The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  Patch found full-time employment with the building firm Sculls of Bristol, which at that time was working on the Wills Memorial Tower in the city. This soaring 215-foot Gothic revival structure formed part of Bristol University’s Wills Memorial Building, named for its first chancellor, a founder of the famous local W.D. & H.O. Wills tobacco company, whose products had been so highly valued at the front. The building of the tower, which was made of reinforced concrete but faced with local Bath stone, had been interrupted by the war and restarted only in 1919. It would provide Patch with four years’ guaranteed work, something of a luxury for former servicemen in 1921, when they accounted for a large percentage of the one million unemployed. In an age before mechanical cranes, working on tall structures was a precarious business. Apart from the fact that the core of the tower was concrete, building methods and materials had changed little since the fourteenth century. The tower was surrounded by free-standing wooden scaffolding and everything apart from bricks, including such heavy materials as rolls of lead and bags of tools, had to be carried up ladders by hand. It was with lead that Patch worked, supplying flashing and pipes and acquiring a new skill of lead burning to make watertight seals. The tower was officially opened by George V in June 1925, but Patch was no more impressed by his king than he was by the ‘big noise’ who unveiled the Combe Down war memorial: ‘I don’t remember much,’ he wrote, ‘I can’t say I was that interested.’

  His employer encouraged him to take another exam and become a Member of the Royal Sanitary Institute: when he failed the exam, his employer offered to pay his expenses for another attempt, telling him that he could reimburse him from his wages if he passed, which he did. He was subsequently appointed manager of the Clifton branch of Sculls, going every day on the hour-long journey from Bath to Bristol by early-morning train to open the shop at 8 a.m., returning after closing-time at 5 p.m. This extension of steady employment at an increased wage was all the more welcome because his second son had been born the previous year. When the General Strike took place in May 1926 and the trains stopped running, Patch bicycled the 12 miles to work. After a while, the job changed and he resigned in order to set up his own business, taking advantage of the numerous contacts he had made while working for Sculls. Most of the work he did was local, but in order to carry tools and materials to jobs farther afield, he bought his first car, a second-hand Austin 7. Known affectionately as the Baby Austin, the vehicle had gone into production in 1923 and was the first British car mass-produced for ordinary people. By far the most popular car of the period, it transformed the lives of thousands of families and meant Patch could take his wife and children on day-trips to places such as Weston-super-Mare on the Somerset coast. He had been taught to drive by the son of a local grocer and at this period no driving test was necessary: those taking to the road merely applied to their local council for a licence.

  By the 1930s, the amount of work Patch was able to procure meant that he was able to employ three other plumbers, local men he had known for a long time. Most of the work was domestic and so not as badly affected by the Depression as major building projects – though Patch learned how to lay bricks and did other odd jobs when times were thin. By the end of the decade, Patch’s two sons had left school, the younger, Roy, following his father into the building trade, the elder, Dennis, training to be an accountant. His brother-in-law had emigrated to Chicago, where he ran an accountancy firm, and when Dennis said that he was going to join his uncle, Patch and Ada considered emigrating too. But all these plans were abandoned in September 1939 when Britain declared war on Germany.

  At forty-one, Patch was too old to be called up once more, but conscription brought back unhappy memories of 1914. Patch himself may have been ineligible for service, but his sons were both of military age. Not wishing to be conscripted into the army, Dennis volunteered for the Royal Navy, while Roy joined the Royal Army Service Corps. Both served overseas but returned safely at the war’s end. Patch’s own Second World War, serving with the Auxiliary Fire Service and as a civilian garrison engineer, has already been described. The latter job meant moving to Compton Dundon, a village just to the south of Glastonbury, where he and Ada would live in a thatched cottage for the next ten years. The cottage came with an extensive garden in which, like his father before him, Patch grew vegetables and kept pigs. There was also an orchard containing rare varieties of cider apples, a Somerset speciality. Patch no more felt like celebrating the end of the Second World War than he had the first: both his nephew and his niece’s fiancé had been killed. Rather than starting up his own business again, he took a job as a plumber with a company called E.R. Carter at West Hendford on the outskirts of Yeovil, and moved to nearby Preston Grove. His holidays were almost always spent in Somerset, often in the caravan he had constructed, although he was also a frequent visitor to Weymouth in neighbouring Dorset, where his lifelong friend from Combe Down, George Atkins, now lived.

