The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  These sacrifices were immediately and starkly apparent in Combe Down, the birthplace of Harry Patch, which might stand representative of local losses in the same way that Patch himself came to represent the British Tommy. Fifty-six names are carved on the limestone war memorial that was erected in 1921 on Firs Field, a public space purchased by public subscription for this purpose. Both Patch and his brother William had returned safely from the war, but many of the boys they had grown up with did not. These included their cousin Fred, a private in the Somerset Light Infantry (SLI) killed at the Battle of Arras in April 1917. His name is recorded on the Arras Memorial alongside those of some 35,000 servicemen who died in the sector between 1916 and 1918 and have no known grave. Patch had also lost several close friends, including Charlie Wherrett, who joined the Somerset Light Infantry at the outbreak of war, survived past the Armistice, but died while serving in India in June 1919 at the age of twenty-five and was buried far from Combe Down in Peshawar. Two other friends from Patch’s schooldays, Stanley Pearce and Lionel Morris, also joined the local regiment when war was declared, and like Patch took part in the Third Battle of Ypres. Pearce was killed in July 1917, disappeared into the Passchendaele mud, and is listed among the 54,000 names of the missing on the Menin Gate. Morris was killed two months later at the age of twenty, and his name appears on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing at Zonnebeke, which commemorates another 35,000 men whose bodies were never found. Another friend, Leslie Lush, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps along with his brother Lewis. Leslie returned, but Lewis was killed in France at the age of twenty-two, eleven days before the Armistice. He had been serving with a field ambulance unit and was buried at the St-Sever Cemetery Extension at Rouen, along with 8,345 other casualties, most of whom had been unsuccessfully treated for their wounds in the city’s many military hospitals. Harold Chivers, who served with the Royal Engineers, died at the age of twenty-one in November 1917 and is buried along with 10,772 others at Etaples, the largest British war cemetery in France. Eric Barrow, too young to enlist when war broke out, lied about his age in order to join the Somerset Light Infantry in October 1915. He went to France in May 1916 and was killed on the Somme three months later, still only eighteen. Like Fred Patch, Stanley Pearce and Lionel Morris, he disappeared without trace: his name is recorded on the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval.

  Harry Patch also remembered other local men and boys who joined the local regiment at the outbreak of war. Frederick Gerrish died a year later in August 1915 and is buried at Hazebrouck in France, a cemetery beside one of the major casualty clearing stations. Kendrick Frankling, who sang with Patch in the church choir and whose father had been the stationmaster at nearby Midford, was killed on the Somme in August 1916 at the age of twenty-three; Albert Kellaway, who gained a lance corporal’s stripe, died there at the age of twenty-eight in September 1916. Neither of their bodies was found and their names joined that of Lionel Morris on the crammed panels of Lutyens’ vast memorial at Thiepval. Captain C.J.O. Daubeny, the only son of Captain C.W. Daubeny of The Brow, a large house built above Jackdaw Quarry, was killed in France at the age of twenty-one in June 1917 and is buried near Arras. A plaque was erected to him in Holy Trinity, the church in which his family sat in named pews and where his father frequently read the lesson. The vicar’s son, Alfred, had served with the SLI at Gallipoli and in Egypt and was killed at the age of twenty-five in Palestine. He is buried at Beersheba, a place whose name would have been familiar to his father from the Bible.

  Combe Down casualties continued to mount even after the war had officially ended. Eric Grant, who sang tenor in the choir and served with the Bedfordshire Regiment, was still in uniform when he died at the age of eighteen in March 1919. He is buried beneath an IWGC headstone in the churchyard of St Michael’s, Monkton Combe, as is Patch’s neighbour Victor Wilkinson, a policeman, who returned from serving as a gunner with the Royal Garrison Artillery but died in April 1919. These fourteen men are merely the ones whose names Patch recalled in extreme old age when he wrote his autobiography, but behind every single name on the Combe Down war memorial is a family and a story. As Patch himself observed, there was scarcely a family in the village who had not been affected by these losses. The same could be said of towns and villages across the land.

