The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War

Many of these people followed the coffin to Westminster Abbey on the morning of 11 November, tagging along behind the official escort. Draped with a Union flag that had been used by David Railton as an altar cloth at the front, on top of which were placed an infantryman’s helmet, belt and bayonet, the coffin had been loaded on to a gun carriage pulled by six black horses. Marching in front of the carriage were a firing party, and massed bands playing Chopin’s funeral march. Immediately behind came the twelve pall-bearers, selected from among the highest-ranking officers in the land: Earl Haig, Earl Beatty and Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard representing the army, navy and air force respectively, along with three other Admirals of the Fleet, three more generals and three more field marshals, including Sir John French who had commanded the British Expeditionary Force until relieved of his position in December 1915. These men were followed by representatives of the army, navy and air force, selected from all ranks, marching six abreast and all wearing black-crêpe armbands; then former servicemen, in mufti, marching four abreast. The procession made its slow way through the streets of the capital, which were lined with troops posted to hold back the mourners who, dressed in black, thronged the pavements and fell silent as the gun carriage passed.

Eventually the procession turned into Whitehall, where the new Cenotaph was concealed under huge Union flags. Although the proceedings had a more military flavour than those on Armistice Day the previous year, the focus remained on those who mourned rather than on those who had fought and survived. A group of unemployed ex-servicemen had even been denied permission to join the funeral procession, perhaps as a result of the various demonstrations, some of them violent, in which many out-of-work veterans had participated during the two years since the war ended. Apart from a specially allocated block where 130 ‘Distinguished Personages’ waited, the pavements of Whitehall nearest the Cenotaph had been reserved for the ‘Bereaved’, selected by ballot and guarded by a line of servicemen from all three forces. With ten minutes to go to the eleventh hour, the gun carriage stopped beside Lutyens’ shrouded monument so that the King, in military uniform, could place a wreath upon the coffin, salute and retire. A choir arrayed on either side of the entrance to the Home Office building directly opposite the Cenotaph sang the hymn ‘Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past’, then the Archbishop of Canterbury said the Lord’s Prayer. On the first stroke of eleven, the King stepped forward again to unveil the Cenotaph. There followed a two minutes’ silence that was supposedly observed throughout the entire British Empire – though it seems unlikely that those tilling fields or hawking goods under a hot afternoon sun in some of the remoter corners of the Empire could even have known what was taking place in the tiny island kingdom that ruled them, let alone participated in this arcane ceremony. In most countries that had fought in the war, however, silence was observed. A notable exception was the United States, where Armistice Day was largely ignored. A year later the Americans would exhume and bury their own Unknown Soldier and mark 11 November as Veterans Day, but in 1920 people went about their normal business without interruption. Throughout Britain, however, the silence that reigned was as remarkable in its way as the one that fell across the battlefields of France and Belgium exactly two years earlier. At the Cenotaph, the end of the two minutes was signalled by eight buglers playing the Last Post, after which the King and other dignitaries placed wreaths at the foot of Lutyens’ empty tomb, then followed the gun carriage to Westminster Abbey, from the tower of which a single bell tolled.

The nave of the Abbey was lined by 100 men who had been awarded the VC and other high military honours, but following a press campaign and a personal plea from Queen Mary the majority of the public invited to attend the service were bereaved women who had lost either a husband or a son, or (as was all too often the case) both. The Dean of Westminster conducted the brief service, during which the casket of the Unknown Warrior was lowered into the tomb excavated for it in the floor of the nave just inside the West Door. Like the Cenotaph, the grave had been sited where people were obliged to take notice of it, in the middle of a thoroughfare: anyone entering the Abbey would have to step round it. In a reversal of Rupert Brooke’s famous notion of ‘some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England’ because a British soldier was buried there, quantities of earth had been imported from the battlefields so that the Unknown Warrior would lie in the French and Belgian soil over which he had fought.

