by Peter Parker
COPYRIGHT
Fourth Estate
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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
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007357963
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007440078
Version: 2014-12-01
DEDICATION
For my godson Julius Lunn
– next generation –
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE: Armistice 1918
ONE: The Unknown Warrior 1919–1921
TWO: A Nation Remembers? 1921–1939
INTERLUDE: Old Soldiers 1939–1945
THREE: Fifty Years On 1945–2000
FOUR: Head Count 2000–2009
FOOTNOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
SOURCE NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PROLOGUE
Armistice 1918
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.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
First published in The Times on 21 September 1914, and intoned at countless Armistice Day services since, Binyon’s lines have become almost too familiar, but were given a new immediacy when spoken by a 105-year-old who by November 2003 was one of a handful of men still alive to have served in what, with good reason, is still sometimes called the Great War. Given the appallingly high casualty rates, few of those who fought on the Western Front had any realistic expectations of growing old or being wearied by age. Some who survived, however, attained very great ages indeed, achieving the rare distinction of having lived in three centuries.
Born on 8 September 1898, Arthur Halestrap could remember his parents receiving letters from relatives serving in the Boer War. He also remembered the death of Queen Victoria and the coronation of Edward VII. His father wo
rked in Southampton for the White Star shipping line, and as a boy Halestrap had walked on the decks of the Titanic while it was in dock there. He had tried to enlist two months after the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, but at the age of sixteen was rejected as too young. He worked instead as a post office telegraphist, excellent training for someone who in September 1916 finally joined up as a signaller with the Royal Engineers.
It was not until January 1918 that Halestrap got to France, and his first experience of being shelled occurred when he was part of a convoy marching up to Brigade HQ in the dark. The horses that were pulling the wagon he was accompanying got stuck in the mud and panicked as the shells started falling, but to his surprise Halestrap did not really experience fear. His months of training had instilled in him a rigid discipline that ensured he got on with the job in hand whatever the circumstances, and he managed to get the wagon moving again across a landscape illuminated by Very lights and shell-bursts. He subsequently took part in the attack in which the British successfully breached the supposedly impregnable Hindenburg Line in September 1918. His job was to set up transmitter-receivers, which meant carrying cumbersome equipment up the line, then going over the top in order to erect radio masts in places that would not attract enemy fire. Although he was not always in the front line, he spent enough time in the trenches to become accustomed to lice, keeping his head down to avoid snipers, advancing under shellfire, and muttering apologies when obliged to walk across the battlefields’ litter of dead bodies.
In sum, his experiences, which may strike us today as extraordinary, were little different from those of millions of combatants. What made Halestrap unusual was that he was still alive to recall them all those years later. Like many combatants, he had survived a number of close encounters with the enemy. While he and a group of soldiers were taking pot shots at a low-flying German observation plane, the pilot responded in kind with a revolver. One bullet slammed into the table beside which Halestrap was standing, missing him by an inch. On another occasion a shell hit an old brewery where Halestrap and his fellow signallers had set up a radio station. Fortunately they had barricaded the windows with sandbags and were protected from the blast. Even when the Armistice had been declared, Halestrap, still in France, managed to outwit death. He caught Spanish flu, a global pandemic that between 1918 and 1919 killed more people than the war did: in Britain alone some 250,000 died. When Halestrap first showed symptoms, a senior officer reckoned that there would be little chance of him surviving the long and gruelling journey to a medical station and so decided to fill him up with rum, wrap him in a blanket and let him take his chances. Halestrap could remember nothing between being given the rum and waking up three days later apparently restored to health. In later years he made some thirty pilgrimages to the battlefields and cemeteries of France and Belgium in order to pay his respects to those who were less fortunate in their close encounters with death. He outlived both his wife and his two children and eventually died in his sleep, aged 105, on 1 April 2004.