The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  Falls nevertheless felt that the authors of war fiction were determined by whatever means available to them ‘to prove that the Great War was engineered by knaves or fools on both sides, that the men who died in it were driven like beasts to the slaughter, and died like beasts, without their deaths helping any cause or doing any good’. He questions much of the ‘incidental details’ such novels provide by way of evidence for this thesis, and complains that: ‘Every sector becomes a bad one, every working-party is shot to pieces; if a man is killed or wounded his brains or his entrails always protrude from his body; no one ever seems to have a rest.’ It should be said, however, that this genuinely reflects the experiences of many of those who wrote about their time in the trenches.

  Falls did not include poetry in his bibliography, but this too was appearing during the period and having its impact on people’s perception of the war. As with the novels and memoirs, these were poems written by people who had been in – and in some cases not survived – the trenches. Isaac Rosenberg was a diminutive working-class recruit from the East End of London, who had joined up simply in order to supplement his mother’s meagre income. He loathed the army, was bullied because he was both Jewish and an inept soldier, and was killed while on night patrol near Arras on April Fool’s Day 1918. His poems, some of the finest to emerge from the war, were edited by Gordon Bottomley in 1922 and his Collected Works were published in 1937. The Selected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, whose entire life and work would be shaped by his service on the Western Front, were published in 1925. Edmund Blunden’s previously mentioned Undertones of War contained ‘A Supplement of Poetical Interpretations and Variations’, and his Poems 1914–1930 were published in 1930. Herbert Read, who served as a second lieutenant in the Yorkshire Regiment, and described himself as ‘in a literal sense, a living witness of the slaughter’, published several books during this period: The End of War (1931) was sandwiched between the two collections, Poems 1913–1925 (1926) and Poems 1914–1934 (1935). Robert Graves, Sassoon’s sometime friend and fellow officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, published his Poems 1914–1927 in 1927, and a revised edition of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, that icon of self-sacrificial youth, was published the following year. Not all these volumes were restricted to war poetry, although in each the war provided part – often a significant part – of the individual poet’s journey. Equally, they did not present a blanket response to the war – Brooke and Rosenberg, for example, being at opposite ends of the spectrum. The poet most influential on public opinion was undoubtedly Wilfred Owen, whose subject, he wrote memorably in a preface, was ‘the pity of War’. The first collection of Owen’s Poems, edited by Sassoon, had been published in 1920, but a new and expanded edition, edited by Blunden, appeared in 1931, with a curious table of contents in which the twenty-seven poems that would still be taken to be the core of his output are categorised by ‘motive’, almost every one of which is negative: ‘Heroic Lies’, ‘Inhumanity of war’, ‘Willingness of old to sacrifice the young’, ‘Grief’, ‘The insupportability of war’, ‘The unnaturalness of weapons’, ‘Mentality of Troops and vastness of Losses, with reflection on Civilians’.

  The very first ‘motive’ listed in Owen’s Poems is ‘How the Future will forget the dead in war’, and even war memorials, those most tangible reminders to the Future of the war’s dead, did not escape criticism in what had begun to be termed ‘War Poetry’. Siegfried Sassoon’s largely meditative and tranquil The Heart’s Journey (1928) included a poem ‘To One in Prison’, which showed scant respect for the ceremonies at the Cenotaph, and in another, ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, Sir Reginald Blomfield’s memorial to the missing at Ypres is dismissed as ‘a pile of peace-complacent stone’. The 54,388 dead whose ‘name liveth for ever’ are imagined rising from ‘the slime’ in which they were lost to ‘deride this sepulchre of crime’. This, clearly, was not a majority view, but many people felt that the notion of war memorials having a warning function in addition to a commemorative one was not helped by massed parades of those currently in the armed forces, which continued to play their by now traditional role on Armistice Day. In 1933 a new symbol of remembrance appeared for the first time: the white poppy. A suggestion by a member of the No More War Movement (which grew out of, and in 1921 replaced, the No Conscription Fellowship) that the central bosses of the British Legion’s poppies should bear the legend ‘No More War’ rather than ‘Haig Fund’ received a dusty answer, and so in 1933 the long-established Women’s Co-operative Guild began manufacturing and distributing white poppies. Founded in 1883 as a means of alleviating the lot of working-class families, the Guild had taken on an increasingly political role and participated in the International Women’s Congress at The Hague in April 1914, where a resolution opposing war was passed. Unable to stop history in its tracks, the Guild nevertheless continued to campaign for peace, demanding for example that militarism should be banned in schools. In 1934, the Peace Pledge Union joined forces with the Guild in the promotion and distribution of the white poppy with the single word ‘Peace’ imprinted on its silver central boss. By 1938 the sale of white poppies had reached 85,000 a year, but these sales were still minute compared with the 40 million red poppies sold that year by some 360,000 volunteers. The white poppy would never catch on in quite the same way, but it has survived to the present day and is an emblem that remains controversial.

