The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  General Gough, whose Fifth Army formed the bulk of the attacking forces, informed Haig that it was impossible in such conditions to renew the attack and that any attempt to do so would be both very costly and tactically worthless; but his opinion was disregarded. So, on 16 August, a second offensive was launched, an offensive in which Harry Patch first went into battle. This action was subsequently named the Battle of Langemarck after the village that was its chief objective. Moving up to the front line in preparation for this attack took a long time: starting the night before, C Company began arriving in position at 4.15 a.m. The company was to take part in the second wave of the attack, shortly after the first troops went into battle at 4.45, and assembled in front of the Steenbeek, a flooded stream lined with smashed and denuded trees. Using unstable pontoon bridges, they crossed the water in single file and reassembled on the other side, ready for the signal to advance. There was no top to go over: the troops were going into the attack from open ground cratered with shell holes, their starting place surreally marked by white tape laid in the mud. Any notion of advancing in a calm and orderly line, as British troops had done so disastrously on the Somme on 1 July 1916, had to be abandoned, and once the whistle had blown men were obliged to make their way as best they could over the shell-ruptured terrain. A creeping barrage, in which guns put down a heavy curtain of shellfire ahead of the advancing troops, supposedly destroying everything before them, was in progress when Patch, hung about with spare parts for his Lewis gun, set off towards the German-held objective, a line drawn on a map marking a boundary some 1,500 yards from their starting point.

  It was during his unsteady progress through this hellish landscape, obscured by smoke, briefly illuminated by shellfire, littered with the wounded and dying of both sides, that Patch came across a young soldier from A Company, which had led the attack. Of all the terrible sights that he encountered, it was this which would remain with him throughout his extraordinarily long life. The soldier, Patch recalled, ‘was ripped open from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel, and lying in a pool of blood’. Seeing men from his own battalion, he begged them to put him out of his misery. In Patch’s terse but eloquent phrase, ‘he was beyond all human help’, and in fact died before anyone could draw a revolver and comply with his desperate request. ‘It is an image that has haunted me all my life,’ Patch wrote some ninety years later, ‘seared into my mind.’ Troops were not in fact supposed to give succour to, or even stop for, the wounded during an attack. Their only objective was to advance. Those hit by bullets or shrapnel, however horribly injured, were the responsibility of medical orderlies, who would do what they could in situ, then arrange for those with a chance of surviving their injuries to be carried back behind the lines to dressing stations or field hospitals. Evacuation of the wounded was particularly difficult at Passchendaele because of the condition of the ground: a well-known photograph shows a stretcher party of seven men sunk literally up to their knees in mud as they struggle with their alarmingly tilting burden.

  The job of a Lewis-gun team was to cover the advancing infantry, putting out of action any enemy troops who had not been obliterated by the creeping barrage or killed by troops in what was sometimes hand-to-hand combat. Patch’s task when the gun was in use was to change the magazine while the No. 1 adopted the firing position, usually lying on the ground. At one point during this chaotic advance a German emerged from a trench and, with his bayonet fixed, ran towards Patch, who disarmed him by drawing his service revolver and shooting him in the shoulder. Still the German came on. The gun team had made an unusually humane and highly irregular pact that they would not shoot to kill unless absolutely necessary, and Patch remembered this code as he took further aim at the advancing German. ‘I couldn’t kill him,’ Patch recalled in old age. ‘He was a man I never knew, I couldn’t talk to him. I shot him above the ankle, above the knee. He went down. He said something to me in German – God knows what it was – but for him the war was over.’

  When C Company reached the German trenches at around midday, they found them empty and immediately set about converting them into a new British front line. Since these trenches were a mirror image of the British ones, this meant transforming traverses into firebays and vice versa, an arduous job which was carried out under the ever-present threat of a counter-attack, which in the event never came, and to the accompaniment of the cries and groans of the wounded from both sides, who were still lying on the battlefield. The battalion was relieved at 1 a.m. on 18 August and made the long march back to camp. ‘The period out of the line, after the fighting, is something of a blank to me now,’ Patch confessed in his autobiography. ‘I’ve been shown pages of the [official] War Diary, but for the most part it’s hard to relate to the record.’ Similarly, battle plans may have looked neat and tidy on paper, but they meant little to men stumbling under cover of dark, behind a deafening creeping barrage, with the constant threat of enemy fire and with fellow soldiers falling to left and right, over a terrain rather more complicatedly three-dimensional and battered than anything shown on a map. ‘How were we to know that a pile of rubble was this village or that, or that a gentle slope was a particular ridge, let alone what was going on across the front?’ Patch asked ninety years later. ‘You only knew what was right next to you, and even this was often obscured by smoke or fire. Strategy we left to those higher up.’ He also said that in spite of what everyone imagines, those higher up were not often discussed in the trenches. Of Haig, he wrote: ‘I know people think we must have spoken about him, but I can’t remember ever doing so. We were there to do a job, and we did it. We weren’t there to criticize; we knew when they’d gone wrong.’