  War memorials became the places where communities far from the Cenotaph gathered once a year on 11 November to observe the two minutes’ silence, lay wreaths, and remember their dead. If Armistice Day had become a public holiday, as the British Legion had wanted, the two minutes’ silence (by now usually referred to as ‘the Silence’) would have been a good deal less impressive. As it was, this tradition endured, sometimes to an absurd or even dangerous degree. It was reported in 1922, for instance, that the pilot of an aeroplane operated by the Daimler Hire Company travelling between Manchester and London on 11 November observed maroons marking the beginning of the Silence bursting in the air as he approached Rugby. ‘He throttled down his engine, and glided silently through the air’, while his four passengers stood to attention with bowed heads. Four years later The Times reported of the service at the Cenotaph that:

  It was probably the deepest Silence that has ever reigned even at this ceremony. Special care had been taken to keep it unbroken by the slightest noise. There was none of the avoidable interruptions that have sometimes marred a little the solemnity of the Two Minutes. An attentive ear could make out but two sounds – a stifled cough and a distant belated steam-whistle. Not a movement could be seen; if any had been seen it would have been felt, so immobile was the whole grey picture.

  From 1928 almost the entire nation could join the Silence when the Cenotaph service was broadcast for the first time on BBC radio, something that became an annual event and around which programming had to be fitted. Radio existed to produce a more or less continual output of sound, so the Silence was particularly striking. It brought the whole nation together with what was happening at the Cenotaph at precisely the same moment. The notion of well-nigh universal participation in the observances of Armistice Day even provided the plot for a detective novel published that same year. Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club could in fact be called an Armistice Day novel; as a popular one, it provides a fascinating insight into prevailing attitudes.

  The entire novel is suffused with the experience of the war, an experience that almost everyone at the Bellona Club, members and staff alike, has shared and which gives them a sense of comradeship regardless of class. The detective hero Lord Peter Wimsey (we are told in a prefatory biographical note) served throughout the war, winning the DSO ‘for some reckless good intelligence work behind the German front’. In 1918 Wimsey had been ‘blown up and buried in a shell-hole near Caudry’ and suffered from severe shell shock from which it took him two years to recover. His convalescence was overseen by his former batman, Sergeant Mervyn Bunter, who becomes his invaluable valet and sidekick in the series of novels Sayers wrote about her aristocratic sleuth. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club was written against a background of Sayers’ own experience of the after-effects of war: her husband, Atherton Fleming, had also served at the front and, shortly after their marriage in 1926, began suffering some form of delayed war trauma.

  The notion that Armistice Day remained principally an occasion for the general public rather than veterans is clear from the novel’s opening page. ‘All this remembrance-day business gets on your nerves, don’t it?’ Wimsey says to Captain George Fentiman. ‘It’s my belief most of us would be only too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn’t run it for all it’s worth. However, it don’t do to say so.’ Fentiman, who is also a veteran of the trenches, agrees: ‘What’s the damn good of it, Wimsey? A man goes and fights for his country, gets his insides gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax.’ These characters are of course fictional, but it is
striking that such sentiments could be voiced not only by the embittered, out-of-work and neurasthenic Captain Fentiman but also by someone as admirable and likeable as Sayers’ detective hero.

  The novel’s complex plot hinges upon the exact time of the death of Captain Fentiman’s grandfather, a general who fought in the Crimean War. This needs to be established in order to decide how his estate is to be divided. The general supposedly died in the club’s smoking room on the morning of Armistice Day, but Wimsey discovers that he had in fact died the day before. A central clue to this discrepancy is that no poppy is found on the body. ‘My dear sir,’ Wimsey says to the family solicitor, Mr Murbles, ‘consider what day it was. November the 11th. Is it conceivable that, if the old man had been walking the streets as a free agent on Armistice Day, he would have gone to the Club without his Flanders poppy?’ Such a thing, he adds, would be ‘unthinkable’.