Once the service was over and the congregation had stepped out into the late morning, the filled grave was covered with Railton’s flag and surrounded by Flanders poppies and wooden railings to protect it from the thousands of people who would visit the Abbey to pay their respects. Here, at last, veterans were given or had somehow achieved priority, and the first people to enter the Abbey after the service had ended were disabled former servicemen, along with their unemployed comrades who had been denied a place in the funeral procession. By 11 p.m., when, an hour later than originally planned, the Abbey doors were closed for the night, some 40,000 people had filed past the grave, round which a guard of honour with bowed heads and reversed rifles kept constant vigil. It was clear that the three days originally allotted for the people to pay their respects before the tomb was properly sealed would be entirely inadequate. Huge queues formed long before the Abbey opened again the following morning, and there were similarly long lines of people at the Cenotaph, where it was estimated that 100,000 wreaths were laid within three days of its unveiling. From Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square, people in their thousands waited patiently and moved slowly forward, their places immediately filled as others joined the queues. They came from all over the country, and the queues grew even longer as the time approached for the Abbey to be closed so that a temporary slab could be placed over the tomb. Even the Dean’s revised timetable could not accommodate those taking part in what had been dubbed ‘the Great Pilgrimage’, and it was not until 4 p.m. on Thursday, 18 November, a week after the funeral, that the doors of the Abbey were finally closed so that the tomb could be properly sealed. Once this was done, the pilgrimage continued: when the Abbey opened again the queues were almost as long as they had been in the week following Armistice Day.

‘Wonderful to think of this unknown boy, or man, lying here with our kings, our captains, our prophets, and our priests,’ one commentator wrote. ‘His fame is greater, too; he is Everyman who died in the war. No matter how many mothers believe that he is theirs, they are right; they are all of them right – for he is every mother’s son who did not come home from France.’ This may have been the intention, but everyone knew that the body was not that of any of the thousands who had been lost at sea or in theatres of war other than the Western Front. Even those who were not privy to the negotiations that took place between the military and ecclesiastical authorities about selecting the Unknown Warrior must have realised that the chances that the person they had lost was now lying among the most illustrious of the land were slender. There was also the question of just how representative of the Empire’s million dead the Warrior really was. Although no one actually quite voiced it, the general assumption was that this ‘British Warrior’ was of pure Christian descent. Some idea of the sort of person many imagined he might be was given by Arthur Machen (the creator of the ‘Angels of Mons’ myth) writing in the London Evening News on the day of the funeral. In an article he fancifully called ‘Vision in the Abbey: The Little Boy Who Came to the King by Way of Great Tribulation’, Machen imagined a boy playing in an idealised English countryside. ‘I see the little child quite clearly,’ he insisted, ‘and yet I cannot make out how he is dressed. For all I can see he may be the squire’s boy, or the parson’s, or the cottager’s son from that old whitewashed, sixteenth-century cottage which shines so in the sunlight. Or I am not quite sure that he is not a town-lad come to stay with relations in the country, so that he might know how sweet the air may be.’ What this little boy was clearly not was a member of the teeming immigrant communities of the poor inner cities, many of whom fought and died for their country. He nevertheless grows up, goes to war, is killed, and becomes the Unknown Warrior.

A suspicion that the authorities at any rate did not really believe that the person they had buried in Westminster Abbey, that Christian repository of the great and the good of the land, could be anything other than a son of the Church of England was confirmed when the following year S.I. Levy, Principal of the Liverpool Hebrew Schools, wrote a letter to Dean Ryle pointing out that the tombstone had carved on it the line ‘In Christ shall all be made alive’. As Mr Levy politely pointed out, the religion of the Unknown Warrior was as much a mystery as his identity. Many Jews, he reminded the Dean, had fought and died in the war and were being mourned in Jewish homes across the land. ‘Among the unbounded wealth of biblical inspiration a line could have been selected which would not have offended the living religious susceptibilities of the unknown warrior, whatever his faith may have been,’ Mr Levy suggested, whereas the chosen line did ‘not meet the spiritual destinies of both Jew and Gentile’. Dean Ryle was not accustomed to being challenged and replied testily that given that the Unknown Warrior was lying in a Christian church it seemed only reasonable that one of the five texts selected for his tombstone should carry a Christian message. For all he knew, the Dean added, the Unknown Warrior might even have been a Muslim: ‘We cannot hope to please everyone.’

