The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  It might have been very different. It was an extraordinary stroke of good fortune that Britain’s last veterans, though of course physically frail, were otherwise not in the least incapacitated. At their very advanced ages they might well have been bedridden, senile or comatose. The Last Veteran himself could have been lying in a hospital wholly unaware of his status. Instead, it would be hard to imagine a more outspoken and eloquent representative of his generation. His words may have become fewer, spoken with increasing pauses between them and in a hoarse whisper, but they always remained pungent and to the point. The Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales paid tribute on television, and the following day news of Patch’s death made the front pages of most of the British newspapers – although at the morning service in Wells Cathedral ‘Harry Patch, local veteran’ took his place inconspicuously on a list read out by the canon of people in the diocese who had died that week. This was just as Patch would have liked it, as he would no doubt have been touched to have known that candles were lit in the windows of Ypres, the town that had adopted him as its own. Further tributes to both Patch and Allingham came from the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clark, the recently appointed Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and the band Radiohead. The BBC had commissioned Clark and Duffy to write poems marking the passing of Britain’s last veterans: Clark’s ‘The Plumber’ was specifically about Patch, whereas Duffy’s ‘Last Post’ was a more generalised salute to those who had just been ‘released from History’. Duffy read her poem on the Today programme on the morning of Allingham’s funeral, and six days later Radiohead’s ‘Harry Patch (In Memory Of)’ was played in a similar slot. The Radiohead song, which had in fact been written in advance of Patch’s death and used his own words from a BBC radio interview as lyrics, was subsequently released as an Internet download costing £1, which went to the British Legion.

  When asked what he thought about the idea that the Last Veteran should be given a state funeral, Patch had replied characteristically: ‘Overall, the idea was all right, I suppose, wanting to honour the generation who fought, but I wasn’t interested. I want to be buried in Monkton Combe alongside my family in the churchyard.’ His wish for ‘a simple, private funeral’ would be observed, but in order to obtain this privacy it was necessary also to organise a large public event so that the nation could pay its respects. The press, naturally enough, spoke of a ‘Hero’s farewell for Harry Patch’, but this was not what he wanted. ‘He could have dealt with it by ignoring the whole thing completely,’ said his friend and spokesman Jim Ross, ‘but in fact he decided to use this to represent his generation with a message which he thought

  they would have wanted broadcast, and that message was one of peace and reconciliation.’ The event would be held in Wells Cathedral and 1,050 tickets made available to the public by personal application at the Cathedral offices. Some four hundred people had already formed a queue when the office opened at 9.30 a.m. a week before the funeral. Some had camped out overnight on the Cathedral Green to ensure they got tickets.

  Patch’s public funeral was meticulously planned to convey his message to future generations. Henry Allingham had always been more conventional than Patch, and his funeral was held at St Nicholas’s Church in Brighton on 30 July with full military honours, his coffin carried by members of the RAF and Royal Navy, representing the two forces with which his war service had been associated. Patch’s funeral, by contrast, bore out the beliefs he had stuck to throughout his life – in particular his belief that all those who fought in the war were victims, irrespective of the uniforms they wore. His coffin, therefore, would be borne into Wells Cathedral by six members of the 1st Battalion The Rifles, successors to his own regiment, but flanked by two infantrymen from France, two from Belgium and two from Germany. All of them, at Patch’s request, were young, roughly the age he had been when he fought in Belgium. Ross told the press: ‘It’s certainly not a military funeral, certainly not a state funeral. It’s the funeral of a private man who had a message, and that message was that we should settle disputes by discussion and compromise, not by war.’ Even ceremonial weapons would be banned inside the Cathedral.

  The choristers of Wells Cathedral had been recalled from their summer holidays to perform at the service, which took place at noon on Thursday, 6 August, and was televised live. It was two days after the ninety-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the war that had interrupted, shaped and eventually come to define Harry Patch’s life. The Cathedral bells tolled 111 times, and the normally busy High Street, through which the cortège would pass, was closed to all traffic. In light rain, the coffin, draped with a Union flag and adorned with a single simple wreath of red roses, was driven to the Cathedral the short distance from Fletcher House through streets lined with people seven deep. Members of the Royal British Legion dipped their flags as their recent and oldest member passed; police on duty saluted; the public took photographs and applauded. When the hearse arrived at the Cathedral, Patch’s great-nephew, David Tucker, placed a box containing his uncle’s medals on the coffin in preparation for them to be formally handed over to the regimental museum during the service. Every one of the Cathedral’s 1,400 seats was occupied, with Patch’s friends and relatives and ticket-holding members of the public joined by the Duchess of Cornwall, representing the Royal Family; the Duchess of Gloucester, patron of the World War One Veterans’ Association; the Veterans Minister, Kevan Jones, representing the government; and General Sir Richard Dannatt, the soon-to-retire Chief of the General Staff, representing the British army. On the Cathedral Green provision had been made for some four thousand people who had been unable to obtain tickets to watch the service on giant screens. Umbrellas mushroomed there on this characteristically damp English summer morning.

