Читать книгу The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War - Peter Parker - Страница 6

Armistice 1918

Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance

To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,

As they had raised it through the four years’ dance

Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;

And murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’

THOMAS HARDY, ‘And There Was a Great Calm’

News that the Great War for Civilisation had finally come to an end was greeted by noisy rejoicing on the streets of London and other cities around the world, but what struck most people on the battlefields of France and Belgium was the silence. At 11 a.m. on Monday, 11 November 1918, after four and a quarter years in which howitzers boomed, shells screamed, machine guns rattled, rifles cracked, and the cries of the wounded and dying echoed in no man’s land, everything suddenly fell quiet. Across parts of Belgium a thick fog had descended that morning, with visibility down to ten yards. In the muffled landscape the stillness seemed almost palpable. Since for most soldiers news of the approaching armistice did not reach them until an hour or less before it was implemented, it is extraordinary that the guns really did fall silent at exactly the planned time. In one part of the line near Le Cateau a German machine gun was firing at the British troops in the opposite trench until the very last minute. ‘At precisely eleven o’clock an officer stepped out of their position, stood up, lifted his helmet and bowed to the British troops. He then fell in all his men in the front of the trench and marched them off.’

Of those who survived, Air Mechanic Henry Allingham of the Royal Air Force was still in Belgium on the morning of 11 November. Ninety years later he recalled that his fellow servicemen ‘grabbed hold of anything that would make a lot of noise – to celebrate, you see. They let off stray shells, Very lights and whatnot. A lot of men, some who’d been right through the war, didn’t make it through the night.’ Others merely got very drunk, while Allingham himself went to bed and enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of a good night’s sleep. The revelling of his fellows took its toll and the following morning few of the ranks were ready to move out at 8 a.m. as planned. It was therefore not until three hours later that they began their long route march through Belgium to Cologne, where the defeated German people surprised Allingham by their friendliness. They may have lost the war, but they were presumably as relieved as the victors that it had finally ended. It was ‘a cheerless, dismal, cold misty day’ in the Forêt de Mormal on the Franco-Belgian border, Gunner B.O. Stokes of the New Zealand Field Artillery recalled. ‘There was no cheering or demonstration. We were all tired in body and mind, fresh from the tragic fields of battle, and this momentous announcement was too vast in its consequences to be appreciated or accepted with wild excitement. We trekked out of the wood on this dreary day in silence.’ Captain Guy Chapman of the Royal Fusiliers had a similar experience, marching back through the fog to Béthencourt: ‘The band played but there was very little singing,’ he recalled in his war memoir, A Passionate Prodigality. ‘We took over our billets and listlessly devoured a meal. In an effort to cure our apathy, the little American doctor from Vermont who had joined us a fortnight earlier broke his invincible teetotalism, drank half a bottle of whisky, and danced a cachucha. We looked at his antics with dull eyes and at last put him to bed.’

Others were rather more ebullient. Gunner G. Worsley of the Royal Field Artillery received the news of the Armistice while serving in France and remembered doing a cartwheel when a trumpeter sounded the ceasefire. He visited the house of a local woman who was inclined to think the war should continue until Berlin was taken. When Worsley complained that this might result in him getting killed, the woman replied, ‘Sanfairyann’ (the British soldiers’ approximation of the French expression ça ne fait rien – that doesn’t matter). ‘Sanfairyann be buggered!’ Worsley retorted. ‘I’m alive. The war’s over. That’s good enough for me!’ It was not merely French civilians who thought that the end may have come rather too soon. Even some British troops, embittered by their experience and worried that the ceasefire might prove only temporary, felt that the war should carry on ‘until Germany’s armies are really beaten in the field, her line broken and if possible her country invaded’. Private Albert Marshall recalled that when an officer told soldiers in the Essex Yeomanry advancing on Lille that there was to be an armistice, ‘You never heard so much grumbling and swearing in all your life, because we’d got them on the run. We wanted to drive them back to Berlin.’ Percy Wilson, who had been told by a recruiting officer that the war would be over by Christmas 1914, was still in uniform in November 1918, serving close to the German border. When an officer announced that the Armistice was to be signed, several soldiers were annoyed that they would not be allowed, as they saw it, to finish the job. ‘I don’t want a bloody armistice,’ one soldier complained; instead he ‘wanted to get over that border [and] show them what the war’s been like’. Eighty-six years later, the 105-year-old Wilson still believed that had the soldiers been allowed to pursue the Germans back over the border there would have been no Second World War: ‘They would absolutely have pounded the Germans to bits.’ There were similar reactions among some airmen. ‘I confess to a feeling of anticlimax, even to a momentary sense of regret,’ Cecil Lewis recalled in Sagittarius Rising, his classic memoir of life with the Royal Flying Corps. ‘We were a new squadron, fresh overseas, we wanted – particularly the new pilots – to justify our existence, to carry out in action the thing we had been training for.’

