The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  Taylor was right: the generally agreed figure for German losses is 465,000.

  Passchendaele comes at a period when ‘British strategy, if such it can be called, reached its lowest level. Haig had come through three years of war still in high command and having learnt little from experience.’ Taylor dismisses most of the strategical thinking that led to Passchendaele, listing the ‘excuses’ that Haig subsequently ‘manufactured’ as to ‘why the Ypres offensive had to be made’. These are described as simply ‘untrue’. ‘The truth was simple: Haig had resolved blindly that this was the place where he could win the war. He never inspected the front line. He disregarded the warnings of his own Intelligence Staff against the mud. No one else shared his confidence.’ In sum, Haig ‘preferred an unsuccessful offensive under his own command to a successful one under someone else’. This account of Haig preparing to send his troops, among whom was Private Harry Patch, into the mud and misery of Passchendaele is accompanied by a photograph of the general standing on the steps of a country house being offered an overcoat by a chauffeur, captioned: ‘Sir Douglas Haig feels the cold’.

  Many writers critical of the conduct of the First World War have been accused by revisionist historians of not dealing with the war beyond the Western Front. Taylor covers all theatres of war, including Italy, the Balkans, the Middle East and Turkey, but his account of these campaigns is often quite as critical as it is of those conducted by Haig. General Sir Ian Hamilton, entrusted by Kitchener with the Gallipoli campaign, sets off for the Dardanelles in 1915 ‘without a staff, with no proper maps, and with no information later than 1906 about Turkish defences’. Apart from one division from the regular army, the troops allotted to Hamilton were ‘colonials and territorials, with no previous experience’. Furthermore, ‘The British army had never rehearsed landing on a hostile coast and had no equipment for this purpose […] The attack on the Dardanelles was a brilliant idea in theory. But even the best idea brings disaster when it is carried out hastily and inadequately.’

  Later military historians would argue that (in the words of Gary Sheffield) the Allied counter-offensive of 1918 rates as ‘one of the greatest series of victories in British history’, partly secured through enormous improvements in strategy; but in Taylor’s view ‘Foch and Haig stumbled unwillingly on a newer and wiser method – to attack at weak points, not strong ones; they quickly took credit for it’. No one reading Taylor’s book could be left in any doubt as to who was to ‘blame’ for the First World War. The fact that, like Clark’s The Donkeys, it was strongly criticised by later historians has done little to diminish its popularity among the reading public. Over forty years and many editions later, it almost certainly remains the most widely read book ever written about the war.

  In his preface, Taylor declared: ‘The unknown soldier was the hero of the First World War. He has vanished, except as a cipher, from the written records. He lives again in these photographs.’ He was also about to live again on the stage. Taylor’s book was dedicated to Joan Littlewood, whose Theatre Workshop production of Oh What a Lovely War! received its premiere that same year at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, in London’s East End. Like Taylor, Littlewood was left-wing and populist, and she had founded her company to bring theatre to the masses. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Oh What a Lovely War! turned out to be a savage satire in which idiotic upper-class generals sent stoical and cheerily singing working-class rankers to certain death.* It transferred from Stratford to the West End, later played on Broadway and in Paris, and remains perhaps the best-known play ever written about the war. Essentially an ensemble piece staged as ‘a pierrot show of fifty years ago’, it was created as the result of extensive research by the writer-producer Charles Chilton (whose father had been killed in the First World War at the age of nineteen) and members of the cast. The title is taken from one of the characteristically ironic and fatalistic soldiers’ songs of the period, and further examples of these songs are used throughout the play, often to devastating effect. The production also made use of archive photographs and newspaper headlines giving casualty figures. In one scene, representative of the whole play, a burial party is seen at work in front of a news panel stating: ‘BY NOV 1916 … TWO AND A HALF MILLION MEN KILLED ON WESTERN FRONT’. They are watched from a balcony by Haig, who makes a speech beginning, ‘I thank you, God; the attack is a great success.’ As the soldiers work, they sing ‘The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling’, which Haig, donning a pierrot’s cap, begins to conduct as another news panel appears: ‘APRIL 17 … AISNE … ALLIED LOSS 180,000 MEN … GAIN NIL’.