  The service was conducted by the Dean of Wells Cathedral, who in his opening address described Harry Patch as ‘an ambassador for peace and reconciliation’. This theme was reflected by the choice of people who took a leading part in the service. The first reading was taken from The Last Fighting Tommy, the scene in which Patch witnessed the death of the young infantryman, and concluded that death is not the end. It was read by the Belgian chargé d’affaires. The second reading, from Corinthians, was read by her German opposite number, while the French chargé d’affaires formally presented the box containing Patch’s medals to the president of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry Museum.

  The eulogy was given by Jim Ross, whose principal theme was that Harry Patch was an ordinary man, made extraordinary by circumstances. He recalled that Patch had told him about his war experiences the first time they had met, but never mentioned them again in eleven years of friendship because there were always other things to talk about. Patch was someone who, though he may have been haunted by the past, was determined to live in the present. The hymns were traditional, but the Cathedral’s leading chorister sang Pete Seeger’s 1960s anti-war anthem ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ to a simple piano accompaniment. The prayers, led by the Precentor of Wells, remembered not only those who had died in Harry Patch’s war, but those who were currently fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Several newspapers the following day would draw comparisons between Patch’s funeral and another one taking place the same day: that of an eighteen-year-old soldier from the 2nd Battalion The Rifles, killed by a Taliban bomb.

  Two buglers sounded the Last Post as the coffin was carried out of the Cathedral, marking the beginning of a minute’s silence. The sky had darkened and there was a heavy downpour – appropriately, given the weather always associated with Passchendaele in the summer of 1917. Another of Patch’s close friends read the familiar lines from Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, lines that would never now be spoken by someone who had not only served alongside the Fallen but had seen many of them fall. To the strains of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’, a hearse then drove Britain’s Last Veteran out of the Cathedral Green and took the road to Monkton Combe church for a private burial attended by those who had known him personally. ‘No o
ne else – no press, no media, no public – just a quiet funeral for Harry with all of his friends,’ as Jim Ross put it.

  Back on the Cathedral Green, almost everyone, it seemed, had something to say about Britain’s Last Veteran, from the head of the British army to the young representatives of the armies of Belgium, France and Germany who had acted as an honour guard. There was a general feeling that in some way Harry Patch belonged to us all, that he was not only a hugely significant part of British history, but also part of the very fabric of the nation. Those who had met him recalled his charm, his sense of humour, his outspokenness, his modesty, his essential decency. Even so, the private man was already fading. People were also speaking of him as someone who symbolised ‘all that’s best about the British army – determination, devotion to duty, but humanity as well’, and claiming that present-day soldiers were ‘in a direct line’ from Patch because ‘he felt such a strong duty to join up, to go and defend the nation’. This was to assert his symbolic role at the expense of the biographical facts. ‘I didn’t want to join up,’ Patch wrote in his autobiography. ‘I didn’t want to go and fight anyone, but it was a case of having to. When it came, army life didn’t appeal to me at all and when I found out how rough-and-tumble it could be, I liked it even less. I had no inclination to fight anybody. I wasn’t at all patriotic. I went and did what was asked of me and no more.’ It was a reluctant conscript, not an eager volunteer, who with enormous grace and patience, and at no small emotional cost to himself, had become the last representative of his generation. As the hearse made its way to Monkton Combe, Harry Patch was leaving behind this public role, which had reached its climax in a great cathedral, in order to return quietly to a place where he truly belonged, lying among his unremarkable family in an English country churchyard.

  At some point, no doubt, people will be interviewing the last British veterans of the Second World War, old soldiers who are already in their eighties or beyond. Then there will be the last veterans of the Korean War, the Falklands War, the Gulf Wars, of Iraq and Afghanistan; but it is doubtful that any of these people will achieve quite the iconic status Harry Patch did. It is partly a matter of scale, of course. While in terms of global carnage the Second World War was quite a match for the First, it never achieved the same resonance and did not leave the country with such an overwhelming sense of national loss. Subsequent wars in which the British have been involved have been comparatively small-scale, confined to individual regions geographically remote from Britain and involving limited forces. More importantly, these forces have been largely made up of professional soldiers, whereas the First World War was fought overwhelmingly by civilian volunteers or conscripts, people like us.