Not everyone who wanted to celebrate could always find the means to do so. Lewis was in a small and remote village just north of the Ypres Salient in Belgium when news of the Armistice reached him: ‘There was nothing to drink in the whole village and nowhere to go to. All we could find was a dump of Hun Very Lights, of all colours, left behind in their retreat. This pyrotechnical display was all we could contribute to the gaiety of Armistice night.’ At the RFC aerodrome in France, recalled Sergeant Charles Watson of 11 Squadron, a celebratory bonfire got out of hand when people began throwing full cans of aviation fuel on to it: ‘They went up with such a bang that troops nearby thought the war had started again.’ Elsewhere even worse behaviour prevailed. Private Eric Hiscock, a boy soldier who at the age of seventy-six published a resonantly titled survivor’s memoir, The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling, recalled drunken Australian soldiers going on the rampage in the red-light district of Boulogne, demanding that the local prostitutes should give their services free by way of celebration. At sea, meanwhile, there were no women with whom to celebrate, and sailors had to improvise. An order to splice the mainbrace was issued aboard HMS Revenge, remembered a former Royal Naval Seaman, 106-year-old Claude Choules, in 2005, and everyone received an extra tot of rum. The ship’s company was invited by the officers to join them in a celebratory dance on the quarterdeck, which they did to the accompaniment of the ship’s band.

Some of those who had been at the front were back in Britain when the Armistice was declared. Two of the war’s best-known poets, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, saw the Armistice being celebrated there. Graves was stationed near Rhyl with an Officer Cadet Battalion. ‘Things were very quiet up here on the 11th,’ he told his fellow poet Robert Nichols. ‘London was full of buck of course but in North Wales a foreign war or a victory more or less are not considered much. Little boys banged biscuit tins and a Very light or two went up at the camp but for the rest not much. A perfunctory thanksgiving service with nothing more cheerful in it than a Last Post for the dead; and then grouses about demobilization.’ In his celebrated memoir Goodbye to All That, however, Graves records: ‘The news sent me out walking alone along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan (an ancient battlefield, the Flodden of Wales), cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.’ Sassoon, meanwhile, was in Oxfordshire on indefinite sick leave after being wounded in the head in July. ‘I was walking in the water-meadows by the river below Cuddesdon this morning – a quiet grey day,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘A jolly peal of bells was ringing from the village church, and the villagers were hanging little flags out of the windows of their thatched houses. The war is ended. It is impossible to realise.’ That evening he travelled to London, where he was unimpressed by the capital’s ‘buck’: ‘masses of people in streets and congested Tubes, all waving flags and making fools of themselves – an outburst of mob patriotism. It was a wretched wet night, and very mild. It is a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years.’

Other soldiers may have been in Blighty for the Armistice, but they were still on active duty. Private Harry Patch of the 7th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry was on an exercise on the Isle of Wight. He had been invalided home in September 1917 with wounds incurred when a shell had exploded above his Lewis-gun team in Belgium. He had spent ten months convalescing, but was eventually passed A1 and placed on a draft to return to the front. Rumours that a ceasefire might be declared had reached Golden Hill Fort, the hexagonal Victorian barracks at Freshwater in which Patch and his fellow soldiers were billeted, on the morning of 11 November. They were practising on a rifle range that day and had been told that if an armistice was signed a rocket would be sent up. When this happened everyone cheered and the officer in charge ordered them to get rid of their spare ammunition by firing out to sea so they wouldn’t have to carry it back to the stores. For Patch, the Armistice meant he would not have to return to Belgium as planned, and eighty-eight years later he remembered his feelings of joy and relief.

