In the summer of 1917, five young men from Ireland and north-west England arrive at Passchendaele, ready for “the big match at Wipers”. Soldiers of the Army Service Corps (ASC – “Ally Sloper’s Cavalry” – named after a newspaper cartoon of the time), they drove ambulances, evacuating the dead and injured from the front; or, in the words of my grandfather Michael Sieve (the spelling of the family name was later changed to Seeve), standing on the far right of the photograph, “putting the bits and bloody pieces back together again”.

Michael came to Flanders from his home in Limerick, Ireland, where his family had settled after fleeing from antisemitic pogroms in 19th-century Lithuania. He had grown up during the boycott of Limerick’s Jewish community, and work was hard to find. After a spell selling coal around the streets of Belfast, he volunteered for steady work with the British army. Saved from the frontline by his poor eyesight, Mike spent the war years aboard his ambulance, driving back and forth with its precious cargo of thousands of damaged and dying young men.

A quiet man, he spoke little of the war subsequently, except to damn the politicians and rulers who directed it. He left the army to settle in Liverpool, to marry and raise three sons. Kindly and placid, he suffered from his “nerves”, and getting work was always difficult. His wife Bluma, a migrant from prewar Russia and a full-time midwife, kept things afloat.

Meanwhile, Mike would take refuge in his card games, a quiet figure in the formal dress of the time, smoking his pipe and taking long walks along the dockside.

Little remains to us of Michael’s part in this calamitous time; an abiding family refusal to wear Field Marshal Haig’s blood-red poppies; a recollection of him softly singing a few lively verses from the popular battlefield song of the time, “Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous”; and the memory of a life lived humbly through the storms of the last century.

Natalie Seeve-McKenna
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/11/family-life-grandfather-serving-in-flanders-ocean-colour-scheme-homemade-chocolate-aeroplanes