Exactly who was lying in Westminster Abbey did not in the end greatly matter. The Unknown Warrior was intended as a symbol and largely accepted as one. The element of uncertainty over his identity may, however, explain the otherwise odd circumstance that even after all the pomp and ceremony that surrounded the Unknown Warrior’s burial, it was an empty tomb which remained the main focus of a grieving nation. People continued to lay huge numbers of wreaths at the Cenotaph every week throughout the twelve months following the funeral. These numbers swelled at Christmas, which was unseasonably mild in 1920, and The Times reported that on Boxing Day ‘There were more people there […] than on any day since the Great Pilgrimage came to an end. The base was nearly surrounded by wreaths of evergreen and holly, and the pile reached nearly to the top of the pedestal.’ Even a year later on 11 November 1921, when the Unknown Warrior’s temporary grave slab was replaced by a permanent one of Belgian marble inlaid with brass lettering made from melted-down bullet casings gathered from the battlefields, The Times insisted that ‘It was surely at the Cenotaph that the nation’s undying gratitude to its glorious dead found […] its fullest and most complete expression’. The heavens appeared to agree. Although a mist ‘obscured the vista’ on this ‘perfect November morning’, ‘immediately over the Cenotaph the sky was pure pale blue’.

The commemoration of the dead had certainly gripped the country’s collective imagination, but many of those who had survived the war felt themselves forgotten. Among those laying wreaths that November morning was a delegation of ex-servicemen and their families from Poplar in the East End of London. Some of these wreaths bore inscriptions which ‘the police were obliged to censor as being likely to be objectionable to those who mourned at the shrine’. Among the inscriptions deemed offensive were ‘To the dead victims of Capitalism from the living victims of Capitalism’ and ‘To the dead not forgotten from the living forgotten’. While some of the veterans wore their war decorations, one had pinned to his coat the pawn ticket for which he had exchanged his medals.

TWO

A Nation Remembers? 1921–1939

Have you forgotten yet? …

For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days …

SIEGFRIED SASSOON, ‘Aftermath’

While veterans who faced poverty and unemployment often complained that they had been forgotten, Britain continued to lavish money and attention upon preserving the memory of those who had died. Many felt that in commemorating the dead the nation was neglecting to fulfil its promises and obligations to those who had survived. By the time the Unknown Warrior had been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, the Imperial War Graves Commission had made considerable progress in the enormous job of providing permanent burial sites for his comrades left behind in Flanders and even farther afield. Most countries in which the war had been fought had followed France’s generous lead in handing over land in perpetuity to the IWGC, which meant that cemeteries could now be constructed in Belgium, Italy, Greece, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt. Similar arrangements would be made with Germany and Turkey.

Once the land was acquired, it was necessary to come to some decision about how the dead should be commemorated. At the invitation of Fabian Ware, Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker (with whom Lutyens had designed a new capital of British India in Delhi before the war) had visited the battlefields in July 1917. Lutyens left a wonderfully touching account of what he found in France:

The grave-yards, haphazard from the needs of so much to do and so little time for thought. And then a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way across miles of country where men were tucked in where they fell. Ribbons of little crosses each touching each across a cemetery, set in a wilderness of annuals and where one sort of flower is grown the effect is charming, easy and oh so pathetic. One thinks for the moment no other monument is needed. Evanescent but for the moment almost perfect and how misleading to surmise in this emotion and how some love to sermonise. But the only monument can be one in which the endeavour is sincere to make such a monument permanent – a solid ball of bronze!