Some felt that the ceasefire had not come soon enough. Twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Norman Collins of the Seaforth Highlanders, who had been twice wounded, was on leave when the Armistice was announced. ‘I was up a bit late that morning, I was shaving, and the sirens went. My first feeling was “It’s too late – all my friends are gone – it’s too late. It’s no use having an Armistice now.”’ For others the ceasefire really was too late. One of the most famous stories about the end of the war describes a telegram delivered to a house in Shrewsbury at noon on 11 November. With the church bells ‘still ringing, the bands playing and the jubilant crowds surging together’, the family of the poet Wilfred Owen learned that he had been killed in action on 4 November. Even the morning of 11 November itself was not without its casualties, including Private George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, who is thought to be the last British soldier to be killed in action in the war. Evidence that the fighting went on up until the very last moment is provided by a plaque on the wall of a house at 71 rue de Mons in Ville-sur-Haine, where a hapless Canadian soldier, Private George Lawrence Price of the 28th Northwest Infantry, was shot dead by a sniper on 11 November at 10.58 a.m.

For most of those left alive at the front, a desolate landscape in which once bustling towns and villages had been reduced to piles of smoking rubble and acre upon acre of woodland reduced to splintered and blackened stumps, there was little enough cause for rejoicing. The longed-for day had finally arrived but the majority of combatants were too physically exhausted and emotionally depleted to enjoy it. Most of them simply felt relief that the war was finally over. In the great silence, men were able to reflect on what they had been through and remember the comrades they had lost. After years crouching in the front line, it was hard to imagine that snipers were no longer training their rifles on your trench. ‘You were so dazed you just didn’t realize that you could stand up straight and not be shot,’ one soldier remembered in the 1960s. ‘My first thought was “So I’m going to live”,’ another recalled almost three-quarters of a century after the Armistice. ‘I was stunned, total disbelief, and at the same time a secret and selfish joy that I was going to have a life.’ Others simply felt lost. The war had swallowed them up and occupied their every waking moment as it was to haunt their dreams in the future: it was hard to imagine what life would be like now that it was over. Some had joined up or been conscripted so young that they could remember no other kind of adult life. ‘Straightaway we felt we had nothing to live for,’ Sapper Arthur Halestrap of the Royal Engineers recalled. ‘There was nothing in front of us, no objective. Everything you had been working for, for years, had suddenly disappeared. What am I going to do next? What is my future?’

Halestrap’s future stretched farther ahead than he could possibly have imagined that November morning. Eighty-five years later to the day he would lead a service of remembrance at the Menin Gate at Ypres, rising from his wheelchair to recite lines from Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

First published in The Times on 21 September 1914, and intoned at countless Armistice Day services since, Binyon’s lines have become almost too familiar, but were given a new immediacy when spoken by a 105-year-old who by November 2003 was one of a handful of men still alive to have served in what, with good reason, is still sometimes called the Great War. Given the appallingly high casualty rates, few of those who fought on the Western Front had any realistic expectations of growing old or being wearied by age. Some who survived, however, attained very great ages indeed, achieving the rare distinction of having lived in three centuries.

Born on 8 September 1898, Arthur Halestrap could remember his parents receiving letters from relatives serving in the Boer War. He also remembered the death of Queen Victoria and the coronation of Edward VII. His father worked in Southampton for the White Star shipping line, and as a boy Halestrap had walked on the decks of the Titanic while it was in dock there. He had tried to enlist two months after the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, but at the age of sixteen was rejected as too young. He worked instead as a post office telegraphist, excellent training for someone who in September 1916 finally joined up as a signaller with the Royal Engineers.

