The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  Some veterans, too old for service themselves, learned what their parents had been through in the First World War when their own sons enlisted. Patch was naturally anxious about his two boys, both teenagers as he had been in 1914. They both served in the war, but returned safely. Others were less lucky. Cecil Withers, born in Rotherhithe in London in 1898, recalled his mother’s anxiety when he and his brother were both serving in the 1914–18 war. She was naturally – and as it turned out justifiably - anxious because another son had died of bronchitis at the age of seven. Withers and his brother both returned safely from the front, but another, older brother who had been unfit for army service had died of tuberculosis during their absence. During the Second World War, the elder of Withers’ two sons joined the RAF as a flight sergeant and was killed at the age of twenty-four in 1944. That same year one of his sisters and her husband had been killed by a flying bomb while on duty as ARP wardens. Those of his family not killed or struck down with disease were blessed with longevity: two of his sisters lived to be ninety and 100, while Withers himself outlived them all, dying in 2005 at the age of 106.

  Alfred Finnigan (1896–2005) had joined up at the beginning of the First World War, in September 1914, and served with the Royal Field Artillery at Passchendaele. What he experienced in 1917 was so appalling, the losses of both fellow soldiers and the horses with which he was working so devastating, that when he married after the war he decided not to have children: ‘I was not prepared to produce cannon fodder for the army,’ he recalled towards the end of his long life, without apparently having had cause to regret this decision. During the Second World War he acted as a fire-watcher for a firm of London printers and shortly found himself in a similar situation to those too old for service in the earlier war: he became an assistant cashier because the man who had this position in the company had been called up. He held this job until his retirement in 1961.

  A rather grimmer picture of the role of the Home Guard than the nostalgic Dad’s Army was provided in 1942 by Alberto Cavalcanti’s film Went the Day Well? Based on a short story by Graham Greene, the film opens with a resident of the fictional village of Bramley End speaking directly to the camera and showing the viewer a memorial in the churchyard. The memorial commemorates ‘the Battle of Bramley End’ in which a group of Germans disguised as British soldiers were defeated and (at some cost) slaughtered by the residents of this emblematic village over the Whitsun weekend of 1942. In Greene’s story, ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’, the principal character is a veteran of the Boer War, who more or less single-handedly repels a German invasion; but in the film the villagers have to overcome the enemy. This is all the more necessary when the Home Guard, in a scene that was both shocking and propagandist, are machine-gunned to death by the Germans as they return on their bicycles from a day’s manoeuvres. The final assault, however, is led by the Home Guard of a neighbouring village, joining forces with the regular army. These troops, it is announced at the beginning of the film, were played by real soldiers: ‘Men of the Gloucestershire Regiment, by kind permission of the War Office’.

  By the time Cavalcanti’s film was released in November 1942, the threat of invasion had receded considerably, although, as Churchill had already warned, ‘until Hitler and Hitlerism are beaten into unconditional surrender the danger of invasion will never pass away’. As more and more troops were sent overseas to pursue this end, the Home Guard was in theory becoming increasingly important in its role of safeguarding Britain, and many of its members were by now manning anti-aircraft facilities and coastal batteries as enlisted troops prepared for the Allied invasion of France. By the end of 1944 the Home Guard had

  officially been stood down, but it was not until December 1945, several months after the war ended, that it was formally disbanded.

  Both in the Home Guard and in other forms of civil defence, many veterans of the First World War had done further valuable service between 1939 and 1945. The popular notion that their own war had been ‘a war to end wars’ had proved unduly optimistic, and additional cemeteries were being constructed in Europe to hold the new harvest of the dead. It remained to be seen how this later conflict would be commemorated and whether the veterans of 1914–18 would find themselves usurped by those who came home after demobilisation.

  THREE

  Fifty Years On 1945–2000

  And when they ask us, how dangerous it was,

  Oh, we’ll never tell them, no, we’ll never tell them …

  First World War song

  On 11 November 1945, after its six-year suspension during the Second World War, Armistice Day was reinstated. It happened that year to fall on a Sunday – which meant that it coincided with Remembrance Sunday, the day suggested by the recently enthroned Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, for wartime observance – and it was initially announced as ‘Remembrance Day’. ‘The change of title enriches the Day with a wider scope and a heightened significance,’ The Times decided. ‘Tomorrow and through years to come all who fell whether between 1914 and 1918 or 1939 and 1945 will be united by a single commemoration, as in life they were united by a single aim. Remembrance Day is to have a fixed place in the national calendar, with the hope that it may be observed throughout the Commonwealth and Empire, and possibly in the United States

  also.’ That place in the calendar had not, however, been settled. In fact no final decision had yet been taken about the name either, or indeed whether the dead of the two wars should be remembered on the same or different days.

