The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  Appointed alongside Lutyens and Baker for the work in France and Belgium were Reginald Blomfield, who was both a distinguished architect and a garden designer, and Charles Holden, who had served in the war both with the London Ambulance Column and the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, and would go on to design many buildings for the London Underground. These four men allotted work on individual cemeteries to young British architects, with priority given to those who had served in the war. Elsewhere, John Burnet, who had worked for Kenyon at the British Museum, was given responsibility for cemeteries in Gallipoli, Syria and Palestine; Sir Robert Lorimer, who was best known for redesigning large country houses in Scotland, would work in Italy, Greece, Egypt and Germany; and Edward Warren, who designed numerous buildings for Oxford University, was allotted Iraq. The Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew was appointed horticultural adviser to the Commission, and Lutyens asked his old associate Gertrude Jekyll, doyenne of the Edwardian country garden, to provide planting plans for a number of cemeteries.

  It would naturally be some time before the uniform designs could be put into practice, and ‘until such time as they could be handed over to the Imperial War Graves Commission for permanent construction’, the cemeteries were the responsibility of the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, which both organised and maintained them, assisted by such bodies as the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The Directorate also remained responsible for searching the battlefields for bodies once the war was over. The vast area to be covered was systematically divided up and allotted to individual ‘Graves Concentration Units’ consisting of twelve soldiers under a senior NCO, who went back and forth looking for corpses and for isolated graves, the occupants of which they exhumed and transferred to recognised cemeteries. Some 8,000 men were employed in this task, and by the time they had finished in September 1921, 204,650 bodies had been removed from the battlefields and reburied in these cemeteries.

  Many relatives of the dead expressed a wish to visit graves as soon as possible after the Armistice, and so a number of religious organisations began conducting groups of the bereaved to France and Belgium. The best known of these was the St Barnabas Society, named after the patron saint of consolation, founded by a clergyman in 1919 in order to subsidise the travel of those who could not afford trips offered by commercial travel companies. Such pilgrimages proved popular. In the seven months between November 1919 and June 1920, for example, the Church Army arranged for 5,000 people to travel to the places where their men lay buried. During this period such places must often have seemed all too redolent of the circumstances in which such men had died. For all the good work carried out by the DGRE, most of the cemeteries were little more than a neat array of wooden crosses standing on bare earth in a bleak landscape where very little was growing. To reach them, mourners would have had to travel through villages that had been reduced to piles of rubble, along rutted roads lined with splintered trees, across ground still churned up by high explosives and littered with barbed wire, burned-out vehicles, abandoned weaponry and all the pitiful detritus of recent warfare. For those who had been unable to attend any sort of funeral for their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers, visiting graves even in these conditions seems to have provided comfort, and by 1923 some 78,500 of them had taken advantage of travelling facilities offered by the Salvation Army and the YMCA. In time these cemeteries would be tidied up considerably and landscaped with shrubs and flower beds. ‘The concept was to create a sentimental association between the gardens of home and the foreign fields where the soldier lies’, and these particular corners of France and Belgium did indeed begin to look as if they were forever England.

  Elsewhere on the Western Front, a tourist industry rapidly developed independently of the pilgrimages conducted for the bereaved. While many people were content to learn about the actual circumstances of the war at the Imperial War Museum, which had been founded at Crystal Palace in 1917 and recorded over three million visitors between 1920 and 1923, others took advantage of the opportunities offered to visit Flanders and Picardy to see where the war had been fought. A number of unemployed veterans of the officer class took out advertisements in the press offering to conduct small groups of visitors round the battlefields by car, their recent first-hand knowledge of France and Belgium a guarantee of authenticity. As early as 1919, tourists could buy books such as A.T. Fleming’s How to See the Battlefields, but the most popular guides were the illustrated series to most of the major battle sites published by the Michelin tyre company, fifteen of which had been published in English editions by 1921. Prefaced with an overview of the military objectives and brief accounts of the individual attacks, complete with maps, the guides provided a detailed itinerary for the visitor. They also contained before-and-after photographs of devastated buildings and villages and recent photographs of the temporary cemeteries. These photos perhaps tell their own story – as well they might, since one would have no idea reading the Michelin guide to the Somme, for example, that 1 July 1916 was (and still is) the worst day in the history of the British army. Euphemistic phrases such as ‘came into contact with the second German positions’ abound, and the emphasis is firmly upon what few successes the Allies achieved, with figures given for numbers of Germans taken prisoner but none whatever for the 60,000 British casualties. ‘The first assaults on July 1 gave the British Montauban and Mametz, while Fricourt and La Boisselle were encircled and carried on July 3,’ we read. ‘Coltmaison and Mametz Wood, reached on the 5th, were carried on the 11th.’ The cost of all this is not mentioned: you would not know from this book that at Mametz Wood on 7 July alone the Welsh Division lost over 4,000 men. Estimates vary as to the overall casualties for the Battle of the Somme, which dragged on until mid-November, but after 140 days the British had lost some 400,000 men and advanced 6 miles. It was not, perhaps, a statistic anyone wanted to read in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Michelin guides contained enough information to be of interest even to those who did not want to make the journey across the Channel, and by January 1922 sales figures for the guides in Britain, France and America had reached 1,432,000. Later that year George V made a tour of the battlefields and cemeteries both to pay his respects to those of his subjects who had died and to inspect the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, of which his eldest son continued to serve as president. A heavily illustrated book about the royal tour, emotively titled The King’s Pilgrimage, became a bestseller when it was published in 1922.