  At the same time, the generation of 1914–18 seems infinitely remote. Whether going over the top or simply making their way through a crowded street, the small black-and-white figures brought to flickering life by early newsreel and documentary footage seem not only to belong to another life, but to another world – and, in a way, they do. The faces of those who stood in long enthusiastic lines outside the recruiting stations were described by Philip Larkin in his celebrated poem ‘MCMXIV’ as ‘archaic’, but part of what now seems the almost culpable naivety among those who imagined the war would be one great adventure came about as a result of their living in the particular world they were about to lose. It was a world in which people believed in what to many of us seem absurd and outmoded clichés: they really did believe in King and Country; they believed that Britannia ruled the waves; they believed that the sun would never set on the British Empire. ‘Never such innocence again,’ Larkin observed poignantly; but one might also add: never such confidence, either. This, too, is our loss. As we have seen, the Edwardian era was not quite the eternal summer it has become in myth, and there were all manner of signs that everything was not as sunny in Britain and her dominions as people liked to think. But while there was widespread poverty and signs of civil unrest for those who cared to look, there was also optimism and a genuine belief in progress, a trust in the beneficial nature of technical and other advances. On the whole, people were not only proud to be British but were prepared to demonstrate their love of country by donning a uniform and taking up arms. While today’s tabloid newspapers and their readers cheer on ‘our lads abroad’, wherever that happens to be, the flag they are rallying around is hoisted safely in Britain. Whatever enthusiasm there may have been among the populace for Mrs Thatcher’s Falklands adventure in 1982, there was a conspicuous lack of civilian volunteers for service in the South Atlantic in defence of one of Britain’s smaller and more remote overseas territories. The public demonstrations that attended Britain’s decision to send troops to Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein would have seemed as extraordinary from the viewpoint of 1914 as the enthusiasm for a war with the Kaiser seems to us from the viewpoint of today. But it is as well to remember that in all sorts of other, more important and enduring ways, the generation of 1914 was little different from us. They ran riot as children, argued with their parents, scrapped with their friends and siblings, fell in and out of love, got drunk, knew happiness and despair, and – overwhelmingly – experienced grief. Those veterans who survived into the twenty-first century provided a link between the present day and a period that already seems beyond our reach. They were both the men in hats jerkily dodging the horse-drawn trams in those early black-and-white films and the men we could still see in full colour recalling that period in numerous television documentaries about the war. As Air Vice-Marshal Peter Dye commented when Henry Allingham unveiled the British Air Services Memorial at St-Omer, a frail 108-year-old was able to ‘bridge the gap between the cold stone and sharp bronze letters of the memorial and the flesh and blood of the young men it commemorates’.

  The First World War generation has now passed irrecoverably into history, the final loss after all those that went before. It has been said that the last veterans ‘breathed life into the pages of history’. If so, that breath is now stilled. ‘It’s really impossible to talk about the Great War and talk about the millions of people who were killed or wounded,’ observed the teacher whose pupils made cards for Harry Patch’s final birthday; ‘but if you talk about one person they really understand, they really make connections.’ Those connections are now broken, and future histories of the war will be written without the living testimony of those who took part in it. The young poet Charles Hamilton Sorley, killed at Loos in 1915, wrote of the ‘millions of the mouthless dead’, but until now those dead have always had a spokesman. Now that the Last Post has sounded for the Last Veteran, there is no one left to say ‘I know what it was like. I was there.’

  FOOTNOTES

  TWO: A Nation Remembers? 1921–1939

  * The Victory Medal was awarded in 1919 to everyone who had served in the war. On the one side was the winged figure of Victory, while on the reverse was the legend ‘The Great War For Civilization 1914–1919’ surrounded by a wreath.

  THREE: Fifty Years On 1945–2000

  * Both Taylor and Littlewood were prominent supporters of the CND: when Canon John Collins decided to hold a rally in support of the CND at the Albert Hall, he had invited Littlewood to stage it, and the proceedings included Taylor receiving a march-past of Scottish pipers.

  * It is unclear why the exclamation mark shifted, but Littlewood herself sometimes included it at the end of the title and sometimes didn’t, and seems also to have been indecisive about the comma she sometimes but not always placed after the ‘Oh’. The published text of the play dispenses with both.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  This is a bibliography of items which have proved particularly useful in researching and writing this book. Books are listed in their first editions; where other editions have been used for the purposes of quotation, the publisher (if different) and date follow in square brackets.

  Allingham, Henry and Dennis Goodwin, Kitchener’s Last Volunteer, Mainstream, 2008

  Arthur, Max, Forgotten Voices of the Great War,
Ebury Press, 2002

  ——, Last Post, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005

  Ashley, Peter, Lest We Forget, English Heritage, 2004

  Babbington, Anthony, For the Sake of Example: Capital Courts Martial 1914–18, Leo Cooper, 1983

  Barham, Peter, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, Yale University Press, 2004

  Bartholomew, Michael, In Search of H.V. Morton, Methuen, 2006

  Blunden, Edmund (ed. Martin Taylor), Overtones of War, Duckworth, 1996

  Blythe, Ronald, The Age of Illusion, Hamish Hamilton, 1963

  ——, The View in Winter, Allen Lane, 1975

  Bond, Brian, The Unquiet Western Front, Cambridge University Press, 2002

  —— (ed.), The First World War and Military History, Clarendon Press, 1991

  Brophy, John and Eric Partridge, The Long Trail, André Deutsch, 1965

  Brown, Antony, Red for Remembrance, William Heinemann, 1971

  Cecil, Hugh and Peter Liddle (eds), At the Eleventh Hour, Leo Cooper, 1998