  Everyone agreed that the massive losses recently suffered – many of them civilian losses – should be commemorated in the way the losses of the previous war had been. Some argued that an entirely separate day should be designated, but choosing one proved complicated. Because the Second World War had been fought on many more fronts and in many more countries than the First World War, there was no exact equivalent of 1918’s Armistice Day, a day on which it could be said that the war conclusively ended and hostilities ceased around the world. Instead there was VE Day marking the Victory in Europe on 8 May 1945 and VJ Day marking Victory over Japan on 15 August 1945. Neither of these seemed satisfactory for what it was hoped would be international observance in the Commonwealth and Empire. The Times further noted that VJ Day was ‘inconvenient and unsuitable, occurring as it does in the middle of August holidays’; VE Day was a better choice, ‘though its possible if very infrequent coincidence with Ascension Day has to be remembered’. Equally pragmatic objections were raised by the paper over continuing with 11 November, which carried with it the ‘risk of weather unfavourable to outdoor ceremonies’, a factor that also ‘may be thought to rule out All Souls’ Day, November 2, which otherwise seems an excellent choice’ – excellent because the Church’s designation for the day is Commemoratio omnium Fidelium Defunctorum, the Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed.

  Even given these difficulties, the paper still felt that the ‘union of commemorations is well advised. Personal memories of the late war are vivid and poignant for all, while those of the earlier belong now to older folk alone.’ To categorise those who had lost husbands and fiancés in that war, and might still be in their forties, let alone those younger people who as children had lost fathers, as ‘older folk’ seems wide of the mark. In spite of what Britain had been through during the past six years, there would almost certainly have been considerable resistance to changing the date of national commemoration among those who had fought in or been directly affected by the First World War. The lessons for the future may not have been learned, as had been piously hoped, but this did not mean the sacrifices of the generation of 1914–18 should be forgotten or even superseded by those of the generation of 1939–45. The Times did at least agree this point: ‘What is owed to those who fought and died in 1914–18 must never be forgotten. In a real sense, indeed, the two wars were but separate parts of one, being waged against the same enemy in defence of the same principles and ennobled by the same spirit of self-sacrifice.’ T
his may have been historically and politically questionable, but was also the view in France, where, as The Times itself had earlier reported, the two conflicts were generally regarded ‘as one war interrupted by an armed and uneasy truce’.

  France was at that very moment arranging a particularly sombre commemoration of Armistice Day in which the bodies of three members of the Resistance (two men and a woman), two presumably Jewish ‘deportees’, a prisoner of war who had died in a German camp, and ‘nine soldiers from France and her territories overseas killed in the military campaigns’ would be brought to Paris on the evening of 10 November. Entering through the three city gates, they would be taken in a torchlit procession to Les Invalides, where they would spend the night. The following morning the coffins would be conducted to the Arc de Triomphe, where, beneath an eternally burning flame, France’s Unknown Warrior was buried. This would allow crowds to file past to pay their respects to the representative dead of both wars. In the evening, the coffins would be escorted on gun carriages to the fortress of Mont Valérian, where 4,500 French men and women had been executed by Germans during the war. There they would wait until they could be laid in a special shrine being built for them.

  Unlike Britain, France had been a battleground in both wars, and it had suffered even greater casualties. Its losses in the First World War outstripped even those of Germany, while its occupation by the Nazis during the Second World War and subsequent questions about the extent to which its citizens had collaborated with the enemy were a national trauma Britain was fortunate enough not to have had to confront. There appears to have been no move in France to commemorate these national catastrophes separately, and the Armistice Day ceremony there in 1945 seemed designed to emphasise a sense of continuity. It was certainly a very different occasion to the somewhat muted and business-as-usual one planned at the Cenotaph. Whatever the politicians and The Times may have thought, the continuity of sacrifice would be emphasised in Britain when communities planned how they were to commemorate the new casualties of war. In general, sculptors lost out to letterers since, rather than commissioning new war memorials, most towns and villages merely added the later dates and a further, though almost always shorter, list of names to existing memorials. A similar decision would be taken about the Cenotaph. Lutyens had died on 1 January 1944, but he would no doubt have been pleased that the only alteration made to his elegant pylon would be the addition of dates: ‘MCMXXXIX’ and ‘MCMXLV’.

  On the first Remembrance Sunday after the war, 11 November 1945, huge crowds gathered in Whitehall just as they had between the wars, though conspicuous by his absence from the proceedings was the new Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. Perhaps appropriately, given the role America had played in the recently concluded war, Attlee was visiting President Truman for talks in Washington. It was announced that he would attend a ceremony held in Arlington National Cemetery, where America’s Unknown Soldier had been buried on 11 November 1921. Meanwhile, James Chuter-Ede, who had been appointed Home Secretary and was spending Remembrance Sunday in Epsom, chose the day to announce that this would probably be the last year in which the commemoration would take place in November.

  The debate continued throughout the remainder of the year and well into 1946. Elements of both the British Legion and the Federation of Townswomen’s Guilds (the latter representing the bereaved women who had traditionally been a focus of Armistice Day) wanted to retain 11 November, but on 19 June the Prime Minister told Parliament that from now on Armistice Day would be replaced permanently in the calendar by Remembrance Sunday, held on the second Sunday of November. This was something of a triumph for the Church, which had always been concerned that insufficient religious emphasis had been placed on Armistice Day. Given that the Second World War had broken out less than twenty-one years after ‘the war to end wars’ had concluded, and was characterised by the indiscriminate bombings of civilians by both sides, the brutalities of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, the genocidal policies conducted by the Nazis, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear weapons, it might be thought that the Church had little reason to want to appropriate the day. God’s infinite mercy had, after all, seemed in short supply recently. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, nevertheless proclaimed: ‘Remembrance of all those who died in the two wars and of all that was done and suffered; thanksgiving for deliverance and for the good hand of God upon us; dedication in the strength of God to all true purposes – these will be uppermost in hearts and prayers on that day.’ He and the Archbishop of York, Cyril Forster Garbett, had approved orders of service for the new day, copies of which, it was announced, were available from the SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge).