  In spite of a difficulty caused by the new threepenny bit, which proved too thick to go through the slot of the British Legion’s collecting boxes (whose design was thereafter adapted), ‘the wearing of Haig’s poppies by the public in London’ was reported in 1937 to be ‘so general that to be without one in the streets was to be conspicuous’ – not merely for military men in Dorothy L. Sayers novels. The continuing need for the funds raised by the sales of poppies is shown by the fact that even two decades after the Armistice, around 639,000 officers and men were still receiving disability allowances. Even so, the universal observation of Armistice Day declined during the 1930s. If the service at the Cenotaph was intended to warn the future as well as commemorate the past, this message began to look increasingly forlorn as the decade wore on. Furthermore, the Great War had begun to seem distant and irrelevant to the new generation, which had been too young to take part in it. It was already becoming history. Even the tomb of the Unknown Warrior was not quite the sacred site it had initially been, and it was reported in 1938 that the stone was ‘to be “elevated” because people walked heedlessly over it’: ‘There have even been instances of wreaths and flowers on the tomb being trampled on’ by ‘thoughtless or unobservant visitors’. A proposal that an eternal flame should be kept burning on the newly elevated tombstone, as it is in Paris beneath the Arc de Triomphe, came to nothing because it would have caused a fire hazard in a building often crowded with visitors. In the end low railings were reinstalled around the tomb.

  A survey carried out by Mass Observation, the anthropological group set up in 1937 to study British life and attitudes, discovered that by 1938 20 per cent of the population no longer observed the two minutes’ silence but simply carried on with work. There was still a certain amount of peer pressure at work: of those who were alone at 11 a.m., 30 per cent ignored the Silence compared with a mere 10 per cent of those who found themselves in company at that hour. The day itself nevertheless continued to exert an influence and act as a reminder. In the late October run-up to Armistice Day in 1938 69 per cent of those men interviewed admitted they no longer doffed their hats when passing the Cenotaph; but of another sample taken two days after 11 November this had dramatically reduced to a mere 5 per cent. Similarly, 43 per cent of people interviewed on 29 October 1938 proclaimed themselves against the continuation of the two minutes’ silence, whereas on 11 November itself this percentage had ‘fallen to 20%, with 11% doubtful, 69% pro’. The survey nevertheless concluded that there was a ‘widespread feeling that the ceremony was already out-of-date and should be stopped’.