  This may not have been particularly subtle, but it was agitprop theatre of the most effective kind, lent authority not only by the use of genuine songs and documents of the period, but also by the fact that it boasted in its programme and in the published text a ‘military adviser’ and a long list of source material, which included official publications and the diaries of General Haig alongside The Donkeys and the works of Sassoon, Graves and Blunden. It was tuneful, it was funny and at times extremely moving. It made no attempt to be even handed, but it caught the public imagination and further reinforced the way people thought about the war. ‘Oh What a Lovely War! awakened race memory in our audiences,’ Littlewood recalled of the Stratford run. ‘At the end of each performance people would come on stage, bringing memories and mementoes, even lines of dialogue which sometimes turned up in the show.’ One local woman brought along one of Princess Mary’s tins, embossed brass boxes variously containing cigarettes, sweets, pencils and chocolates which had been given to every serving soldier as ‘a gift from the nation’ at Christmas 1914. ‘I’ve had this on my mantelpiece forty-five years,’ she said. ‘It was Dad’s, for ’is Woodbines, he carried it with ’im wherever ’e went till ’e got killed. You can keep it.’ One of the actors carried it in his pocket throughout the run.

  Not everyone was impressed. The military historian John Terraine wrote to The Spectator to complain that the claim in the programme that every word uttered by Haig in the play was taken from his diaries was misleading since the quotations were highly selective: no doubt Mein Kampf ‘could provide impeccable “evidence” that the late A. Hitler was a misjudged saint’, he concluded. Terraine was on dangerous ground here, since a year earlier in the same magazine he had himself been accused by the historian and journalist Robert Kee of quoting selectively from Haig’s diaries in his admiring and controversial biography of the general. Terraine also protested about one of the ‘scoreboards’ used in the play. He admitted he had not in fact seen the production, but had read reports of one scoreboard that stated that on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele, British losses were 135,000 for a gain of 100 yards. This, he objected, was grossly inaccurate: the British losses for that day were not known, but those for the first three days of the battle did not exceed 31,850. It seems, however, that Terraine may have been misled: certainly, no statistics for Passchendaele are given in the published text of the play. His dim view of Oh What a Lovely War! would nevertheless be echoed by many military historians over the years. Correlli Barnett described it as ‘a highly partisan, and often grossly unfair, presentation of the war from an extreme anti-Brasshat point of view’, while in The Unquiet Western Front (2002) Brian Bond concurred, complaining of the play’s ‘blatant anti-military bias and historical distortions’. This view, he suggested, was supported by ‘a distinguished general and military historian’ (named in the notes as General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, author of many books, including a 1966 account of The Somme), who in a private letter to Bond opined that ‘taken as history, the play is not even serious enough to be called a travesty’. Bond acknowledged that Liddell Hart, something of a bête noire in his book, believed that ‘there was more of the real war in the play than in recent “whitewash history”; it did faithfully reflect what his generation thought of the war’, but Bond’s own generation of military historians begged to differ. When it was later revealed that the Theatre Workshop’s
‘military adviser’, Raymond Fletcher, had been recruited to the KGB the previous year, this merely confirmed many historians’ suspicion that the play, though admittedly entertaining, was little more than Marxist propaganda. Not that any of this had much effect on its enduring popularity with theatregoers.