  Another element of the plot is whether or not a telephone booth in the club was out of order. A club member remembers that it was because he wanted ‘to get through to a man down in Norfolk. Brother was a friend of mine – killed on the last day of the War, half an hour before the guns stopped firing – damnable shame – always ring up on Armistice Day, say a few words, don’t you know.’ Wimsey realises that the phone had not in fact been out of order, but that a notice had been put on the door of the booth to that effect while it was being used temporarily to store the general’s corpse, which was then transferred to the chair in the smoking room where it was discovered. Murbles points out that there were people in the smoking room all morning; how on earth could anyone have moved the body without being observed? ‘Were people there all morning, sir?’ Wimsey replies. ‘Are you sure? Wasn’t there just one period when one could be certain that everybody would be either out in the street or upstairs on the big balcony that runs along in front of the first-floor windows, looking out – and listening? It was Armistice Day, remember.’

  Mr Murbles was horror-struck.

  ‘The two minutes’ silence? – God bless my soul! How abominable! How – how blasphemous! Really, I cannot find words. This is the most disgraceful thing I ever heard of. At the moment when all our thoughts should be concentrated on the brave fellows who laid down their lives for us – to be engaged in perpetrating a fraud – an irreverent crime—’

  The perpetrator, a veteran of the war, is unrepentant, which further outrages Murbles. ‘I cannot, and I will not sit here and listen while you congratulate yourself, with a cynicism at which you should blush, on having employed those sacred moments, when every thought should have been consecrated,’ he expostulates. ‘Oh, punk!’ replies the fraudster. ‘My old pals are none the worse because I did a little bit of self-help.’

  Much of the unravelling of the plot relies upon what people would normally be doing in the run-up to Armistice Day and on the day itself. Sayers also uses the character of George Fentiman to illustrate the difficulties faced by men of the officer class who

  returned after the war to find themselves unemployed. Their plight had been thoroughly aired in Warwick Deeping’s hugely popular sentimental novel Sorrell and Son (1925), in which the eponymous hero undergoes the indignity of having to work as a hotel porter in order to pay for his son’s education. Fentiman is a more extreme case. Heavily in debt, he lives in rented rooms in unfashionable Finsbury Park. Frequently ill as a result of gassing and shell shock, unable to find work, Fentiman is obliged to rely upon his wife’s income as a cashier working long hours in a tea shop. This he finds deeply humiliating: it is the cause of frequent marital rows, of which he later feels very ashamed. He later applies for a job selling cars, one of the new but distinctly déclassé jobs available to former officers after the war.

  The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club makes ingenious use of the form and customs of Armistice Day while at the same time showing that attitudes towards it were not perhaps as universal as people liked to believe. Indeed, Armistice Day remained an event from which many real-life ex-servicemen continued to feel alienated. It was not merely those who were out of work and felt themselves forgotten, but others for whom the event seemed, as Harry Patch put it, ‘nothing but a show of military force’. The presence of a steadily diminishing band of veterans proudly wearing their medals at the Cenotaph every year has become such a familiar feature of the ceremony that it is something of a surprise to discover that it was not until the early 1930s that the British Legion began to play a significant role in Whitehall each 11 November. There had always been debate as to how this ceremony should be conducted, and the increasing participation of politicians and other ‘bigwigs’ laying wreaths in order of precedence seemed to have little to do with the ordinary people it supposedly honoured. Some felt that the forces’ march-past, which had survived since the very first Armistice Day, should be scaled down or removed altogether since it added a martial – or even militarist – emphasis to what should have been a commemoration of the human cost of war.

  A further factor against excessive military participation in the Armistice Day ceremony in the interwar period was that those who were being remembered at the Cenotaph had been members of the armed forces only ‘for the duration’. They may have died as soldiers, but they had lived as civilians, which is how many of their friends and families remembered them. It was the British Legion’s patron, the Prince of Wales, who suggested in 1932 that the armed forces at the ceremony should be replaced by members of the Legion, who might sport medals, but would of course be in civilian dress. Both the government and the prince’s father were opposed to the idea, and the Legion itself worried that the armed forces might resent their role being usurped by old soldiers. Furthermore, it was not clear whether enough veterans could be assembled to fill the gap left by the military.

