The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War

A society that forgets its past and is embarrassed about remembering the sacrifice of those who have gone before is one that loses its past and, with that, loses its future. As those young people I referred to were able to remind me and many of my colleagues, there is something special about pausing to remember. We are not dwelling on or glorifying war, but remembering the sacrifice of those whose sole responsibility was to aid and abet their colleagues and to protect and defend the society in which they lived, and which nurtured them.

A short debate followed in which Duncan Smith’s proposal was broadly welcomed, although everyone agreed that nothing could be done without first ascertaining the wishes of the family of the last veteran to die. If for any reason the family did not want a state funeral, it was suggested, a national service of commemoration should be held instead. Don Touhig, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence, cautioned that however appropriate a state funeral might seem, and whatever popular support there was for it, there might be logistical difficulties in ascertaining who really was the last veteran. More than half the service records of the period had been destroyed during the Blitz, and so reliance was put upon those veterans who had identified themselves. No one was under any obligation to identify themselves and there might be veterans who preferred anonymity or had either by choice or oversight not made themselves known: as recently as March of that year two new French veterans had been ‘discovered’. To further complicate matters, Touhig stated that the government’s definition of a last veteran was rather more flexible than the generally agreed one. He argued that anyone who had served during the war, and even those who had not finished their training and were still in Britain when the Armistice was declared, should be recognised as veterans. It became clear that some sort of service of commemoration might be a more workable arrangement than a state funeral, and this was what the government eventually decided upon. On 27 June 2006 the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, announced that: ‘A National Memorial Service will allow the whole nation to honour the valour and spirit shown by the veterans of WW1 and will commemorate an entire generation.’ This would take place in Westminster Abbey within about twelve weeks of the death of ‘the last known World War One veteran’. As with Duncan Smith’s original proposal, the ceremony would be modelled on the one that took place on 11 November 1920 when Britain’s Unknown Warrior was laid to rest in the Abbey ‘among the most illustrious of the land’.

A state funeral for the Last Veteran would undoubtedly have provided a neater symmetry than a mere service of commemoration, since it would have marked the end of a prolonged period of national mourning which started with the state funeral of the Unknown Warrior. Not only was the Unknown Warrior, like the Last Veteran, an individual representative of all those who served in the First World War, he was also an individual chosen at random, or at any rate by chance, just as the Last Veteran achieved that status by an accident of longevity.

Ever since the Armistice there have been arguments, not all of them seemly, about how the First World War should be remembered, commemorated and represented. In all this the veterans have played a significant and sometimes controversial role. Veterans were not always seen as remarkable, fêted and honoured because they provided a link with a particularly poignant piece of our history. Over the years they had been treated with a great deal less deference and consideration, had been obliged to fight for their rights, had been involved in later battles in which the weapons were bricks and batons and the enemy was the forces of law and order in their own country. They had been both the centrepiece of our national acts of commemoration, and dismissed as increasingly irrelevant, standing in the way of liturgical reform. Above all, they had remained a constant reminder of a major historical event that in all sorts of ways, not least the psychological, shaped the twentieth century.

In Britain the international catastrophe that was the First World War has been adopted as a peculiarly national trauma, one that has cast its shadow down the years and haunts us still. There have been other wars since 1918, and in all of them combatants have had to endure privation, discomfort, misery, the loss of comrades and appalling injuries. Even so, the First World War continues to exert a hold upon the collective imagination in Britain in a way it does not in, say, the USA. The statistics are, of course, extraordinary. On the First Day of the Somme 20,000 British soldiers were killed, the equal of the entire sum of casualties of the Boer War. The number of British service personnel killed in the Second World War was less than half the number killed in 1914–18. Even when you add in the many more civilian casualties Britain suffered during the Second World War – some 60,000 – the overall number of deaths is still smaller than the dreadful tally of the Great War. Over 30 per cent of British men who were aged between twenty and twenty-four in 1914 were killed in action or died of wounds; of those aged between thirteen and nineteen the figure is more than 28 per cent; some 200,000 women were left widows and 350,000 children left without fathers.

Bad as this was, it was not unique to Britain. France, Germany and Austria each not only lost more combatants than Britain, but also lost a higher proportion of their overall population: France lost 1 in 28, Germany 1 in 35, Austria 1 in 50, Britain 1 in 66, Italy 1 in 79, the USA 1 in 2,000. Furthermore, although the mass slaughter on the Western Front was indisputably awful, for all the talk of ‘mechanised killing’ it does not compare with the industrialised murder carried out by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It remains a grim statistic that of the six million British who fought in the First World War roughly one in eight were killed, but they were at least killed fighting in defence of their country or for some sort of patriotic principle rather than simply rounded up for liquidation. It is not even a question of numbers. The long lists of names on First World War memorials, many of them from the same family, tell of the losses sustained by individual villages, towns or cities, but none of them speaks so eloquently of communities destroyed as, for example, the interior walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, where the names of some 80,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust from Bohemia and Moravia are inscribed, arranged by where they once lived: men, women and children, street after street after street. The bomb that fell on Hiroshima in 1945 eclipsed anything produced by even the greatest bombardment of the trenches, resulting in between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths in an instant.