It was not until January 1918 that Halestrap got to France, and his first experience of being shelled occurred when he was part of a convoy marching up to Brigade HQ in the dark. The horses that were pulling the wagon he was accompanying got stuck in the mud and panicked as the shells started falling, but to his surprise Halestrap did not really experience fear. His months of training had instilled in him a rigid discipline that ensured he got on with the job in hand whatever the circumstances, and he managed to get the wagon moving again across a landscape illuminated by Very lights and shell-bursts. He subsequently took part in the attack in which the British successfully breached the supposedly impregnable Hindenburg Line in September 1918. His job was to set up transmitter-receivers, which meant carrying cumbersome equipment up the line, then going over the top in order to erect radio masts in places that would not attract enemy fire. Although he was not always in the front line, he spent enough time in the trenches to become accustomed to lice, keeping his head down to avoid snipers, advancing under shellfire, and muttering apologies when obliged to walk across the battlefields’ litter of dead bodies.

In sum, his experiences, which may strike us today as extraordinary, were little different from those of millions of combatants. What made Halestrap unusual was that he was still alive to recall them all those years later. Like many combatants, he had survived a number of close encounters with the enemy. While he and a group of soldiers were taking pot shots at a low-flying German observation plane, the pilot responded in kind with a revolver. One bullet slammed into the table beside which Halestrap was standing, missing him by an inch. On another occasion a shell hit an old brewery where Halestrap and his fellow signallers had set up a radio station. Fortunately they had barricaded the windows with sandbags and were protected from the blast. Even when the Armistice had been declared, Halestrap, still in France, managed to outwit death. He caught Spanish flu, a global pandemic that between 1918 and 1919 killed more people than the war did: in Britain alone some 250,000 died. When Halestrap first showed symptoms, a senior officer reckoned that there would be little chance of him surviving the long and gruelling journey to a medical station and so decided to fill him up with rum, wrap him in a blanket and let him take his chances. Halestrap could remember nothing between being given the rum and waking up three days later apparently restored to health. In later years he made some thirty pilgrimages to the battlefields and cemeteries of France and Belgium in order to pay his respects to those who were less fortunate in their close encounters with death. He outlived both his wife and his two children and eventually died in his sleep, aged 105, on 1 April 2004.

Unusual as Halestrap’s story is, it is far from unique. Most of those whose experience of the Armistice I have described lived on into their nineties and beyond, becoming a select band who could recall for much later generations a war that scarred a century. The year Halestrap led the ceremony at the Menin Gate, it was reckoned that he was one of twenty-seven surviving British veterans of the First World War, the youngest of whom was 103. Thereafter the numbers steadily dwindled. Thirteen men (including Halestrap) and two women were interviewed for a two-part BBC television documentary, The Last Tommy, but seven of them had died by the time the programme was broadcast in 2005. A year later, the official count stood at nine, not all of whom had seen active service. Numbers were continually being readjusted – and not always downwards. There have been occasional discoveries of ‘new’ veterans, who had not previously identified themselves – though in Britain, apart from a man whose claim could not be verified because crucial documents were missing, none of these had seen action. Unlike their great-grandchildren’s generation, for many of whom celebrity at any price has become a major ambition, these veterans did not want fame or court publicity. They understood, however, that people were bound to be interested in them and they remained gracious when calls were made on their rapidly dwindling time and energy. Most of them were perfectly ordinary people who after the war continued to lead perfectly ordinary lives until longevity forced them into the limelight.

As increasing attention was drawn to this small group of men and women, it became clear that eventually it would soon diminish until only one member was left: the Last Veteran. To be the last of anything is an achievement of sorts, but on the whole it is a melancholy and potentially lonely one, as much about extinction as survival. It makes us think of the threatened species with whom we share the planet, as the writer J.R. Ackerley did in 1964. Ackerley suggested a parallel between a death in the animal kingdom and the death of a generation:

In 1914 a tragedy occurred, so shocking, so awe-inspiring, so poignant and so irreparable that if all mankind had put on sackcloth and ashes it would scarcely have seemed an adequate expression of their shame and repentance. Doubtless the First World War springs to your self-important minds. Let it spring off again. […] It was the death of a pigeon. She was female, and she died of old age on September 1, 1914, at one o’clock in the afternoon.