  In spite of his employer’s suggestion that he was fit enough to carry on working, Harry Patch retired at the statutory age of sixty-five in 1963. The fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War the following year, and the renewed interest in the war throughout the 1960s, passed him by entirely. He had never spoken to his wife about the war, nor discussed it with any of his work colleagues, and would continue to remain silent about his experiences for the next thirty-five years. Instead he pursued his interest in more distant history, becoming something of an amateur expert on Roman Bath and the geology of Somerset, in particular the mines of Combe Down. He occasionally gave public talks on these subjects, and in his nineties, when concern was expressed about the danger of subsidence in Combe Down after a hole had opened up in Firs Field, he was called upon to lead geologists from Bath University through the tunnels he had explored as a boy seventy years earlier, tunnels that had been sealed off as a safety measure in the late 1920s.

  The 1970s and early 1980s brought Patch more than his fair share of difficulties and unhappiness. Ada died after a stroke at the age of eighty-one in 1976, and George Atkins died the following year. Patch moved in with his unmarried elder son Dennis, who was living in Wells, but this proved disastrous. Dennis had been very close to his mother and, deeply affected by her death, began drinking heavily. In order to fund his alcoholism, he sold off many of his father’s possessions, including his war medals. After four years of increasingly unhappy cohabitation, Patch met and married a widow called Jean, later admitting: ‘To be honest, I married to get out of my son’s way.’ He was now eighty-two and moved with Jean into sheltered accommodation at Valley Close in Wells. They were so concerned about Dennis’s health that they persuaded him to see a doctor. Dennis was admitted to hospital with advanced sclerosis of the liver and died eight days later aged only sixty-one. The complications of Patch’s relationship with Dennis led to an estrangement between him and his other son, Roy, which lasted until the latter’s death from cancer in 2002. Jean also developed cancer and died after four short years of marriage, spending a considerable time bedridden and nursed by her husband. Patch and his neighbours in Wells, Fred and Betty Isaacs, had become close and mutually dependent friends. Patch looked after Betty when her husband died, and the two of them did some travelling; but when in 1996 Betty became too frail for this and was advised to move into a residential home, Patch decided to go with her. He would remain at Fletcher House for the remainder of his life. After Betty died, Patch became the inseparable companion of another resident, a Londoner called Doris who although in her nineties was still sixteen years his junior.

  Harry Patch never had any desire to visit the places where he had fought as a young man, but shortly after his second marriage he had been offered tickets for a tour of the Normandy beaches that had played so significant a role in the Second World War. While he found he could take a detached historical interest in old dugouts and gun emplacements, he found the huge American cemetery above Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer overwhelming. Containing 9,387 burials, this is
the largest American cemetery of that war – though it is far surpassed in size by the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery containing 14,246 burials from the First World War, many of them men killed during the very last days leading up to the Armistice. Patch recognised that he may well have known some of those buried at Colleville, having spent time with them when he was overseeing the plumbing and sanitation at their military camps in Somerset in 1944. He could not bring himself to wander among the graves as his fellow tourists were doing, but instead stood there and wept. It is evident from the vocabulary he used to describe his thoughts as he looked out across the massed gravestones and imagined those who lay beneath them that he was also reminded of the losses of his own war: ‘they didn’t die a normal death, they were shot, bayoneted or torn to death by shrapnel’. He regretted coming and swore he would never again venture abroad. The seventieth anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele was widely marked in 1987, but Patch kept his counsel and took no part in the commemorations. The seventieth anniversary of the Armistice the following year also passed him by.