Regardless of the historical and demographic facts, when remembering the First World War the British continue to talk about a lost generation. There is a sense that as a nation we have never quite recovered from this loss, that the flower of British youth was cut down in Picardy and Flanders, that an irreplaceable wealth of talent and an almost prelapsarian state of innocence were destroyed for ever between the years 1914 and 1918. Cast out of the Edwardian Eden, where it was somehow always perfect summer weather, we have ever after tended to look yearningly back rather than expectantly forward.

The war has become part of who we are. It occupies a disproportionately large place in our sense of the world and its history and remains a seemingly endless resource not only for historians, but for novelists, poets, dramatists and composers, for cinema and television. The sounds and images of the war are so imprinted on the national consciousness that we recognise them instantly: the foreign place names such as Mons, Ypres, Loos, Passchendaele and the Somme, which retain a familiarity even for those who could not point to them on a map; the lines of men at the recruiting offices on 4 August 1914 and the rows of crosses (now replaced by rounded headstones) that marked where those bank-holiday crowds ended up; the scarlet poppies blowing in a landscape rendered unrecognisable by shellfire; the mud and the blood, and the big guns in France that could be heard this side of the Channel. When in 1980 Kenneth Macmillan created a ballet using Poulenc’s Gloria, all he had to do was place tin helmets on the dancers’ heads to make this joyous piece of music into a requiem. Indeed, the war is constantly used – some might say dragged in – as a reference point in the arts: Andrew Davies’s television adaptation of A Room with a View (2007) dispensed with E.M. Forster’s happy ending and had George Emerson killed in the trenches, while Kenneth Branagh’s film of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (2006) sent Tamino off to the Somme. The complex philosophical ideas, with their Masonic elements, that characterise the struggle between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute could, Branagh felt, be presented to a wider audience if the action was moved to the Western Front. ‘By giving each an army and presenting visually the landscape of the First World War, there is a sense of import and scale about the actions of these characters,’ he said. ‘The Great War provides a territory both literal and metaphoric that is as emotive and complex as the opera itself.’

This territory is a disputed one. Our popular notion of the war – formed largely by what was written about it by those who fought in the front line, and by later artistic reimaginings of it – is that it was indeed uniquely horrible; that it was conducted by an incompetent High Command that repeatedly sacrificed thousands of men in order to gain a few yards of churned earth; that it was characterised by ‘mud, blood and futility’. There is, however, another view of the conflict, one argued by such leading military historians as Correlli Barnett, John Terraine, Hew Strachan, Brian Bond, Nigel Cave, Gordon Corrigan, Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior, and supported by a generation of younger so-called ‘revisionist’ historians such as Gary Sheffield. These historians point out that not all the generals were callous incompetents, nor all rankers hapless and unwilling victims; they insist that some of the battles were brilliantly planned and fought; they remind us that we did after all win the war. They are exasperated by the Anglocentric attitude to the war that prevails in Britain, pointing out not only the war’s international dimensions but also the even larger losses sustained by other combatant countries. The British tendency to think of the war only in terms of the Western Front, they argue, gives us a hopelessly skewed impression both of its conduct and of its wider significance. They dismiss the War Poets as unrepresentative, complain about the way the war is taught in schools where literature is given precedence over history, and retain a particular loathing for two of the most enduringly popular representations of the war, the play Oh What a Lovely War! and the television tragicomedy Blackadder Goes Forth. In short they feel that the British are obsessed with the ‘tragedy’ of the war and are incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Their view of popular representations of the war can be summed up by the title of Gordon Corrigan’s 2003 study: Mud, Blood and Poppycock.

The impact of such books on interpreting the war in universities is considerable, and there is no doubt that many of them are meticulously researched and cogently argued. Their impact on the public at large, however, is as yet limited. As Gary Sheffield comments in the introduction to The Forgotten Victory (2001), which is one of the best, most approachable and most persuasive of these ‘revisionist’ histories: ‘For the last decade and a half I have sat in academic seminars in which historians have complained about the difficulty of shifting public opinion on these issues. It seems that every time an important new book comes out, another popular book or television programme appears repeating the same old tired myths.’ The two sides in this argument have become – to use an appropriate verb – entrenched, and it seems unlikely that either will yield in the foreseeable future.