  Ther
e was some support for this in the press, started by Hannen Swaffer writing in the socialist Daily Herald in November 1937. Swaffer was known as the Pope of Fleet Street because of his many pronouncements on all matters, and he now declared: ‘Armistice Day’s formal Empire service at the Cenotaph, with its Two Minutes’ Silence, should never be held again! Yesterday’s happenings made this even more obvious.’ What had happened on 11 November 1937 was that the Silence had been interrupted by a man who burst through the supposedly restraining phalanx of sailors in Whitehall shouting ‘All this hypocrisy!’ and something else rather less audible that was reported as ‘You are deliberately conniving at another war!’ He then ran in the direction of the Prime Minister and the new king, George VI, but was leapt upon by several policemen before he reached an impassive Neville Chamberlain. From beneath the collapsed scrum he could still be heard repeating his mantra, while everyone else remained silent and tried to concentrate. When the Silence finally ended, the man was led struggling back through the reassembled line of bluejackets to an ambulance station. From the crowd cries of anger (including a shout of ‘Kill him!’ – hardly in tune with the mood of the day, one would have thought) were heard above the solemn roll of drums preceding the sounding of the Last Post. The episode was described as causing ‘no more than a little pool of violence at the centre of a motionless and soundless sea’. One senses that it was with some relief that newspapers subsequently reported that the man was ‘an escaped patient from a mental asylum’. What was not immediately reported was that the man, whose name was Stanley Storey, was also a war veteran, who may well have been incarcerated, as so many had been, as a result of shell shock or some other kind of battle trauma. He was a reminder of a cost of the war that had often been hidden from the public. In the year of his protest, there were still some 35,000 veterans receiving disability pensions on the grounds of mental health. Many of these men were confined to lunatic asylums around the country, out of sight and out of both the public’s mind and their own. Some were still there, or at any rate in special hospitals and under psychiatric care, in the 1990s. ‘My experiences of the First World War have haunted me all my life,’ Edmund Blunden confessed some fifty-five years after the Armistice, ‘and for many days I have, it seems, lived in that world rather than this.’ For veterans locked away in county asylums, there really was no escape from the war and what it had done to them. One soldier, for example, wounded at Cambrai in 1918, was admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in 1920. By 1987 this institution had long since been more tactfully renamed Friern Psychiatric Hospital, but the old soldier was still there, eventually dying at the age of ninety-two in December of that year.

  The supposed warning provided by the million dead was ignored and on 3 September 1939 England once again declared war on Germany. On 11 October the Home Office announced that the King had decided that no service would be held at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, and that ‘in the present circumstances it would be preferable that other large services which it has been the custom to hold throughout the country on Armistice Day should not be held’. It was felt, among other things, that the sirens used to mark the end of the Silence might be confused with those signalling the air raids everyone expected to be an early feature of the war. Poppies, however, would be sold and worn as usual, and wreaths could be laid at the Cenotaph and other war memorials – which was just as well since 50,000 had already been made at the Poppy Factory at Richmond when war broke out. Special showrooms had been opened in Bond Street and on the Cromwell Road, where people could inspect and order from fifty different designs, and in the event orders for 35,000 additional wreaths were placed after war was declared. Sales of poppies generally were in fact up on the previous year, with gross receipts of £595,188 compared with £578,188 in 1938.

  The service at Westminster Abbey would take place as usual. A two minutes’ silence would be observed there at 11 a.m., and those listening to the broadcast at home on the radio – including the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace – could join in. The Archbishop of Canterbury advised that services of remembrance might be held as usual, but that the Sunday immediately following Armistice Day (which happened to fall on a Saturday that year) ‘should be observed as a Day of Remembrance and Dedication’. The Archbishop went on to quote Abraham Lincoln:

  It is for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

  Anyone who thought that the war might be used as an excuse to remove Armistice Day from the national calendar altogether would be disappointed, The Times declared in an editorial headlined ‘The Faith of Armistice Day’. While there would be ‘no stately gathering at the Cenotaph, no prescribed minutes of silence to hush the whole land’, such ceremonies were ‘merely symbols and it is not upon their unbroken continuance that the real observance of the Day depends’. Those who wanted Armistice Day ‘expunged from the national calendar’ complained that ‘the price paid […] to secure a victory which failed and a truce which never became a real peace can scarcely be thought to justify an annual thanksgiving’. The Times felt that ‘there is little reason for supposing this view to be widely held, and none at all for doubting that it is profoundly foolish. It wholly misconceives the purpose of Armistice Day’:

  What Armistice Day chiefly commemorates is a victory not of arms but of the spirit, a victory won not through war but in war. […] No doubt the men who served spoke seldom of this their inward faith; to do so was not their habit. Yet the record of it was found in intimate letters and diaries of many who fell, and it was shared by multitudes quite incapable of expressing it in words. To remember this spirit gratefully, to honour the men loyal to it in life and death, is the real purpose of Armistice Day.