  Patch had done his best to repress his memories of the war, but after he moved to Fletcher House a minor incident brought everything back with startling immediacy. The door to his room was opposite a linen cupboard. One night someone had gone to get some linen and turned on the fluorescent light inside the cupboard. As the tube flickered into life, flashes of light came through the glass panel above the door to Patch’s room, where its occupant lay in the dark, half asleep. He was transported in an instant back to Passchendaele. ‘It was the flash of a bomb,’ Patch recalled. ‘That flash brought it all back.’ When he celebrated his 100th birthday shortly afterwards, newspapers and television companies got in touch. He had been suffering from bad dreams about the war and decided that the time had come to face his demons, so he agreed to appear on television in Veterans, a BBC documentary series commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the Armistice based on the research among veterans carried out by Richard van Emden. In his search for survivors, van Emden had regularly scanned the Caring Times, the house magazine of the care-home profession, which always noted when a resident had reached 100. He would then telephone the relevant home to ask whether the centenarian had taken part in the First World War and would be prepared to talk about his experiences. He had already persuaded 120 of them to commit their memories to tape when he first went to meet Patch on 1 July 1998. Patch later claimed that although he took part in van Emden’s television documentary, he ‘slept through most of it’, and had no inkling that he would become a world-famous spokesman for his generation. One poignant aspect of the book that accompanied the series was photographs of the veterans as they look at the end of the twentieth century juxtaposed with ones taken during the war. This was not possible in the case of Patch. Given his view of the war and the fact that he had for so many decades attempted to erase it from his life, it is appropriate that there appeared to be no photographs of Private Harry Patch at the front, or even on his way there. The only photograph of him in uniform in his autobiography was taken at his brother George’s wedding in 1918 after he had been back in England for many months recuperating from his wound. Standing at the back, he is barely discernible, a ghostly figure partly obscured by those standing in front of him.

  Patch was prepared to be interviewed about the war, but in spite of repeated offers and requests had absolutely no intention of returning to the battlefields, as many of his fellow veterans had done. He relented in November 2002 when he agreed (‘I don’t know why’) to attend a ceremony marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the unveiling of the Menin Gate at Ypres. He was 104 and was joined by Jack Davies, 107, who had also served with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, and Arthur Halestrap, 104, who had become a regular visitor to battlefields, cemeteries and other sites in France and Belgium. Although Patch found the whole experience very emotional, he was glad that he had gone, and thereafter returned several times. Even so, he could not for a long time face going to Pilckem Ridge or Langemarck, though he visited the chapel at Toc H, where he and his gun crew had received communion in the summer of 1917. When he finally went to Langemarck to lay a wreath on the memorial to the 20th (Light) Division, to which his regiment had belonged, he found himself unable to leave the coach: ‘I looked from the window and the memories flooded back and I wept, and the wreath was laid on my behalf.’ Every time he went to the Ypres Salient, he insisted it would be the last. ‘I don’t feel the need to go,’ he would say. ‘I know that Arthur Halestrap always felt that it was his duty to go until the end, but I don’t know, we shall have to see.’

  In the autumn of 2004 he was prevailed upon to travel once more to Belgium for the BBC television documentary The Last Tommy. He would play a leading role in the second half of this two-part film, which opened with Patch, by now in a wheelchair, sitting among the massed gravestones at Tyne Cot Cemetery a few miles north-east of Ypres. Tyne Cot is the largest British war cemetery in the world: the stones that stretched away from Patch to the horizon mark 11,945 burials, 8,367 of them containing unidentified bodies, many of them recovered from Passchendaele. In addition the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing records the names of a further 34,900 men for whom there was no room on the nearby Menin Gate. ‘It’s painful,’ Patch commented later in the film in his by now slow voice, with its deep Somerset burr. ‘I’ve got three mates buried here somewhere. I don’t know where.’ Looking across the serried ranks of gravestones, he echoed what many people had thought over the years, but did so with a simple authority only his own experience and long memory could give: ‘It’s too many. When you look at it – why did they die? Look at them. Why? All of them dead.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘No.’