This solitary bird was in fact a passenger pigeon called Martha, living in Cincinnati Zoo, and the last of her once abundant species. One of the final great hunts of the passenger pigeon, which was killed for its meat, took place over five months with a casualty rate of some 50,000 every day. No wonder Ackerley saw a parallel between this mass slaughter and what had happened on the Western Front – particularly since he was writing in 1964 when the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war was being widely marked. He had himself been wounded in action on the Somme on 1 July 1916 and therefore became one of the 60,000 casualties suffered by the British that terrible day.

The chances were always that the Last Veteran would in some ways be no more distinctive of his kind than Martha was of hers. After leading a life for the most part no different from that of many of his contemporaries, he would nevertheless achieve the signal distinction of being the last Briton to have fought in the Great War. The significance of this did not escape politicians, and there were suggestions that this man, whoever he might turn out to be, should be given a state funeral. This was put before the House of Commons by a former leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith, on 18 April 2006. The idea had been around for some time before this, and Duncan Smith had been prompted to propose it formally after being approached by one of his constituents. Duncan Smith had wondered whether such an event might be considered invidious since there were still many people alive who had fought just as bravely and honourably in the Second World War. The constituent immediately replied that ‘the first world war was different, and that everyone who fought in the second world war recognised that. There was something peculiar about the conditions and nature of that conflict.’ Duncan Smith went on to outline what it was about the First World War that set it apart from other conflicts: the huge casualty figures (one million dead and two million wounded in the British Empire alone); the fact that the bodies of almost half those killed on the Western Front were never found; the appalling conditions in the trenches. Duncan Smith also quoted two examples from the ‘flood of letters’ he had received on this subject, both from nine-year-old schoolgirls who supported the idea of a state funeral. He concluded:

A society that forgets its past and is embarrassed about remembering the sacrifice of those who have gone before is one that loses its past and, with that, loses its future. As those young people I referred to were able to remind me and many of my colleagues, there is something special about pausing to remember. We are not dwelling on or glorifying war, but remembering the sacrifice of those whose sole responsibility was to aid and abet their colleagues and to protect and defend the society in which they lived, and which nurtured them.

A short debate followed in which Duncan Smith’s proposal was broadly welcomed, although everyone agreed that nothing could be done without first ascertaining the wishes of the family of the last veteran to die. If for any reason the family did not want a state funeral, it was suggested, a national service of commemoration should be held instead. Don Touhig, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence, cautioned that however appropriate a state funeral might seem, and whatever popular support there was for it, there might be logistical difficulties in ascertaining who really was the last veteran. More than half the service records of the period had been destroyed during the Blitz, and so reliance was put upon those veterans who had identified themselves. No one was under any obligation to identify themselves and there might be veterans who preferred anonymity or had either by choice or oversight not made themselves known: as recently as March of that year two new French veterans had been ‘discovered’. To further complicate matters, Touhig stated that the government’s definition of a last veteran was rather more flexible than the generally agreed one. He argued that anyone who had served during the war, and even those who had not finished their training and were still in Britain when the Armistice was declared, should be recognised as veterans. It became clear that some sort of service of commemoration might be a more workable arrangement than a state funeral, and this was what the government eventually decided upon. On 27 June 2006 the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, announced that: ‘A National Memorial Service will allow the whole nation to honour the valour and spirit shown by the veterans of WW1 and will commemorate an entire generation.’ This would take place in Westminster Abbey within about twelve weeks of the death of ‘the last known World War One veteran’. As with Duncan Smith’s original proposal, the ceremony would be modelled on the one that took place on 11 November 1920 when Britain’s Unknown Warrior was laid to rest in the Abbey ‘among the most illustrious of the land’.

A state funeral for the Last Veteran would undoubtedly have provided a neater symmetry than a mere service of commemoration, since it would have marked the end of a prolonged period of national mourning which started with the state funeral of the Unknown Warrior. Not only was the Unknown Warrior, like the Last Veteran, an individual representative of all those who served in the First World War, he was also an individual chosen at random, or at any rate by chance, just as the Last Veteran achieved that status by an accident of longevity.

