I watched these pictures of the outbreak of a war that the Germans planned would last a mere 40 days, I was reminded of my first impression of this mammoth conflict.<\/p>\n

In the early 1960s when I was in my early teens, I used to visit and stay with my paternal grandmother who lived in Sedgley<\/a>, just outside Wolverhampton, a village where I was born. \u00a0I often slept in the front bedroom which was dominated by a large framed reproduction of a dying horse in the First World War with the caption underneath “Goodbye old man”.<\/p>\n

Over half a century later, I was wondering if I could find an image of that painting and perhaps an explanation of its origin. Of course, we now have the Internet and Google and the search took seconds.<\/p>\n

This is the icture.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/center> <\/p>\n

I now know that “Goodbye Old Man” was a watercolour by Italian artist Fortunino Matania showing a British soldier saying farewell to his dying horse. The painting was commissioned in 1916 to raise money for The Blue Cross Fund<\/a> and now hangs in the charity\u2019s animal hospital in Victoria, London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"