FOR reasons of space, I excluded from my feature on Commondale’s war memorials (D&S, Jul 15) a moving description by Joseph Ford, in his Somme Reminiscences and Folk Lore of Danby Parish and District, of how the First World War affected Commondale’s small moorland community. I hope readers agree it’s worth recording as a footnote.

Ford wrote: “Those were stirring times in the hamlet when its youth was engaged in war. The minds of the inhabitants ceased to follow the usual trend of thought, and their lives were not the ordered, natural lives they had lived before. The cry of the green-crested lapwing, heralding to us in the dales the coming of spring, failed to arouse its former significance, and the call of the red grouse, arising at dawn to settle on the intake walls, failed to awaken the thoughts and feelings of former years.”

He concluded with a quote, alas unattributed: “‘There had come War and a maddening pain, and things were never the same again.’”

Though other places would have different tokens of peacetime, I think we can be certain that the profound, all-pervading impact of the war so memorably expressed by Ford, would be the same everywhere.

Harry Mead, Great Broughton