The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War

The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War
Peter Parker

This moving and timely book explores the way the First World War has been thought about and commemorated, and how it has affected its own, and later, generations.On 11 November 1920, huge crowds lined the streets of London for the funeral of the Unknown Warrior. As the coffin was drawn on a gun carriage from the Cenotaph to Westminster Abbey, the King and Ministers of State followed silently behind. The modern world had tilted on its axis, but it had been saved. Armistice Day was born, the acknowledgement of the great sacrifice made by a whole generation of British men and women.Now, almost a century later, Harry Patch, the last British veteran who saw active service, has died. Our final link with the First World War is broken.Harry Patch was born in 1898 and was conscripted in 1916. He served with a Lewis gun team at the Battle of Passchendaele and in September 1917 was wounded by a shell that killed three of his comrades. After the war, Patch returned to Somerset to work as a plumber, a job he continued to do until his retirement.The First World War was fought not by a professional army but by ordinary civilians like Patch, who epitomised Edwardian Britain and the sense, now lost, of what Britain stood for and why it was worth fighting for. The Last Veteran tells Patch's story, and explores the meaning of the war to those who fought in it and the generations that have followed. Peter Parker's illuminating and timely book is a moving tribute to a remarkable generation.

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_97379228-7ce3-5156-8c72-2903f262f116)

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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2009

Copyright © Peter Parker 2009

Peter Parker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007357963

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007440078

Version: 2014-12-01

DEDICATION (#ulink_e25d6971-70e9-5946-9f81-b8ab9f18b1b4)

For my godson Julius Lunn

– next generation –

CONTENTS

COVER (#u54886c9a-ee0c-518f-a5c8-2c92377403ed)

TITLE PAGE (#u3e4c5cfb-fa47-5f9c-a4ab-668bab5137cc)

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_a0cc62c2-3912-5941-b1bf-96ec9841b424)

DEDICATION (#ulink_3906130e-6b29-587d-a340-86a506342407)

PROLOGUE: Armistice 1918 (#ulink_d01f8455-c7c6-5e9a-9492-27e2c2a886f9)

ONE: The Unknown Warrior 1919–1921 (#ulink_ea877abf-5c35-5fd1-a9bf-fcda3953769e)

TWO: A Nation Remembers? 1921–1939 (#ulink_f0fd3dd0-5e86-59de-a4ea-f0a504a76823)

INTERLUDE: Old Soldiers 1939–1945 (#litres_trial_promo)

THREE: Fifty Years On 1945–2000 (#litres_trial_promo)

FOUR: Head Count 2000–2009 (#litres_trial_promo)

FOOTNOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

SOURCE NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_c56d8952-c74e-5ed2-a70a-2c267fccf1dd)

Armistice 1918 (#ulink_c56d8952-c74e-5ed2-a70a-2c267fccf1dd)

Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance

To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,

As they had raised it through the four years’ dance

Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;

And murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’

THOMAS HARDY, ‘And There Was a Great Calm’

News that the Great War for Civilisation had finally come to an end was greeted by noisy rejoicing on the streets of London and other cities around the world, but what struck most people on the battlefields of France and Belgium was the silence. At 11 a.m. on Monday, 11 November 1918, after four and a quarter years in which howitzers boomed, shells screamed, machine guns rattled, rifles cracked, and the cries of the wounded and dying echoed in no man’s land, everything suddenly fell quiet. Across parts of Belgium a thick fog had descended that morning, with visibility down to ten yards. In the muffled landscape the stillness seemed almost palpable. Since for most soldiers news of the approaching armistice did not reach them until an hour or less before it was implemented, it is extraordinary that the guns really did fall silent at exactly the planned time. In one part of the line near Le Cateau a German machine gun was firing at the British troops in the opposite trench until the very last minute. ‘At precisely eleven o’clock an officer stepped out of their position, stood up, lifted his helmet and bowed to the British troops. He then fell in all his men in the front of the trench and marched them off.’