  The resurgence of militarism and fascism in Europe played a part in these shifts of attitude towards Armistice Day, but it may also have been significant that from 1928 onwards a large number of books more directly about the war than Sayers’ novel began to appear. The generally pious and patriotic volumes commemorating the Fallen, which were often privately printed, gave way to frank accounts written for the general reader of the realities of trench warfare, enlivened by criticism of those whose principal strategy had been to pursue a war of attrition. Many of these war memoirs and autobiographical novels became bestsellers. Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War both appeared in 1928, the year R.C. Sherriff’s frequently revived trench play Journey’s End was first performed. In 1929 came Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Richard Aldington’s coruscating Death of a Hero, and the English translation of E.M. Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). Frederic Manning’s bowdlerised but still stark account of life as a ranker, Her Privates We, appeared in 1930, as did Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Henry Williamson’s expressionist fable A Patriot’s Progress and Sherriff’s novelisation of Journey’s End. While not all of these were strictly ‘anti-war’, most described all too vividly the realities of trench warfare and put individual faces to the already dreadful statistics.

  Similarly, regimental histories and detailed accounts of individual battles and strategy, mostly aimed at a specialised audience, were supplemented by more popular historical and analytical accounts of the war. Particularly influential in shaping people’s attitudes were official-sounding histories such as Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis (1923–31) and B.H. Liddell Hart’s The Real War, 1914–1918 (1930), both of which were a good deal less objective than their titles suggested and undoubtedly fuelled a growing public perception of the war as ill conceived and badly conducted. Together with Lloyd George’s six volumes of War Memoirs (1933–36), these books did much to make people question why and how the war had been fought and whether the cost was worth it.

  That cost is frequently measured in these three books, with casualty figures given a prominent part in accounts of the principal battles. Churchill’s chapter on the
Somme in the third part of his book, which appeared in 1927, for example, outlines the losses suffered by a single division on the first day of the battle: ‘In all, the Division lost in little more than two hours 218 out of 300 officers and 5,274 other ranks out of 8,500 who had gone into action. By the evening of July 1, the German 180th Infantry Regiment was again in possession of the whole of its trenches. Its losses during the day’s fighting had been 8 officers killed and 273 soldiers killed, wounded or missing.’ Although Churchill is at pains elsewhere to praise ‘the phlegm, the temper and the fortitude of Sir Douglas Haig’, he notes of J.H. Boraston’s summary of the first day on the Somme in Sir Douglas Haig’s Command (1922): ‘It takes some hardihood for Col. Boraston to write: “The events of July 1 … bore out the conclusions of the British High Command and amply justified the tactical methods employed.”’ Churchill also criticises Haig’s own account in his published Despatches (1919) of the gains made during the first five days of the battle, noting that these gains had ‘been purchased by the loss of nearly a hundred thousand of our best troops’. In spite of such losses, he writes: ‘The battle continued. The objectives now were pulverised villages and blasted woods, and the ground conquered at each stage was so limited both in width and depth as to exclude any strategic results.’ He dismisses Haig’s unwisely self-confident tally of casualties: ‘Sir Douglas Haig, in his final despatch upon the Somme, committed himself to the following positive assertion: “There is nevertheless sufficient evidence to place it beyond doubt that the enemies’ losses in men and material have been very considerably higher than those of the Allies.”’ Positive, but according to Churchill completely untrue: the figure, he says, was in fact roughly 2.27 British losses for every German loss. While he concedes that Haig could not take sole blame for what happened on the Somme, he added: ‘Nevertheless the campaign of 1916 on the Western Front was from beginning to end a welter of slaughter, which after the issue was determined left the British and French armies weaker in relation to the Germans than when it opened, while the actual battle fronts were not appreciably altered, and except for the relief of Verdun, which relieved the Germans no less than the French, no strategic advantage of any kind had been gained.’ The account ends with a fulsome paean to the bravery and determination of the troops whose lives, the reader could only conclude, had been profligately and more or less pointlessly sacrificed. Churchill’s tribute to the front-line troops was not merely a piece of retrospective patriotic piety made from the comfort of a Whitehall armchair. In 1916, but before the Battle of the Somme, he had himself served briefly as a commanding officer in France, where he was noted not only for his leadership but also for the concern he showed for the well-being of the men in his battalion.