Ever since the Armistice there have been arguments, not all of them seemly, about how the First World War should be remembered, commemorated and represented. In all this the veterans have played a significant and sometimes controversial role. Veterans were not always seen as remarkable, fêted and honoured because they provided a link with a particularly poignant piece of our history. Over the years they had been treated with a great deal less deference and consideration, had been obliged to fight for their rights, had been involved in later battles in which the weapons were bricks and batons and the enemy was the forces of law and order in their own country. They had been both the centrepiece of our national acts of commemoration, and dismissed as increasingly irrelevant, standing in the way of liturgical reform. Above all, they had remained a constant reminder of a major historical event that in all sorts of ways, not least the psychological, shaped the twentieth century.

In Britain the international catastrophe that was the First World War has been adopted as a peculiarly national trauma, one that has cast its shadow down the years and haunts us still. There have been other wars since 1918, and in all of them combatants have had to endure privation, discomfort, misery, the loss of comrades and appalling injuries. Even so, the First World War continues to exert a hold upon the collective imagination in Britain in a way it does not in, say, the USA. The statistics are, of course, extraordinary. On the First Day of the Somme 20,000 British soldiers were killed, the equal of the entire sum of casualties of the Boer War. The number of British service personnel killed in the Second World War was less than half the number killed in 1914–18. Even when you add in the many more civilian casualties Britain suffered during the Second World War – some 60,000 – the overall number of deaths is still smaller than the dreadful tally of the Great War. Over 30 per cent of British men who were aged between twenty and twenty-four in 1914 were killed in action or died of wounds; of those aged between thirteen and nineteen the figure is more than 28 per cent; some 200,000 women were left widows and 350,000 children left without fathers.

Bad as this was, it was not unique to Britain. France, Germany and Austria each not only lost more combatants than Britain, but also lost a higher proportion of their overall population: France lost 1 in 28, Germany 1 in 35, Austria 1 in 50, Britain 1 in 66, Italy 1 in 79, the USA 1 in 2,000. Furthermore, although the mass slaughter on the Western Front was indisputably awful, for all the talk of ‘mechanised killing’ it does not compare with the industrialised murder carried out by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It remains a grim statistic that of the six million British who fought in the First World War roughly one in eight were killed, but they were at least killed fighting in defence of their country or for some sort of patriotic principle rather than simply rounded up for liquidation. It is not even a question of numbers. The long lists of names on First World War memorials, many of them from the same family, tell of the losses sustained by individual villages, towns or cities, but none of them speaks so eloquently of communities destroyed as, for example, the interior walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, where the names of some 80,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust from Bohemia and Moravia are inscribed, arranged by where they once lived: men, women and children, street after street after street. The bomb that fell on Hiroshima in 1945 eclipsed anything produced by even the greatest bombardment of the trenches, resulting in between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths in an instant.

Regardless of the historical and demographic facts, when remembering the First World War the British continue to talk about a lost generation. There is a sense that as a nation we have never quite recovered from this loss, that the flower of British youth was cut down in Picardy and Flanders, that an irreplaceable wealth of talent and an almost prelapsarian state of innocence were destroyed for ever between the years 1914 and 1918. Cast out of the Edwardian Eden, where it was somehow always perfect summer weather, we have ever after tended to look yearningly back rather than expectantly forward.

