Former Pink Floyd bassist, Roger Waters, has thanked the man who finally discovered the truth about his late father, who went missing during World War II, with a poem. The 93-year-old British veteran who made the discovery, Harry Shindler, has spent many years searching for the truth of soldiers who went lost in Italy. Shindler uncovered documents revealing the exact time and location of where Waters’ father, Lieutenant Eric Fletcher Waters, died during a German attack.

The Pink Floyd front-runner could not be more grateful for finally knowing the truth. His missing father was the focal point to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, in which the protagonist grows up looking for his father figure.

“Waters is delighted and so am I,” said Shindler from his home in Italy. “He is a man who has spent his whole life trying to find his father and now he’s done it.”

Shindler traced a report of fighting after the Anzio landing at the National Archives in Kew. The documents revealed that Waters was killed in a ditch at 11.30am on February 18, 1944, after his team was surrounded. His body has never been found.

“Waters didn’t know where his dad was killed, but nobody had lifted a finger,” said Shindler. “I knew there had to be a war diary, but I never thought it had been kept for 70 years.”

Water’s poem entitled Only One River reads:

‘When the wind scythes through the crop and good men fall, and children soft in mothers arms, cringe unbelieving from the desperadoes casual blade, ‘My father distant now, but live and warm and strong in uniform tobacco haze, speaks out ‘My son he says, stay not the passion of your loss but rather keen and hone its edge, that you may never turn away numb, brute, from bets too difficult to hedge ‘What price the child ? Which ? Yours or mine, this one at home, the baby bird in whistling bowls of pasta worms or that one on TV, dead and grainy in some Balkan ditch ? ‘To feel that other fathers’ loss denies connections formed in fields of blood and handed banner bright from man to boy, in pride of place, loins strong bereft of pettiness and rancour ‘So, cup your tears my father says, cup that salt badge of strive, it flows from but one river, it was on that my son, I bet my life. – ‘Only One River’ by Roger Waters

–Lindsey Winepol

[Via The Guardian – The Telegraph – The Daily Mail]