  This was to be, Patch declared, his final pilgrimage, and it was to have a remarkable conclusion. Recalling how he had spared the life of the German who had run at him in August 1917, Patch admitted that had this incident taken place after his gun crew had been killed ‘I’d have had no trouble at all in killing him’. He once again shook his head sorrowfully. He found the whole ordeal of returning to the scenes of such incidents painful: ‘I’ve got some bitter memories, that’s the trouble. I can’t forget that. Eighty-seven years. That’s a long time.’ The programme makers not only wanted to persuade Patch to return to Pilckem Ridge, they wanted him to meet one of Germany’s last surviving veterans on 22 September, the anniversary of the loss of his gun team. A year older than Patch, Charles Kuentz had also been at Passchendaele – on the other side. He had been conscripted into the Imperial German Army in 1916 at the age of nineteen, and was as reluctant to go to war as Patch had been. His father was French and he had himself been born in Alsace-Lorraine, a disputed border territory that had been under German rule only since 1871, when France lost the Franco-Prussian War. Kuentz had always considered himself French and spoke French as his first language and so had no particular desire to ‘defend the Fatherland’. He had fought the Russians in freezing conditions on the Eastern Front before being transferred to the Western Front in 1917, where he saw action at Arras and on the Somme as well as at Passchendaele. He too had suffered the loss of a close friend, killed horribly by shrapnel beside him in a trench. He had also lost a son in the Second World War: drafted into the Waffen-SS after the invasion of France, he had been killed on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. Like Patch, Kuentz had never talked about his experiences in the war until he reached the age of 100, when people began to seek him out and ask him for his reminiscences.

  It was arranged for the two men to meet at Langemarck German Military Cemetery. The Germans had consolidated their First World War cemeteries in the 1930s when bodies were exhumed from smaller plots and reburied: some 10,000 bodies from eighteen different burial sites were brought to Langemarck to join the 4,000 or so already there. Further reorganisation took place after the Second World War when Langemarck became one of three ‘collecting cemeteries’ for the German dead of the First World War. Bodies were exhumed from other Belgian sites – Zonnebeke,
Poelkapelle, Passchendaele, Moorslede, Westroosbeke and Zillebeke – and reburied at Langemarck, bringing the total identified dead to 19,378. In addition, unidentified remains were removed from all over the Western Front and buried in the Kameraden Grab, a mass ‘Comrades’ Grave’, bringing the total number of burials to a staggering 44,234. Because of its complicated history of reburials, and because the Belgian authorities were less inclined to make land available for the dead of those who had invaded their country than for their allies, Langemarck does not mark each individual burial with a headstone as is the custom in British war cemeteries. Instead, burial plots containing up to eight bodies are marked by flat stones listing names where known, among which stand sombre groups of squat black basalt crosses. It was in this setting that two centenarians, who more than an average lifetime ago had faced each other as enemies, came together in an act of reconciliation. As at the famous ‘Christmas Truce’ of 1914, when in defiance of the authorities British and German troops had emerged briefly from their trenches to fraternise, the two men exchanged gifts representative of their own localities: Kuentz brought a tin of Alsatian biscuits, Patch a bottle of Somerset cider. Neither man spoke the other’s language, but they shook hands and both expressed their thoughts through an interpreter. Asked whether he would hold it against Kuentz if it was discovered that it had been he who had fired the shell that killed the three members of the Lewis-gun team, Patch replied: ‘No. Not today.’ He repeated what had by now become one of his most often-voiced messages to later generations: ‘The most important thing is don’t go to war. Settle it over the table. That’s how the first two wars were settled – by negotiation over a table. Why should they do it after so many lives have been lost?’ ‘Exactement,’ commented Kuentz’s wife, who had accompanied him. ‘Aujourd-hui nous sommes tous les amis,’ Kuentz himself added. Together he and Patch laid a wreath of poppies on a German grave. Patch leaned out of his wheel chair to pick up an acorn from the ground, which he presented to Kuentz, who shortly afterwards remarked in an interview: ‘It means an awful lot to me. These small gestures are the things that encourage friendship between peoples, so that we will never again fight wars against each other. We shot at each other from this place, but now we are friends. What a miracle. I never believed that I would experience this at the age of 107.’ Patch himself commented characteristically: ‘Charles was conscripted just like myself and fought for the Kaiser as I had fought for the King, relations of course, cousins, so it was a family affair. It shows you how stupid war is.’ The two men had lunch and in the evening sat side by side to witness the act of remembrance that takes place at 8 p.m. every day of the year at the Menin Gate, when the busy road running beneath Sir Reginald Blomfield’s huge memorial is closed to traffic by the police and the Last Post is played by members of the town’s fire brigade. The last surviving German veteran of the First World War, Charles Kuentz died a few months later on 7 April 2005.