Bronze balls were not what Ware had in mind. He subsequently asked Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, to become an adviser to the Commission. After visiting France and Belgium himself, Kenyon submitted a report laying out the principles upon which he believed the cemeteries should be created. They should be surrounded by low walls, within which uniform headstones would mark individual graves arranged without regard for rank or status. In death all men would be equal, officers and their men lying as they had fought, side by side, the headstones merely recording rank, name, regiment, date of death, and age if known. The details, however, were left to Lutyens and Baker, who did not always agree about the design of the cemeteries. Lutyens wanted to avoid all religious symbolism and so came up with the Stone of Remembrance, a sort of non-denominational altar, or (as he described it) a ‘great fair stone of fine proportions’, raised on a shallow flight of broad steps. Inscribed on the stone were some biblically derived but religiously neutral words chosen by Kipling: ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’. The more traditionally inclined Baker felt that something specifically Christian and military was called for and designed a huge stone Cross of Sacrifice standing on an octagonal base and faced with a downward-pointing bronze sword. In the event, both designs were used, the Stone featuring in every cemetery containing over four hundred graves, the Cross in all but the smallest plots. In most cases the headstones would be set into concrete beams, buried invisibly beneath the earth, which would keep them both upright and aligned in proper military order.

Appointed alongside Lutyens and Baker for the work in France and Belgium were Reginald Blomfield, who was both a distinguished architect and a garden designer, and Charles Holden, who had served in the war both with the London Ambulance Column and the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, and would go on to design many buildings for the London Underground. These four men allotted work on individual cemeteries to young British architects, with priority given to those who had served in the war. Elsewhere, John Burnet, who had worked for Kenyon at the British Museum, was given responsibility for cemeteries in Gallipoli, Syria and Palestine; Sir Robert Lorimer, who was best known for redesigning large country houses in Scotland, would work in Italy, Greece, Egypt and Germany; and Edward Warren, who designed numerous buildings for Oxford University, was allotted Iraq. The Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew was appointed horticultural adviser to the Commission, and Lutyens asked his old associate Gertrude Jekyll, doyenne of the Edwardian country garden, to provide planting plans for a number of cemeteries.

It would naturally be some time before the uniform designs could be put into practice, and ‘until such time as they could be handed over to the Imperial War Graves Commission for permanent construction’, the cemeteries were the responsibility of the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, which both organised and maintained them, assisted by such bodies as the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The Directorate also remained responsible for searching the battlefields for bodies once the war was over. The vast area to be covered was systematically divided up and allotted to individual ‘Graves Concentration Units’ consisting of twelve soldiers under a senior NCO, who went back and forth looking for corpses and for isolated graves, the occupants of which they exhumed and transferred to recognised cemeteries. Some 8,000 men were employed in this task, and by the time they had finished in September 1921, 204,650 bodies had been removed from the battlefields and reburied in these cemeteries.

Many relatives of the dead expressed a wish to visit graves as soon as possible after the Armistice, and so a number of religious organisations began conducting groups of the bereaved to France and Belgium. The best known of these was the St Barnabas Society, named after the patron saint of consolation, founded by a clergyman in 1919 in order to subsidise the travel of those who could not afford trips offered by commercial travel companies. Such pilgrimages proved popular. In the seven months between November 1919 and June 1920, for example, the Church Army arranged for 5,000 people to travel to the places where their men lay buried. During this period such places must often have seemed all too redolent of the circumstances in which such men had died. For all the good work carried out by the DGRE, most of the cemeteries were little more than a neat array of wooden crosses standing on bare earth in a bleak landscape where very little was growing. To reach them, mourners would have had to travel through villages that had been reduced to piles of rubble, along rutted roads lined with splintered trees, across ground still churned up by high explosives and littered with barbed wire, burned-out vehicles, abandoned weaponry and all the pitiful detritus of recent warfare. For those who had been unable to attend any sort of funeral for their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers, visiting graves even in these conditions seems to have provided comfort, and by 1923 some 78,500 of them had taken advantage of travelling facilities offered by the Salvation Army and the YMCA. In time these cemeteries would be tidied up considerably and landscaped with shrubs and flower beds. ‘The concept was to create a sentimental association between the gardens of home and the foreign fields where the soldier lies’, and these particular corners of France and Belgium did indeed begin to look as if they were forever England.