The war has become part of who we are. It occupies a disproportionately large place in our sense of the world and its history and remains a seemingly endless resource not only for historians, but for novelists, poets, dramatists and composers, for cinema and television. The sounds and images of the war are so imprinted on the national consciousness that we recognise them instantly: the foreign place names such as Mons, Ypres, Loos, Passchendaele and the Somme, which retain a familiarity even for those who could not point to them on a map; the lines of men at the recruiting offices on 4 August 1914 and the rows of crosses (now replaced by rounded headstones) that marked where those bank-holiday crowds ended up; the scarlet poppies blowing in a landscape rendered unrecognisable by shellfire; the mud and the blood, and the big guns in France that could be heard this side of the Channel. When in 1980 Kenneth Macmillan created a ballet using Poulenc’s Gloria, all he had to do was place tin helmets on the dancers’ heads to make this joyous piece of music into a requiem. Indeed, the war is constantly used – some might say dragged in – as a reference point in the arts: Andrew Davies’s television adaptation of A Room with a View (2007) dispensed with E.M. Forster’s happy ending and had George Emerson killed in the trenches, while Kenneth Branagh’s film of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (2006) sent Tamino off to the Somme. The complex philosophical ideas, with their Masonic elements, that characterise the struggle between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute could, Branagh felt, be presented to a wider audience if the action was moved to the Western Front. ‘By giving each an army and presenting visually the landscape of the First World War, there is a sense of import and scale about the actions of these characters,’ he said. ‘The Great War provides a territory both literal and metaphoric that is as emotive and complex as the opera itself.’

This territory is a disputed one. Our popular notion of the war – formed largely by what was written about it by those who fought in the front line, and by later artistic reimaginings of it – is that it was indeed uniquely horrible; that it was conducted by an incompetent High Command that repeatedly sacrificed thousands of men in order to gain a few yards of churned earth; that it was characterised by ‘mud, blood and futility’. There is, however, another view of the conflict, one argued by such leading military historians as Correlli Barnett, John Terraine, Hew Strachan, Brian Bond, Nigel Cave, Gordon Corrigan, Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior, and supported by a generation of younger so-called ‘revisionist’ historians such as Gary Sheffield. These historians point out that not all the generals were callous incompetents, nor all rankers hapless and unwilling victims; they insist that some of the battles were brilliantly planned and fought; they remind us that we did after all win the war. They are exasperated by the Anglocentric attitude to the war that prevails in Britain, pointing out not only the war’s international dimensions but also the even larger losses sustained by other combatant countries. The British tendency to think of the war only in terms of the Western Front, they argue, gives us a hopelessly skewed impression both of its conduct and of its wider significance. They dismiss the War Poets as unrepresentative, complain about the way the war is taught in schools where literature is given precedence over history, and retain a particular loathing for two of the most enduringly popular representations of the war, the play Oh What a Lovely War! and the television tragicomedy Blackadder Goes Forth. In short they feel that the British are obsessed with the ‘tragedy’ of the war and are incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Their view of popular representations of the war can be summed up by the title of Gordon Corrigan’s 2003 study: Mud, Blood and Poppycock.

The impact of such books on interpreting the war in universities is considerable, and there is no doubt that many of them are meticulously researched and cogently argued. Their impact on the public at large, however, is as yet limited. As Gary Sheffield comments in the introduction to The Forgotten Victory (2001), which is one of the best, most approachable and most persuasive of these ‘revisionist’ histories: ‘For the last decade and a half I have sat in academic seminars in which historians have complained about the difficulty of shifting public opinion on these issues. It seems that every time an important new book comes out, another popular book or television programme appears repeating the same old tired myths.’ The two sides in this argument have become – to use an appropriate verb – entrenched, and it seems unlikely that either will yield in the foreseeable future.

It is no part of this book’s aim to take up this quarrel, but in tracing the way in which the First World War has been remembered and commemorated, and by looking at the way in which the experiences of those who fought in it on the front line have shaped this process, the many corrective ‘facts’ adduced by military historians are less relevant than what the majority of people in Britain have believed and continue to believe about the war. We do not define ourselves as a people by facts, but by received ideas – ideas that have a symbolic rather than a literal truth. Among the long-cherished ideas that the British have about themselves is that they believe in fair play and favour the underdog, they are phlegmatic and always see the funny side of any given situation, and they are among the most tolerant people in the world. All these notions could be ‘disproved’ by citing examples of contrary behaviour, but they persist as a generally accepted truth. As far as the war is concerned, we may no longer believe that angels appeared to protect the British at the Battle of Mons in 1914, that a Canadian serviceman was ‘crucified’ on a barn door near Ypres, or that Germans bayoneted babies and boiled down corpses in order to produce soap, but we still believe – with considerable justification – that the First World War was a great national tragedy and that an entire generation was profligately and unnecessarily sacrificed.

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.