The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  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, r
eaching 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.

  ‘The unity of the nation which has been the great secret of our strength in war must not be relaxed if the many anxious problems which the war has bequeathed to us are to be handled with the insight, courage, and promptitude which the times demand,’ Lloyd George declared, and he decided to call a general election for 14 December. He felt that a new parliament ‘possessed of the authority which a General Election alone can give it’ would be needed ‘to make the peace of Europe and to deal with the difficult transitional period which will follow the cessation of hostilities’. Just how difficult that transitional period would be soon became apparent.

  Often referred to as a ‘khaki election’ because it took place immediately after a war, the 1918 general election might equally have been dubbed a ‘petticoat’ one, since it was the first in which women – at any rate, women property-owners over thirty – had the vote. With the massive losses suffered in the war, the women’s vote was more significant than its legislators might have envisaged. Given that many of those in khaki were still on active service abroad and that many women were in mourning for a husband, son, father, brother or fiancé, it must have looked like a ‘black’ election as much as a khaki one at the polling booths. The shadow of the war certainly loomed over the election in Nottingham, where now redundant shell cases were used to make up the shortfall in ballot boxes. It was also the first election in which men who were not property-owners were allowed to vote, but they had to be twenty-one. Many former servicemen like Harry Patch, who was twenty when the election took place, discovered that while they were deemed old enough to be sent off to fight for their country, they were still considered too young to vote. The result of the election was an overwhelming victory for a coalition chiefly composed of Liberal and Conservative members under the renewed premiership of Lloyd George.

  It was all very well to win a general election, but Lloyd George now needed to lead the country into a post-war future with all its attendant problems. Making the peace in Europe would prove to be a great deal easier than maintaining it at home. In his Special Order of the Day for 12 November 1918, the Commander-in-Chief General Haig had assured his victorious but exhausted troops that ‘Generations of free peoples, both of your own race and of all countries, will thank you for what you have done’. Similarly, the Liberal Party’s election manifesto had promised: ‘In the field of creative reform at home, social and industrial – our first duty is owed to those who have won us the victory and to the dependants of the fallen. In the priorities of reconstruction they have the first claim, and every facility should be given them not only for reinstatement, and for protection against want and unemployment, but for such training and equipment as will open out for them fresh avenues and new careers.’ Unsurprisingly after such promises, those returning to Britain from the battlefields expected to find it the ‘fit country for heroes to live in’ that Lloyd George’s government had pledged.

  Getting back to Britain in the first place was often difficult: one of the principal complaints among the armed forces was the slow pace of demobilisation. An end to hostilities did not mean an immediate end to war service, and even soldiers who had been in Britain on 11 November 1918 often had a long and frustrating wait before they returned to Civvy Street. The army had been very quick to recruit soldiers but less swift to let them go. ‘It had taken three days to get me into uniform,’ Harry Patch recalled, ‘but it would be five months before I got out of khaki and out of the army.’ The government’s decision to give priority to men whose particular skills were required to get the wheels of industry turning once more was particularly unpopular, chiefly because many of these so-called ‘key men’ had been considered too important to send to France and had been allowed to enlist only when the fighting forces had been seriously depleted. This meant that those who were last in were often first out – a policy that did not find favour among those who had been serving for much longer periods. Guy Chapman remembered the anger caused when the first person from his battalion to be demobbed was a man who had seen only fourteen weeks’ service: he was a miner and therefore needed back in England. This demobilisation by individual rather than by battalion was logistically complex and destroyed the sense of group loyalty that had kept men going during the war. Under pressure, the scheme was eventually abandoned, but while in force it led to mass discontent.

  The discipline that had carried many of the soldiers through almost unimaginable hardships at the front seemed merely irksome now that the war was over, and it began to break down. On the Isle of Wight Harry Patch’s company particularly resented being ordered about on parade and taken for route marches by a peacetime officer who had risen from the ranks. The men finally refused to turn out for this officer, even when he challenged them with a revolver. They subsequently returned to talk to him with loaded weapons, and when he cocked the trigger of his revolver, the men responded by pulling back the bolts of their rifles. ‘Now, you shoot, you bugger, if you dare,’ one of the men shouted, and the officer very sensibly backed down. A brigadier was sent to Freshwater to sort out what had in effect been a mutiny. He listened to both the officer’s account and the men’s grievances. One man complained that they had joined up for the duration but were still waiting to be demobilised and return to their jobs three months after hostilities ceased. The brigadier, perhaps fearing that disaffection among the ranks would spread, gave orders that the company be excused parades. Thereafter they only did fatigues – little more than keeping the camp tidy – until they were demobbed. ‘We had decided ourselves that we were more or less civilians, and that army rules no longer applied to us,’ Patch recalled.

  A small mutiny at Golden Hill Fort was easy enough to deal with, but by January 1919 much more worrying instances of military insubordination were occurring elsewhere. Fears of the sort of mass revolt that had occurred in Russia led to a misguided decision to keep British forces hard at it in order to distract them from any revolutionary ideas they might be entertaining now that they no longer had a war to fig
ht and were anxious to leave the army as soon as possible. It was one thing to have demob delayed, quite another to be subjected to increased military discipline without any particular purpose in view.

  The worst, most prolonged mutiny took place at Calais in January 1919 and was a direct result of the men’s impatience at the slow pace of demobilisation. Private John Pantling of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) stationed at the Val de Lièvre camp had been arrested and imprisoned for making a seditious speech to his fellow soldiers, some of whom subsequently broke into the jail in which he was being held and helped him escape. The sergeant who was guarding Pantling was then arrested, but released when the mood of the men was felt to be growing ever more dangerous. As on the Isle of Wight, a senior officer listened to the men’s grievances and agreed to some concessions and an improvement in conditions, but the subsequent setting up of so-called Soldiers’ Councils in the various army camps at Calais smacked too much of Soviet practices for the military authorities, and it was decided that Pantling should be found and rearrested. When he was, not a single one of the 2,000 men at Val de Lièvre answered the reveille. An equal number of men from a neighbouring camp joined the Val de Lièvre contingent in marching on GHQ to demand the release of the troublesome private. This was granted, but by now the mutiny had spread, with some 20,000 men involved. General Byng, a seasoned soldier who had led the Third Army to victory the previous year, was sent to Calais to put an end to the disturbances, but his troops simply joined the mutineers. Eventually a further meeting was organised at which further concessions were granted, and on 31 January the mutiny came to an end.