It is no part of this book’s aim to take up this quarrel, but in tracing the way in which the First World War has been remembered and commemorated, and by looking at the way in which the experiences of those who fought in it on the front line have shaped this process, the many corrective ‘facts’ adduced by military historians are less relevant than what the majority of people in Britain have believed and continue to believe about the war. We do not define ourselves as a people by facts, but by received ideas – ideas that have a symbolic rather than a literal truth. Among the long-cherished ideas that the British have about themselves is that they believe in fair play and favour the underdog, they are phlegmatic and always see the funny side of any given situation, and they are among the most tolerant people in the world. All these notions could be ‘disproved’ by citing examples of contrary behaviour, but they persist as a generally accepted truth. As far as the war is concerned, we may no longer believe that angels appeared to protect the British at the Battle of Mons in 1914, that a Canadian serviceman was ‘crucified’ on a barn door near Ypres, or that Germans bayoneted babies and boiled down corpses in order to produce soap, but we still believe – with considerable justification – that the First World War was a great national tragedy and that an entire generation was profligately and unnecessarily sacrificed.

By giving a scholarly overview of campaigns and strategy military historians can usefully and instructively tell us what the war was about; but what really interests us is what it was like. For that we have always turned to those who were there, notably the poets and memoirists, but latterly to those more ordinary people, the diminishing band of living witnesses whose voices had yet to be stilled. As one schoolchild who met 110-year-old Henry Allingham in 2007 remarked: ‘The books tell us about the battles but they don’t tell you what people who were there thought about them.’ The gulf between military history and personal experience was demonstrated by the man who did indeed become Britain’s Last Veteran, Harry Patch, when talking about Passchendaele: ‘I’m told we attacked on 16 August, but the date doesn’t mean much to me. I know it was about six weeks before I was wounded, so I suppose the middle of August is about right. I remember the names – Pilckem Ridge was one and the other was Langemarck – but it is such a long time ago that I can’t quite connect them up in my head.’ Patch may have forgotten the exact dates and places, but he knew what a battlefield was like – not from the maps that were studied at GHQ, but because in 1917 he was stumbling over one.

For Patch, the First World War was not about military intelligence, the deployment of battalions or the plan of attack. It was about wading around in filth with no opportunity to bathe or change your lice-ridden clothes for the whole four months you were at the front. It was about discomfort and fear and exhaustion and having your best friends quite literally ‘blown to pieces’. As the last British Tommy to revisit the battlefields over which he and so many other men had fought ninety years before, Patch commented in 2007:

Some of the boys buried here are the same age as me, killed on the same day I was fighting. Any one of them could have been me. Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am now the only one left. Just like them, when I went over the top, I didn’t know whether I would last longer than five minutes. We were the PBI – the Poor Bloody Infantry – and we were expendable. What a waste. What a terrible waste.

It is the living witness of the men on the front line that we have lost now that the Last Veteran has died.

ONE

The Unknown Warrior 1919–1921

The tomb and the Cenotaph bear witness to the greatest emotion this nation has ever felt. Children are brought here every year; and so the memory, without the sharpness, perhaps, felt by us who lived through it, goes on with another generation. In this way a nation keeps alive its holy places.

H.V. MORTON, The Spell of London (1926)

In the immediate post-war period a number of large, well-orchestrated public events – culminating in the funeral of the Unknown Warrior on 11 November 1920 – showed a nation drawn together in grief. It would be hard not to be moved by the sense of national unity that these occasions suggested, but they took place against a background of considerable unrest in Britain. The country had not only been involved in four long and costly years of war but had endured numerous social and economic problems on the home front. Even before the war, the long Edwardian summer of myth had in reality been disrupted by serious industrial disputes. To the increasing alarm of employers, trade unions had grown in power since the beginning of the century and Britain had begun to be dogged by strikes which were largely the result of wages failing to keep pace with inflation. It was not at all clear that the wave of popular patriotism that appeared to overwhelm the country when war was declared would sweep away the widespread differences between employers and workers. A joint meeting between the Labour Party, the Trades Union Congress and the General Federation of Trade Unions was convened towards the end of August 1914 with the intention of urging employers and workers in key industries to pull together for the duration of the war. A great many workers, some of them in industries vital to the war effort, had already abandoned their jobs in order to join up, and serious labour shortages were soon apparent in engineering, munitions and mining. For some people, working and living conditions were such that a spell in the army seemed to offer a lucky escape from poverty and drudgery into a life that provided a secure wage, free food and clothing, and the possibility of adventure overseas.