  Others who visited the battlefields had been there not long before. While it is easy to see why veterans might wish to visit the battlefields and cemeteries many years later, the notion of them returning to places where they had so recently endured appalling conditions, and which nature had yet to heal, may strike us as odd. Many veterans were haunted by their experiences at the front, experiences they would be unable to forget however long they lived. These were not experiences that were easy to talk about or share with civilians, even if they were friends or family. Siegfried Sassoon made his notorious public protest against the political conduct of the war in 1917 on behalf of his suffering fellow soldiers partly in the belief that ‘it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise’. Now that the war was over, veterans were naturally wary of harrowing their families and friends, or worse still boring them, with stories from the trenches. ‘There was nobody interested anyway,’ George Louth recalled, ‘so it was useless telling them and if you did they would only laugh at you, say it wasn’t true. It wasn’t a conscious thing, nobody talked about the First War in those days, even my wife, even she never heard my story and we were married seventy years.’ Louth had joined up in 1915 at the age of eighteen and survived the first day on the Somme in 1916, but was invalided out in December of that year. He would live to celebrate his 103rd birthday in 2000, but ‘only once spoke about
[the war] from 1918 until 1990’. This was to a woman enquiring after her husband, who had been ‘blown to pieces’ but was officially listed as ‘wounded and missing’. Harry Patch too never spoke about the war. He married happily in 1919, but not once in fifty-seven years of wedded life did he mention the war to his wife. ‘I don’t think she had any idea about my service, and never brought it up.’

  Many veterans felt as if they had been set apart from civilian life altogether, and that the only people with whom they could truly share their feelings were those they had served alongside. The veterans’ organisations not only campaigned for the rights of ex-servicemen, they also provided former soldiers with a community and would organise visits to France and Belgium. Ex-servicemen had been among both cemetery pilgrims and battlefield tourists from the very outset, paying their respects to friends who had been buried in haste and without pause for mourning, or visiting places where they had undergone what was fast beginning to seem the defining experience of their lives.

  For some, the Western Front had proved so overwhelming that it became the only place they felt they belonged. The Imperial War Graves Commission needed hundreds of gardeners to tend the cemeteries it was building, and it recruited these from among former servicemen. By 1921, 1,326 veterans were employed by the Commission, and they had not only planted over 15 miles of hedges and 75 miles of borders, but had also seeded some 200 acres of bare earth with grass. Many of them spent the rest of their lives in France and Belgium, often marrying local women. Captain Frederick Osborne of the Royal Fusiliers, for example, joined up in 1914 with five friends and fought throughout the war, at the end of which he was the only survivor of the original group. After being demobilised, he returned to the Ploegsteert region and took a job looking after cemeteries. He married a Flemish woman, learned the language, and made his life in Belgium, staying on there after his retirement in 1962.

  Britain itself continued to be something of a battlefield during the early 1920s with Armistice Day becoming a focus not only of national mourning but of protests intended to remind everyone that those who had returned from the war were still awaiting a home fit for heroes. In October 1920, disturbed by the continuing rise in unemployment (which still included a large number of ex-servicemen), a group of London mayors headed by the Mayor of London and future leader of the Labour Party, George Lansbury, requested an interview with Lloyd George at Downing Street. In support of this deputation, large numbers of the unemployed, many of them wearing their combat medals, descended upon Whitehall. According to Wal Hannington, the trade union official who was leading a North London contingent that day, the crowd was orderly, doing little more than cheering and singing. Nevertheless, Whitehall became severely congested and in order to clear the street mounted policemen charged the crowds, who were packed in so tightly on all sides that they could not retreat and ‘were compelled to fight back at the police or simply stand still and be clubbed down’. Eventually, the police were beaten back and the crowd surged up towards Trafalgar Square, but were stopped by reinforcements who struck the workers down as they tried to escape. Hannington recalled that ‘dozens of men lay in the roads and on the side-walks groaning with pain as the blood gushed out from wounds inflicted by police batons’. Then a policeman was dragged off his horse, which was commandeered and mounted by an unidentified worker who broke through police lines at a gallop, while men on foot followed in his wake. He managed to reach Downing Street before being ‘clubbed down’. The police eventually restored order and the crowd dispersed.