  The low-key observation of the day continued throughout the war years. ‘There was no pageantry; there were no crowds,’ it was reported in 1940. ‘Instead, as Big Ben chimed the hours, two elderly women, each with medals pinned across her coat, laid at the foot of the Cenotaph a simple wreath in memory of a Guardsman who fell in the last War. Omnibuses and motorcars rumbled on, but a group of people standing around the Cenotaph stood still in silence for the usual two minutes.’ The silence was not absolute because shortly before 11 a.m. the air-raid sirens had gone off, ‘and the drone of British aircraft filled the air during the two minutes when in normal time London is locked in silence honouring the Empire’s dead’. Almost as the two minutes came to an end, ‘the sirens sounded “raiders passed” and, coming just then, the signal seemed like a prophecy of the final “all clear” for which the nation works’.

  INTERLUDE

  Old Soldiers 1939–1945

  ‘Here we are! here we are!! here we are again!!!

  We’re fit and well, and feeling as right as rain.

  Never mind the weather. Now then, altogether:

  Hullo! Hullo! Here we are again!’

  from Cinderella (1914) by

  CHARLES KNIGHT and KENNETH LYLE

  The all-clear would not sound for several years yet, and before the war ended in 1945 many veterans would find themselves once again in uniform. The upper age limit for war service was fixed at forty-one, which meant that the youngest of those who fought in the earlier conflict were eligible for conscription. The majority of the veterans were a good deal older than that, and of those who survived into the twenty-first century only Kenneth Cummings saw active service in both wars. The son of a merchant seaman, Cummings was just fourteen when the First World War broke out, but the following year he won a P&O scholarship to become a naval cadet and received training aboard HMS Worcester. He subsequently served as a midshipman of the Royal Naval Reserve on HMS Morea, an armed escort for troopships and Atlantic convoys. On his very first voyage the Morea passed the point in the Bristol Channel where a hospital ship had been sunk by the Germans, and Cummings remembered the unreassuring sight of the bodies of nurses and patients floating on the water. Afte
r the war he left the Royal Navy and joined P&O as a cadet, qualifying as an officer in 1921. He was serving on the Macedonia in 1923 when it brought back from Egypt the body of Lord Carnarvon, who had financed the dig that uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamen. During the Second World War P&O’s liners were commandeered as troop carriers, and Cummings was serving on board the Viceroy of India when it was sunk off the North African coast in November 1942, having just delivered 2,000 troops to Algeria. He got away safely on a lifeboat and then became chief officer on another troop carrier, the Ile de France. Having survived both wars, Cummings lived to 106, becoming one of the very last handful of First World War veterans still alive eighty-eight years after the Armistice.

  For some, whether or not they went to war again was down to chance. In 1939 Tom Kirk, who during the First World War had served in the Royal Navy as a surgeon probationer on ships escorting Norwegian convoys, was in practice as a GP in Lincolnshire. Both he and his partner wanted to volunteer, but the British Medical Association decided only one of them could be spared. They tossed a coin for it and Kirk remained in the practice, a ‘decision’ approved by the BMA because Kirk’s partner had not been in the earlier war. Kirk’s luck continued to hold, and he lived to be 105. Other veterans who survived into the twenty-first century, such as George Hardy, who had been a cavalry instructor with the Inniskilling Dragoons, and Charles Watson, who had served with the Royal Flying Corps, found themselves in reserved occupations during the Second World War – respectively as a chartered accountant in Hull and as draughtsman and designer for a well-known engineering company in Bedford. Hardy was, however, also the director of a shipping yard in Hull and had to spend every night sleeping there in order to raise the alarm during bombing raids. In the event of the Germans managing to land and attempting to capture the yard, it was Hardy’s job to blow it up to prevent it falling into enemy hands. Watson, meanwhile, volunteered as an air-raid warden. The threat of air raids and the possibility of invasion were of course very real from the outset of the war, and an opportunity for older veterans to serve their country again was provided by the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), later renamed the Home Guard.