  The attack on 16 August had in fact gone reasonably well as far as Patch’s regiment was concerned, with the objective achieved and comparatively few casualties: forty-three men killed and 140 wounded for 1,500 yards gained. By the harsh standards of Passchendaele, this was more or less a success; but elsewhere the attack had once again been a costly failure. As Liddell Hart put it, to the right of the DCLI, ‘where alone an advance might have a strategic effect, a heavy price was paid for nought’. Haig nevertheless decided to launch yet another offensive, though this was again delayed by bad weather, which had closed in once more following a brief respite immediately after the 16 August attack. The date chosen for the new offensive was 20 September.

  Patch’s battalion had been ordered to be ready to move to the front line, but were not immediately required. On the night of 22 September, Patch and his gun team were making their way back into reserve in single file across open ground because there were no communication trenches at this point. Although the regiment had suffered casualties the previous day as a result of being bombed by enemy aircraft, the night seemed relatively quiet. The crew were waiting briefly in a huddle while the No. 1 was ‘attending to the call of nature’, when there was a flash of light and Patch was thrown to the ground. He lay there, ‘conscious but incapable of anything’, for a couple of minutes before he realised he had been hit in the groin by shrapnel. He applied the field dressing that all soldiers carried with them and, with very little notion of how much time was passing, waited for stretcher-bearers. Taken by ambulance to a casualty clearing station, he had his wound cleaned and dressed by a doctor, but the fragment of shell remained in place. The shock and the anaesthetising effect of hot metal searing flesh were wearing off, and he began to feel acute pain.

  Since Patch’s injury was less serious than those suffered by many of the men at the clearing station, he was obliged to wait until the following evening before seeing another doctor. He was told that the shrapnel could be removed but was warned that no anaesthetic was available. Since the wound was hurting a great deal, Patch decided to endure two minutes of further pain as four men held him down while the fragment was cut out of him and the wound stitched. He had clearly made the right decision because this procedure brought swift relief. He declined to accept the 2-inch-long piece of jagged metal as a souvenir and was reli
eved to learn that his wound had been classed as ‘a Blighty one’, meaning he would be invalided back to Britain. A couple of hours later he was taken by train to the base camp at Rouen, where he was at last given a bath – in fact, two baths: one containing insecticide, the other clean water – and exchanged his torn, bloodied, muddy and lice-ridden uniform for a sterilised one in what was known as ‘hospital blue’. These blue serge uniforms were reserved for serving men who had been injured, partly to remind them that they were still in the army even if on sick leave, but also so that when they were recuperating back in Britain they weren’t mistaken by the patriotic for ‘shirkers’, as they might have been in civilian dress unless their wounds were visible or otherwise obvious.

  That evening Patch was stretchered aboard a hospital ship, which set sail the following night, delivering its cargo of wounded to Southampton the next morning. In spite of being asked which was the nearest military hospital to his home, Patch ended up in Liverpool, where his wound was disinfected and dressed daily and where he recovered from other, minor, injuries caused by his being flung to the ground: a sprained foot and some torn chest ligaments. Although he did not yet know it, his time in the trenches was over. He was still only nineteen.

  It was while he was in hospital that Patch received a letter from his No. 1, Bob Haynes, to tell him that the three other members of the gun crew had been killed outright by the shell that had injured him when it burst above their heads: ‘there was nothing left, nothing left to bury’. ‘My reaction was terrible,’ Patch recalled; ‘it was like losing part of my life.’ His physical wounds would eventually heal, but as for many of those who lost comrades in the war, the death of these three men was something from which he never really recovered. The date on which they died became his own private day of remembrance, far more important to him than 11 November.

  Patch’s recovery was aided by a new friendship with an entertaining fellow patient from Australia who had suffered shrapnel wounds in his legs. The two young men joked with the nurses, played practical jokes and, when sufficiently recovered, were allowed out of the hospital, sometimes to visit the local cinema, where their hospital blue entitled them to free tickets. Like many friendships forged in the war, this one proved temporary: they were sent to different convalescent camps and although they exchanged addresses and even corresponded for a while they never saw each other again. ‘I never once considered going to Australia,’ Patch confessed. ‘My home was Somerset.’ He was still, however, a long way from returning to Combe Down, apart from a brief visit just before Christmas. Instead he was posted to No. 2 Convalescent Camp at Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham. The intention was that he would eventually be passed fit and returned to the front, and there was little for him to do except wait. Rather than sitting around whiling away the time with games of cards, as other convalescents did, Patch decided to take a correspondence course in order to qualify as a sanitary engineer. He also met his future wife, Ada Billington, in the town, though he did not propose until the following December. Given the uncertainties of the time, uncertainties that made some couples snatch at happiness only to have it cruelly taken away when newly married wives were almost instantly widowed, this was no doubt sensible. Patch later discovered that in 1914 Ada had been briefly engaged to a soldier who had soon afterwards been killed in action. In spite of Patch’s pleading, Ada insisted she would not marry anyone until the war ended. The couple did, however, see a lot of each other while Patch remained in Sutton Coldfield, where he was introduced to Ada’s family.