  Wal Hannington’s Unemployed Struggles 1919–1936, from which this account is taken, may be one of the great classics of the British working-class movement, but it is a work of polemic and not always accurate. Hannington’s version of events, recalled some fifteen years later, is at odds with the contemporary reports of this incident in The Times, for example. The newspaper agreed that the crowd was ‘fairly orderly, though noisy’, and that the mounted police used newly introduced ‘long staves’ to belabour the protesters, between thirty and forty of whom suffered injuries, mostly to the head. The newspaper reported, however, that police had been obliged to intervene because a group of the unemployed decided to go to Downing Street to protest rather than, as had been originally planned, wait on Victoria Embankment for the deputation of mayors to report back on their interview with Lloyd George. These protesters ‘were heavily reinforced by many hundreds of irresponsible young hooligans who took a leading part in the afternoon’s disorders’. These young men apparently threw bottles, stones and brickbats at the police and caused considerable damage to government buildings: the stone balustrade of the Privy Council Office was demolished, several windows were broken at the Treasury and every single window was smashed on the ground floor of the War Office.

  Hannington’s claim that ‘The mayors had not been received by Mr Lloyd George. He was not apparently interested in hearing about the plight of the workless and had conveniently left London’ was untrue. Indeed, Lansbury emerged from Number 10 after a meeting with the Prime Minister and attempted to restore order among his supporters. Furthermore, Hannington’s ‘unknown hero on the white horse’ was neither an ‘ex-cavalry man’ nor even a member of the unemployed, but a nineteen-year-old packing-case maker from Hoxton called Edward Cannadine, who had been exercising a horse and had ‘turned into Whitehall to see the demonstration’. At Bow Street Magistrates’ Court the following morning, he claimed that ‘Someone struck the horse, which got out of control, and he was unable to prevent it charging the police’. Quite what someone from Hoxton was doing exercising a horse in the middle of London was not divulged, but the horse clearly hadn’t been taken from the police since it had no saddle. Nevertheless, the court declined to believe that Cannadine was an innocent passer-by caught up in events beyond his control and fined him 40 shillings for ‘insulting behaviour’. A number of other protesters were charged with a variety of offences, including three men who had taken the opportunity to break into a jeweller’s and make off with £3,000 worth of diamond rings.

  Whatever the detailed facts of the case, the protest had forcibly brought the problem of unemployed war veterans into the public eye. According to Hannington, the behaviour of the police ‘caused a wave of bitter feeling to sweep throughout London and the provinces’. He claimed – apparently unaware of the clashes between the police and unemployed in Westminster in May 1919 – that

  It was the first episode of its kind since the war ended. It came as a shock to many who hesitated to believe that such treatment would be meted out to men who had only recently returned from the battlefields after four years of warfare in which they had been made to believe that ‘their grateful country would never forget them’. The ‘comradeship of the trenches’ was over. Ex-soldiers in blue uniforms were now ready to club down ex-soldiers in rags at the bidding of the only class which had profited by the war.

  Questions were asked in Parliament, and there were demands that the left-wing Daily Herald (of which Lansbury was both proprietor and editor) should be prosecuted for its comments on the action of the police.

  Matters had not improved a year later: the number of unemployed continued to rise inexorably, passing the one million mark by February 1921. While at the Cenotaph on 11 November that year protests were largely confined to the wording on wreaths, elsewhere in the country several violent episodes took place. The two minutes’ silence in Liverpool was disturbed by some two hundred men ‘purporting to represent the unemployed of the city’ (as an unsympathetic Yorkshire Post put it), who pushed their way through the silent crowd amid cries of ‘What we need is food not prayers’ and ‘Anyone want a medal?’ Worse was to happen in Dundee, where a ‘Communist crew, who have labelled themselves, on what justification they would find it hard to explain, the “organised unemployed”’ (the Dundee Advertiser) sang ‘The Red Flag’ during the two minutes’ silence. After the Last Post sounded, the crowd of mourners turned on the protesters, snatching and destroying their banners and dragg
ing those who were seated on lorries to the ground. It took some time for the police to gain control. Several arrests were made – but only, it seems, of the protesters. The general view of such incidents may be judged by the wife of a veteran lucky enough to be in employment who wrote to the papers suggesting the protesters should be whipped with the cat-o’-nine-tails, or by a former soldier who stated that any ex-servicemen among them must be those who ‘were dragged into the army by the conscription net [and whose] names are writ large in the “crime sheets” and sick lists of the unfortunate unit to which they were drafted’.