Elsewhere on the Western Front, a tourist industry rapidly developed independently of the pilgrimages conducted for the bereaved. While many people were content to learn about the actual circumstances of the war at the Imperial War Museum, which had been founded at Crystal Palace in 1917 and recorded over three million visitors between 1920 and 1923, others took advantage of the opportunities offered to visit Flanders and Picardy to see where the war had been fought. A number of unemployed veterans of the officer class took out advertisements in the press offering to conduct small groups of visitors round the battlefields by car, their recent first-hand knowledge of France and Belgium a guarantee of authenticity. As early as 1919, tourists could buy books such as A.T. Fleming’s How to See the Battlefields, but the most popular guides were the illustrated series to most of the major battle sites published by the Michelin tyre company, fifteen of which had been published in English editions by 1921. Prefaced with an overview of the military objectives and brief accounts of the individual attacks, complete with maps, the guides provided a detailed itinerary for the visitor. They also contained before-and-after photographs of devastated buildings and villages and recent photographs of the temporary cemeteries. These photos perhaps tell their own story – as well they might, since one would have no idea reading the Michelin guide to the Somme, for example, that 1 July 1916 was (and still is) the worst day in the history of the British army. Euphemistic phrases such as ‘came into contact with the second German positions’ abound, and the emphasis is firmly upon what few successes the Allies achieved, with figures given for numbers of Germans taken prisoner but none whatever for the 60,000 British casualties. ‘The first assaults on July 1 gave the British Montauban and Mametz, while Fricourt and La Boisselle were encircled and carried on July 3,’ we read. ‘Coltmaison and Mametz Wood, reached on the 5th, were carried on the 11th.’ The cost of all this is not mentioned: you would not know from this book that at Mametz Wood on 7 July alone the Welsh Division lost over 4,000 men. Estimates vary as to the overall casualties for the Battle of the Somme, which dragged on until mid-November, but after 140 days the British had lost some 400,000 men and advanced 6 miles. It was not, perhaps, a statistic anyone wanted to read in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Michelin guides contained enough information to be of interest even to those who did not want to make the journey across the Channel, and by January 1922 sales figures for the guides in Britain, France and America had reached 1,432,000. Later that year George V made a tour of the battlefields and cemeteries both to pay his respects to those of his subjects who had died and to inspect the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, of which his eldest son continued to serve as president. A heavily illustrated book about the royal tour, emotively titled The King’s Pilgrimage, became a bestseller when it was published in 1922.

Others who visited the battlefields had been there not long before. While it is easy to see why veterans might wish to visit the battlefields and cemeteries many years later, the notion of them returning to places where they had so recently endured appalling conditions, and which nature had yet to heal, may strike us as odd. Many veterans were haunted by their experiences at the front, experiences they would be unable to forget however long they lived. These were not experiences that were easy to talk about or share with civilians, even if they were friends or family. Siegfried Sassoon made his notorious public protest against the political conduct of the war in 1917 on behalf of his suffering fellow soldiers partly in the belief that ‘it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise’. Now that the war was over, veterans were naturally wary of harrowing their families and friends, or worse still boring them, with stories from the trenches. ‘There was nobody interested anyway,’ George Louth recalled, ‘so it was useless telling them and if you did they would only laugh at you, say it wasn’t true. It wasn’t a conscious thing, nobody talked about the First War in those days, even my wife, even she never heard my story and we were married seventy years.’ Louth had joined up in 1915 at the age of eighteen and survived the first day on the Somme in 1916, but was invalided out in December of that year. He would live to celebrate his 103rd birthday in 2000, but ‘only once spoke about [the war] from 1918 until 1990’. This was to a woman enquiring after her husband, who had been ‘blown to pieces’ but was officially listed as ‘wounded and missing’. Harry Patch too never spoke about the war. He married happily in 1919, but not once in fifty-seven years of wedded life did he mention the war to his wife. ‘I don’t think she had any idea about my service, and never brought it up.’