Of those who survived, Air Mechanic Henry Allingham of the Royal Air Force was still in Belgium on the morning of 11 November. Ninety years later he recalled that his fellow servicemen ‘grabbed hold of anything that would make a lot of noise – to celebrate, you see. They let off stray shells, Very lights and whatnot. A lot of men, some who’d been right through the war, didn’t make it through the night.’ Others merely got very drunk, while Allingham himself went to bed and enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of a good night’s sleep. The revelling of his fellows took its toll and the following morning few of the ranks were ready to move out at 8 a.m. as planned. It was therefore not until three hours later that they began their long route march through Belgium to Cologne, where the defeated German people surprised Allingham by their friendliness. They may have lost the war, but they were presumably as relieved as the victors that it had finally ended. It was ‘a cheerless, dismal, cold misty day’ in the Forêt de Mormal on the Franco-Belgian border, Gunner B.O. Stokes of the New Zealand Field Artillery recalled. ‘There was no cheering or demonstration. We were all tired in body and mind, fresh from the tragic fields of battle, and this momentous announcement was too vast in its consequences to be appreciated or accepted with wild excitement. We trekked out of the wood on this dreary day in silence.’ Captain Guy Chapman of the Royal Fusiliers had a similar experience, marching back through the fog to Béthencourt: ‘The band played but there was very little singing,’ he recalled in his war memoir, A Passionate Prodigality. ‘We took over our billets and listlessly devoured a meal. In an effort to cure our apathy, the little American doctor from Vermont who had joined us a fortnight earlier broke his invincible teetotalism, drank half a bottle of whisky, and danced a cachucha. We looked at his antics with dull eyes and at last put him to bed.’

Others were rather more ebullient. Gunner G. Worsley of the Royal Field Artillery received the news of the Armistice while serving in France and remembered doing a cartwheel when a trumpeter sounded the ceasefire. He visited the house of a local woman who was inclined to think the war should continue until Berlin was taken. When Worsley complained that this might result in him getting killed, the woman replied, ‘Sanfairyann’ (the British soldiers’ approximation of the French expression ça ne fait rien – that doesn’t matter). ‘Sanfairyann be buggered!’ Worsley retorted. ‘I’m alive. The war’s over. That’s good enough for me!’ It was not merely French civilians who thought that the end may have come rather too soon. Even some British troops, embittered by their experience and worried that the ceasefire might prove only temporary, felt that the war should carry on ‘until Germany’s armies are really beaten in the field, her line broken and if possible her country invaded’. Private Albert Marshall recalled that when an officer told soldiers in the Essex Yeomanry advancing on Lille that there was to be an armistice, ‘You never heard so much grumbling and swearing in all your life, because we’d got them on the run. We wanted to drive them back to Berlin.’ Percy Wilson, who had been told by a recruiting officer that the war would be over by Christmas 1914, was still in uniform in November 1918, serving close to the German border. When an officer announced that the Armistice was to be signed, several soldiers were annoyed that they would not be allowed, as they saw it, to finish the job. ‘I don’t want a bloody armistice,’ one soldier complained; instead he ‘wanted to get over that border [and] show them what the war’s been like’. Eighty-six years later, the 105-year-old Wilson still believed that had the soldiers been allowed to pursue the Germans back over the border there would have been no Second World War: ‘They would absolutely have pounded the Germans to bits.’ There were similar reactions among some airmen. ‘I confess to a feeling of anticlimax, even to a momentary sense of regret,’ Cecil Lewis recalled in Sagittarius Rising, his classic memoir of life with the Royal Flying Corps. ‘We were a new squadron, fresh overseas, we wanted – particularly the new pilots – to justify our existence, to carry out in action the thing we had been training for.’

Not everyone who wanted to celebrate could always find the means to do so. Lewis was in a small and remote village just north of the Ypres Salient in Belgium when news of the Armistice reached him: ‘There was nothing to drink in the whole village and nowhere to go to. All we could find was a dump of Hun Very Lights, of all colours, left behind in their retreat. This pyrotechnical display was all we could contribute to the gaiety of Armistice night.’ At the RFC aerodrome in France, recalled Sergeant Charles Watson of 11 Squadron, a celebratory bonfire got out of hand when people began throwing full cans of aviation fuel on to it: ‘They went up with such a bang that troops nearby thought the war had started again.’ Elsewhere even worse behaviour prevailed. Private Eric Hiscock, a boy soldier who at the age of seventy-six published a resonantly titled survivor’s memoir, The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling, recalled drunken Australian soldiers going on the rampage in the red-light district of Boulogne, demanding that the local prostitutes should give their services free by way of celebration. At sea, meanwhile, there were no women with whom to celebrate, and sailors had to improvise. An order to splice the mainbrace was issued aboard HMS Revenge, remembered a former Royal Naval Seaman, 106-year-old Claude Choules, in 2005, and everyone received an extra tot of rum. The ship’s company was invited by the officers to join them in a celebratory dance on the quarterdeck, which they did to the accompaniment of the ship’s band.