  Apparently forgetting that it had originally advised against a November date, The Times now decided nothing could be more appropriate:

  Some of the world’s greatest poets – HOMER, VIRGIL, DANTE MITON – have seen in the falling of autumnal leaves the image of fleeting generations of men; and from before the dawn of history our ancestors seem to have dedicated the month of November to thoughts of the beloved dead. In their proud festival of All Saints, as well as the more sombre commemoration of All Souls, the Christian church has made this immemorial cult its own, giving it richer, nobler, and in a deep sense happier significance. So in the quiet of the falling year we shall remember the valour and the sacrifice, and continue to give thanks.

  The two minutes’ silence was retained as part of the Remembrance Sunday ceremonies, but its impact was massively reduced. This was chiefly because the whole idea of the Silence was to bring the country to a stop, whatever it was doing, and on a Sunday morning the country was usually doing very little. Shops, offices and factories were closed and a considerable percentage of the population was either in church, or at home preparing Sunday lunch or relaxing over the Sunday papers. Those who had televisions could, if they wished, watch a live broadcast of the ceremony at the Cenotaph, which took place in lovely autumnal weather that year. ‘The setting, architectural and human, of the service was as it has always been, but with Whitehall looking its most beautiful,’ The Times reported.

  No accident of weather marred the ceremony; there cannot have been a finer late autumn morning in London. Certainly it was cold, but it was also exhilarating while the sun shone, and that was till half an hour or more after the Silence. All through the service the Cenotaph, like the gnomon of a giant sundial, threw a long, deep shadow that moved slowly eastward across the roadway north of the monument, where the King and Princess Elizabeth had their posts.

  The future Queen, who had served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) during the war, was there in her khaki uniform to represent future generations, and her father wore the uniform of the Admiral of the Fleet. The remainder of the Royal Family, dressed in black and sporting scarlet poppies, looked down upon the ceremony from a first-floor window of the Home Office building.

  Part of that ceremony was the unveiling of the two new dates carved on the east and west faces of the Cenotaph to match MCMXIV and MCMXIX on the north and south ones. Just before 11 a.m., the King stepped forward and ‘pulled a gold-tasselled cord, so drawing apart two pairs of small shutters, apparently made of close-packed laurel leaves, which had hidden the two halves of the new inscription’. He then stepped back as Big Ben began sounding the hour and a gun went off to mark the beginning of the Silence. The crowd heard the ‘dull explosions of belated maroons in the distance. After that a quiet all but complete, chiefly disturbed by the noise of heavy aircraft somewhere to the west. As the throb of engines swelled and died away some who heard may have felt the sounds to be not wholly irrelevant.’ The Times drew a comparison with this day and the unveiling of the original, temporary Cenotaph by the King’s father, George V. ‘Looking back to 1919, it was surely still possible then to feel with something like certainty, however mistakenly, that the world must and could determine that the catastrophe should never recur. But to-day? There seemed plenty of time in the
Silence for some not very satisfactory thoughts, mixed with private memories that rustled with the last leaves on the Whitehall plane trees.’

  Wreaths were laid by the King and Princess Elizabeth, and on behalf of Queen Mary, the Queen Mother. Then came the Prime Minister, characteristically upstaged by the Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, ‘with many medals pinned on his overcoat’. The massed bands of the Brigade of Guards and the choir of the Chapel Royal sang the hymn ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, and the Archbishop of Canterbury said a short prayer before leading the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer. It may have been Remembrance Sunday, but the Church’s role at the Cenotaph remained small. ‘As the white-helmeted buglers of the Royal Marines sounded a gay and lovely Reveille the Cenotaph flags were stilled again as if listening.’ There followed a march-past led by 2,000 men and women of the British Legion and representatives of what were now the four services, civil defence joining the army, navy and air force. The police then moved into position and members of the public were ‘marshalled into endless moving streams along Whitehall’: ‘The civilian pilgrimage past the Cenotaph went on for many hours. Many tributes, from wreaths to single poppies, were left at its base by men and women, themselves wearing poppies and often medals, who had also brought with them many memories.’ After a service at Westminster Abbey, the congregation, mainly made up of ‘ordinary men and women in sombre dress’, filed past the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, where they laid ‘wreaths and bunches of poppies in memory of those who had fallen in old campaigns as well as the two world wars’. The commemoration of the dead of earlier military campaigns suggests that Remembrance Sunday would take on a broader historical significance than Armistice Day: as the blood-soaked twentieth century moved into its second half, the dead of all wars would be remembered.