Those who stayed behind soon realised that their value to the country had increased, and they not unnaturally felt that their working conditions should reflect this. Rumours and even evidence that some manufacturers were making huge profits from war production and not passing anything on to their employees fuelled anger and led to a series of strikes. The first serious one occurred in Glasgow in February 1915 when 5,000 engineers, whose union had been asking for a rise of twopence an hour since the previous June, laid down their tools. The dispute spread until some 10,000 members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers at eight engineering plants were on strike, but it lasted only a little under three weeks. Dissatisfaction with the settlement of the strike led to the forming of the Clyde Workers’ Committee. In particular, the CWC challenged the 1915 Munitions of War Act, which had been passed in order to ensure the uninterrupted production of weapons and ammunition. Although agreed by trade union leaders, the Act was seen by many as an opportunistic erosion of workers’ rights, including the right to strike.

Meanwhile a rent strike had also broken out in Glasgow, where landlords had attempted to raise rents and evict tenants who could not or would not pay. Many of the tenants were women whose husbands were at the front and who had entered the workforce, finding employment in munitions factories. The refusal of some 20,000 of them to pay rent gained support among other industrial workers, who threatened to come out on strike in sympathy. In order to prevent the disruption of war production, the government was obliged to introduce new legislation protecting tenants’ rights. The government also had to accede to the demands of miners in South Wales who came out on strike in July 1915 in a dispute with mine-owners. There was little else it could do since a prolonged stoppage of coal production would have been disastrous.

Back on Clydeside the ‘dilution’ of the munitions industry by allowing unskilled men and women to fill the large gaps left by those who had enlisted – by this time about a quarter of the workforce – was causing further unrest. A refusal in March 1916 to allow one of the leaders of the CWC to investigate the conditions under which such people were employed in one factory was seen as an affront to the rights of shop stewards and led to more strikes in 1916. Opposition to the Military Services Act, which introduced conscription at the beginning of March, fuelled additional protests in Glasgow and led to the arrest and imprisonment of several activists under the deeply unpopular and draconian Defence of the Realm Act, which had been passed without debate four days after war was declared in August 1914. The Act restricted trade union activity (strikes and lockouts had been outlawed in the munitions factories), regulated – which is to say decreased – pub opening hours, and generally cracked down on dissent and any other behaviour thought to be unpatriotic or unhelpful to the conduct of the war.

In 1918 even the police went on strike. Prevented by the Crime Act of 1885 from belonging to any sort of union, many police had nevertheless responded to an anonymous letter published in the September 1913 issue of the Police Review announcing that just such an organisation was being formed. Throughout the war many policemen secretly became members of the unrecognised and technically illegal National Union of Police and Prison Officers, which was established to address their grievances over pay and conditions. The 1918 strike was triggered by the sacking of a police captain who had been active in this union, which by then claimed to have 10,000 members and was demanding proper recognition. The entire Metropolitan Police Force of London, numbering 12,000 members, went on strike on 30 August, and the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, while refusing to recognise the NUPPO on the grounds that such an organisation could not be contemplated while the country was at war, nevertheless met with its representatives and agreed to many of their other demands. The union’s membership subsequently saw a rapid growth, reaching some 50,000 by the time of the Armistice.

The British people were suffering in their homes as well as in the workplace. German submarine raids caused massive losses among the merchant marine, which meant that there was a lack of imported goods, so food prices soared. Coal rationing was introduced in October 1916, and in December of that year a Food Controller was appointed as part of the newly formed Ministry of Food. People were encouraged to monitor their own consumption, but rumours in 1917 that Britain’s food supply was all but exhausted led to panic buying, after which rationing was introduced: sugar in December, followed by butter, meat, jam and tea.

It was one thing to eat less for your country in times of war, but rationing was no more over by Christmas 1918 than the war had been in 1914, and its continuation long after the Armistice caused considerable resentment. Victory may have been greeted with jubilation, but it did little to calm the industrial and social unrest that pervaded the country. A more general imbalance between supply and demand in goods was not much helped by the fact that there was no immediate return to peacetime conditions in factories either. The Munitions of War Act had obliged many manufacturers to adapt their factories for the production of vital armaments, and it would take time to reconvert production lines so that they could return to making the goods they produced before the war. The Defence of the Realm Act remained in place, and the gulf that had opened up during the war between the Western and Home Fronts, fuelled by mutual incomprehension and, on the part of the serving men, a degree of hostility towards those who for whatever reason had not joined up, was not healed by peace. Soldiers at the front had resented the fact that the jobs from which they were absent had been taken over by those who had stayed at home rather than join them on the battlefields. It was not only ‘shirkers’ who had usurped them in the workplace: women had been absorbed into the overall workforce in huge numbers and, newly emancipated, could hardly be expected to return to hearth and home the minute the war was over – although many of them did.