Some of those who had been at the front were back in Britain when the Armistice was declared. Two of the war’s best-known poets, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, saw the Armistice being celebrated there. Graves was stationed near Rhyl with an Officer Cadet Battalion. ‘Things were very quiet up here on the 11th,’ he told his fellow poet Robert Nichols. ‘London was full of buck of course but in North Wales a foreign war or a victory more or less are not considered much. Little boys banged biscuit tins and a Very light or two went up at the camp but for the rest not much. A perfunctory thanksgiving service with nothing more cheerful in it than a Last Post for the dead; and then grouses about demobilization.’ In his celebrated memoir Goodbye to All That, however, Graves records: ‘The news sent me out walking alone along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan (an ancient battlefield, the Flodden of Wales), cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.’ Sassoon, meanwhile, was in Oxfordshire on indefinite sick leave after being wounded in the head in July. ‘I was walking in the water-meadows by the river below Cuddesdon this morning – a quiet grey day,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘A jolly peal of bells was ringing from the village church, and the villagers were hanging little flags out of the windows of their thatched houses. The war is ended. It is impossible to realise.’ That evening he travelled to London, where he was unimpressed by the capital’s ‘buck’: ‘masses of people in streets and congested Tubes, all waving flags and making fools of themselves – an outburst of mob patriotism. It was a wretched wet night, and very mild. It is a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years.’

Other soldiers may have been in Blighty for the Armistice, but they were still on active duty. Private Harry Patch of the 7th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry was on an exercise on the Isle of Wight. He had been invalided home in September 1917 with wounds incurred when a shell had exploded above his Lewis-gun team in Belgium. He had spent ten months convalescing, but was eventually passed A1 and placed on a draft to return to the front. Rumours that a ceasefire might be declared had reached Golden Hill Fort, the hexagonal Victorian barracks at Freshwater in which Patch and his fellow soldiers were billeted, on the morning of 11 November. They were practising on a rifle range that day and had been told that if an armistice was signed a rocket would be sent up. When this happened everyone cheered and the officer in charge ordered them to get rid of their spare ammunition by firing out to sea so they wouldn’t have to carry it back to the stores. For Patch, the Armistice meant he would not have to return to Belgium as planned, and eighty-eight years later he remembered his feelings of joy and relief.

Some felt that the ceasefire had not come soon enough. Twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Norman Collins of the Seaforth Highlanders, who had been twice wounded, was on leave when the Armistice was announced. ‘I was up a bit late that morning, I was shaving, and the sirens went. My first feeling was “It’s too late – all my friends are gone – it’s too late. It’s no use having an Armistice now.”’ For others the ceasefire really was too late. One of the most famous stories about the end of the war describes a telegram delivered to a house in Shrewsbury at noon on 11 November. With the church bells ‘still ringing, the bands playing and the jubilant crowds surging together’, the family of the poet Wilfred Owen learned that he had been killed in action on 4 November. Even the morning of 11 November itself was not without its casualties, including Private George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, who is thought to be the last British soldier to be killed in action in the war. Evidence that the fighting went on up until the very last moment is provided by a plaque on the wall of a house at 71 rue de Mons in Ville-sur-Haine, where a hapless Canadian soldier, Private George Lawrence Price of the 28th Northwest Infantry, was shot dead by a sniper on 11 November at 10.58 a.m.

For most of those left alive at the front, a desolate landscape in which once bustling towns and villages had been reduced to piles of smoking rubble and acre upon acre of woodland reduced to splintered and blackened stumps, there was little enough cause for rejoicing. The longed-for day had finally arrived but the majority of combatants were too physically exhausted and emotionally depleted to enjoy it. Most of them simply felt relief that the war was finally over. In the great silence, men were able to reflect on what they had been through and remember the comrades they had lost. After years crouching in the front line, it was hard to imagine that snipers were no longer training their rifles on your trench. ‘You were so dazed you just didn’t realize that you could stand up straight and not be shot,’ one soldier remembered in the 1960s. ‘My first thought was “So I’m going to live”,’ another recalled almost three-quarters of a century after the Armistice. ‘I was stunned, total disbelief, and at the same time a secret and selfish joy that I was going to have a life.’ Others simply felt lost. The war had swallowed them up and occupied their every waking moment as it was to haunt their dreams in the future: it was hard to imagine what life would be like now that it was over. Some had joined up or been conscripted so young that they could remember no other kind of adult life. ‘Straightaway we felt we had nothing to live for,’ Sapper Arthur Halestrap of the Royal Engineers recalled. ‘There was nothing in front of us, no objective. Everything you had been working for, for years, had suddenly disappeared. What am I going to do next? What is my future?’

Halestrap’s future stretched farther ahead than he could possibly have imagined that November morning. Eighty-five years later to the day he would lead a service of remembrance at the Menin Gate at Ypres, rising from his wheelchair to recite lines from Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.