Ohree

Passing the area of woodland where the world war two graffiti tree was I thought I'd have another look. What I hadn't noticed on my last visit was the size of the '1944' tree, considering the carvings are 65 years old the tree doesn't appear to be that old or have grown that much; the letters haven't stretched or deformed much at all. On a nearby tree there is further graffiti, which I hadn't noticed last time. This tree is much larger and the graffiti on it is deformed by the trees growth, one piece so mutated it was illegible and yet the carving appear to be contemporaneous with each other. The new piece says 'Ohree i 194(4)' or the h could be a k and as for the second 4 it was almost obliterated, as I said the trees expansion has distorted the letters and figures. It could be that the trees are not contemporaneous as are the whittling, that would be the rational explanation, but following my previous musings I wondered if the trees growth, in some magical way, represented the men's destinies and that one had fallen in battle and the other had survived the war and continued to grow as did his corresponding tree. The forest can be a strange place. Had the fellows whose knife work adorns the wood been on R&R or on picket duty, the track nearby would have been a busy byway during the war when 10's of thousands, and closer to D Day 100's of thousands of military personnel made the forest their home. I'll never know.

As I walked on through the woods they were quieter than they had been of late, there was an eerie still .... no birds were singing, or at least very few and with their volumes turned right down. Moving on I became aware of all manner of birds throughout the woodland, not in the trees though, all on the ground, milling about. My entrance disturbed them and soon the wood filled with birds, big and small, rising to the spindly branches all that remain of the canopy; when settled, they began to chatter and wood filled again with song. What was that about? Why had they all been on the ground?