by Peter Parker
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 w
ere 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.