  In August 1918, Patch was deemed fit enough to be sent to Tidworth in Wiltshire, in order to resume training. He knew exactly what this meant, and dreaded being sent back to the front, but it turned out that he wasn’t after all fully recovered. The ligaments in his chest had not healed properly, as he discovered when he first put on his heavy equipment. He was excused duty for a week, but when he went on parade again a fortnight later, the same trouble flared up. He was sent back to hospital, conveniently in Handsworth and so within easy reach of Ada. The treatment for his damaged ligament was electronic massage, which went on for several weeks, after which he was told to report for duty on the Isle of Wight. Patch believed that the chest injury may well have saved his life. Instead of being sent back to the Western Front in the summer of 1918, he was still on the Isle of Wight when the Armistice was declared on 11 November. Patch’s war had ended.

  Like many of those who survived the war, Harry Patch simply returned to his former life when the hostilities ceased and his long-delayed demob was granted; but what he had been through had altered his life altogether. The First World War was like an earthquake, its aftershocks going on for many years afterwards. For a long time he continued to have bad dreams about the night he was wounded and lost his friends. ‘The war might have been over, but its effects were never far away,’ he recalled. He returned to Combe Down ‘thoroughly disillusioned’: ‘I could never understand why my country could call me from my peacetime job and train me to go to France and try to kill a man I never knew. Why did we fight? I asked myself that, many times. At the end of the war, the peace was settled round a table, so why the hell couldn’t they do that at the start, without losing millions of men?’ The dreadfully wounded soldier who had begged Patch to finish him off had cried out ‘Mother!’ as he died, and Patch had been convinced that this was a cry not of despair but of greeting. ‘I’m positive that when he left this world, wherever he went, his mother was there,’ Patch wrote towards the end of his life, ‘and from that day I’ve always remembered that cry and that death is not the end.’ Even so, he left the army with his ‘faith in the Church of England shattered’. In an unsuccessful attempt to revive it he joined the church choir: ‘in the end I went because I enjoyed the music and had friends there, but the belief? It didn’t come. Armistice Day parade – no. Cassock and surplice – no. I felt shattered, absolutely, and I didn’t discuss the war with anyone from then on, and nobody brought it up if they could help it.’ This attitude persisted well beyond the immediate aftermath of the war: he refused to join veterans’ associations, had no wish to revisit the battlefields, never attended a regimental reunion and avoided all war films and ‘anything to do with war on television’. He did not even join the British Legion until bribed with a bottle of whisky to do so in the very last year of his life. Nor did he ever again meet the other surviving member of his gun team, although the two men ‘kept in touch’ until Bob Haynes died in the 1970s. At the first general election in which he was eligible to vote, Patch put his cross against the name of the Liberal candidate, a Quaker who had campaigned against conscription.

  His disillusionment in the immediate aftermath of the war was not much helped by the fact that, like many returning servicemen, he was in dispute with his former employers, and was obliged to take on temporary jobs. Many returning servicemen were so desperate for work that they would travel miles or simply move to where the jobs were. At first, Patch was determined to remain in Combe Down, where his father had promised him a house on his forthcoming marriage, and he considered joining the Somerset County Police. Although taller than the average working-class British recruit (who, stunted by poor diet and an unhealthy urban environment, was 5 inches shorter than his middle-class equivalent), at 5 feet 8 inches, Patch was 1 inch shorter than the height then required for the police force and was rejected. He dug trenches for the privately owned Combe Down Water Company when the village was put on the mains, but eventually decided to move to Gobowen, a small town in Shropshire close to the Welsh border, where he’d been offered a nine-month plumbing job on a new housing scheme. Apart from the pay, which was better than anything on offer around Bath, he was now within easy reach of his fiancée, who was living with her brother in a village called Hadley near Wellington. It was here, on 13 September 1919, that Harry Patch and Ada Billington were quietly married, and they spent their honeymoon walking in the hills around Church Stretton. Their first son, Dennis, was born in Shropshire the following June,
just after Patch’s job came to an end. The new family moved in with Ada’s brother, and Patch joined a building firm in Ludlow. The company dealt mostly with private clients, some of them living in huge country houses, with hordes of staff. The amount of respect such people still commanded in the early 1920s was made clear to Patch when he was doing a job for Lady Mary Cambridge at Shatton Hall. Having missed his train from Whitchurch back to Shrewsbury, he was surprised when the stationmaster, hearing that he had been working for her ladyship, said he would make the next express train stop so that Patch could travel in the guard’s van.

  In 1921 Patch returned with his wife and baby son to Combe Down and settled into 5 Gladstone Place, one of the houses built by his father a decade earlier. His brother William was next door at No. 4, and his parents and brother George were also living in the village, where large crowds turned out on a beautiful late summer’s day for the unveiling of the village war memorial. A service was held at Holy Trinity Church, after which Patch and his fellow choir members walked in their robes to Firs Field, where the new memorial in the shape of a cross was concealed beneath a Union flag. The congregation sang ‘O Valiant Hearts’, after which the memorial was unveiled by ‘some big noise in uniform, covered in medal ribbons, or scrambled egg’, as Patch dismissively put it.