  By the time the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war arrived, the ground had been laid for a distinctly 1960s anti-Establishment approach to the proceedings. The anniversary was widely marked, but the most notable event was BBC television’s epic documentary series, The Great War, which was both scholarly and sober but nevertheless attracted audiences averaging eight million for each of its twenty-six episodes. This figure is even more remarkable, since the series was being shown on the recently launched ‘highbrow’ channel BBC2; such was its success that it started being repeated on BBC1 even before it had finished broadcasting on the new sister channel. The series was hugely ambitious, covering every aspect and theatre of the war. For some historians, it appeared to provide an opportunity to redress the balance and present a more even-handed account of the war than the lions-and-donkeys approach of Clark, Taylor and Littlewood. Indeed, among those who wrote the scripts were John Terraine and Correlli Barnett, neither of whom was inclined to this supposedly simplistic view of the war. Terraine’s attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of General Haig has already been mentioned, while Barnett (author of The Swordbearers: Supreme Command in the First World War, published the previous year) would become a scourge of what he saw as the ‘whingeing’ school of First World War studies. Between them they were credited with writing or co-writing twenty of the twenty-six episodes, and both served as ‘historical and research consultants’, while Terraine was also appointed as associate producer. Liddell Hart had agreed to act as ‘military adviser’, but resigned over Terraine’s episode on the Somme and eventually had his name removed from the credits for the entire series. He explained his reasons for doing so publicly, writing a letter to The Times in which he explained that when he read the script for the Somme episode, he ‘immediately pointed out that it was wrongly slanted – for it repeatedly emphasised the supposed inexperience and unskilfulness of the British troops while not making any mention of the indisputable faults of the High Command’s planning and conduct of the offensive’. The programme was, however, broadcast ‘without any adequate correction of the commentary’. He was told that he would be sent Terraine’s script for the episode on Third Ypres, but since he would receive it only a few days ahead of the broadcast, it would be impossible for him to offer any advice that could be implemented. He wrote that he regretted having to explain publicly his reasons for asking to have his name removed from the series ‘because many of the earlier programmes were good, as well as graphic, examples of how history could be treated on television’.

  In spite of the best efforts of the principal scriptwriters, however, the overwhelming impression left by the series with viewers was one of waste and futility. Never before had people seen so much archive footage, most of which vividly depicted the conditions in which men had fought and died. What is surprising is that even those episodes scripted by Terraine seem to reinforce the impression of the war he was supposedly attempting to dispel. The episode dealing with Ypres in 1917, for example, was given the title ‘Surely we have perished’, a line from Wilfred Owen. Extensive footage of troops slogging along waterlogged trenches and mules floundering helplessly in the Ypres quagmire was accompanied by such observations as ‘the miseries of the war multiplied and heaped upon the soldiers’ and ‘this was the slough of despond’. Some scenes were accompanied on the soundtrack by extracts from such poems as Owen’s ‘Dulce et decorum est …’ and Sassoon’s ‘Attack’ with its final plea, ‘O Jesus, make it stop!’ Although the programme went on to describe how the Canadians eventually took Passchendaele, it concluded by recording that at the end of Third Ypres, the British had suffered almost a quarter of a million casualties without their reaching even their first objective. A journalist was quoted as saying that for the first time the British army had lost its spirit of optimism and saw no future except ‘continuous slaughter’. This was followed by more images of corpses, and the episode’s final words were given to Sassoon, an extract from his poem ‘To Any Dead Officer’, which ends with the regretful line ‘I wish they’d killed you in a decent show’.

  The use of poems, beautifully read, now looks like something of an own goal by Terraine, and it is hardly surprising he failed to confound people’s notion that the war was almost uniquely squalid and tragic, given that the abiding memory of this particular episode was a montage of photos all too vividly illustrating lines from Sassoon’s poem ‘Counter-Attack’ in which he describes in repulsive detail an area of the front ‘rotten with dead’. The images are shocking even today, when we are more inured than people in the 1960s to death and destruction as a staple of television news reporting and documentary.

  The most striking thing about The Great War, however, was that this footage was intercut with the stark testimonies of veterans of these campaigns, by now mostly in their late sixties and beyond and wearing the standard 1960s mufti of jackets and ties. Filmed in a studio in front of blown-up photos of the trenches, they spoke calmly but frankly of the dreadful conditions at the front, of shell craters brimming with corpses that were gradually decomposing into the surrounding slime, of the wounded slipping off duckboards to drown in the mud, and of the bitterness such deaths caused. Here were perfectly ordinary-looking men, who (to use a metaphor endorsed by the programme) had seen and survived hell. They looked just like the people at home watching their testimonies, providing a tangible link between the present and the horrendous cavalcade of images from what by 1964 must have seemed to most viewers a distant, almost unimaginable world. They were evidence that what we were seeing was not something that could simply be consigned to history; they had been there and could recall it as if it were indeed yesterday rather than half a century ago. It was perhaps the first time for many years that some of these veterans had spoken publicly (or even privately) of their experiences, and it marked the beginning of a more general public interest in them as living witnesses to an event that had shaped the century and seared the collective consciousness. Harry Patch did not take part, nor did any of those who would some forty years later be fêted as the ‘last veterans’. In spite of this widespread revival of interest in the war, many of those who had fought in it maintained the long silence they had already kept for half a century.

  The marking of the fiftieth anniversary of the First World War coincided with the birth of a new, post-Austerity youth culture in Britain, and there are surprising parallels between these two events. In the 1960s Britain could once again consider itself a world leader, as it had in 1914, though this time it was not as an imperial power but as a cultural force. The pop culture of the period drew heavily upon Britain’s imperial past, and enjoyed a similar sense of national self-confidence. The Union Jack was adopted as the symbol of what became known as the Swinging Sixties, but rather than fluttering dutifully from flagpoles, it lent its distinctive red, white and blue to T-shirts and other fashion items, posters and postcards, lapel pins, and decals to stick on cars and motorbikes. Alexander Issigonis’s Mini, launched in 1959, became the classic 1960s vehicle, and during this period these cars often boasted Union Jack decorations on their roofs or even on their headlights. The eccentric and pseudonymous pop singer Screaming Lord Sutch, later to become a colourful figure in British general elections as leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, drove around in a Rolls-Royce painted in Union Jack stripes. Some older people were affronted that a national symbol should become a fashion accessory among the disrespectful young, and perhaps its most symbolic appropriation was that of Pete Townshend, who sported a Union Jack jacket on the sleeve of the Who’s assertively titled 1965 album My Generation.

  One of the most familiar images of Swinging London was a First World War recruiting poster. On 6 August 1914, two days after the
outbreak of war, the recently ennobled military hero Earl Kitchener of Khartoum had joined the cabinet. Appointed Secretary of State for War, he became the face of recruitment when a poster was produced depicting his sternly mustachioed likeness in military uniform pointing a huge accusing finger at the viewer with the reminder ‘Your Country Needs You’. It became perhaps the best-known image of the war, and sixty years later was subversively appropriated by Britain’s thriving pop culture. One of London’s most celebrated and fashionable shops in the mid-1960s was called I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet and sold second-hand and antique military clothing at 293 Portobello Road. Describing itself as ‘London’s First Second Hand Boutique’, specialising in ‘Kinky, Period & Military Gear’, the shop adopted and adapted the 1914 recruiting poster as its trademark. The earl was seen pointing at passers-by from a sign hanging outside the shop, and some of the world’s leading pop groups bought their clothes here. Perhaps its most iconic moment was the day Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones took Jimi Hendrix to the shop to kit him out in the braided, frogged and colourful military jackets that became his trademark. Such was the success of the shop that it subsequently opened branches in the other two streets that epitomised Swinging London, Carnaby Street and the King’s Road in Chelsea. On their 1966 album, Winchester Cathedral, the New Vaudeville Band, who wrote and played songs that were mostly pastiches of the music of the 1920s and 1930s, included a number called ‘I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet’, imagining what his lordship would make of this cheeky appropriation of his image and wardrobe.

  The taste for fanciful military gear, most famously adopted by the Beatles for their seminal 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, arose directly from the renewed, if largely satirical or critical, interest in the First World War. This reached its apogee at the end of the decade when, as Oh! What a Lovely War, Littlewood and Chilton’s celebrated play reached an even wider audience when it was adapted for the cinema.* Directed by Richard Attenborough, the film boasted a cast that included some of Britain’s most distinguished and popular actors (Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Kenneth More, Jack Hawkins, Dirk Bogarde, Phyllis Calvert, Maggie Smith), two of whom had already lent their resonant voices to the BBC’s The Great War. The script by Len Deighton differs markedly from that of the play, although the central idea of a pierrot show is maintained by setting much of the film on Brighton Pier. It opens with crowds milling on the promenade on that famously sunny August Bank Holiday in 1914. Among them is the Smith family, emblems of the ordinary people of Britain whose lives would be shattered by the actions of the politicians and generals. The gulf that separated these two groups is suggested in the title sequence, with the names of those actors playing the Smiths appearing above the title, while the theatrical luminaries who play the political and military grandees are listed as ‘guest stars’ at the end of a cast list, culminating in ‘and John Mills as Sir Douglas Haig’. The film’s essential theatricality is emphasised by the image of Haig selling tickets for the war from a kiosk. All the male members of the Smith family enlist and are duly killed – though this must be the only war film in which not a single death is actually shown: people die off-screen or, like old soldiers, they simply fade away.