The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  In spite of the deliberate artificiality of its conception, the film is prefaced with a carefully worded announcement suggesting historical authenticity: ‘The principal statements made by the historical characters in this film are based on documentary evidence and the words of the songs are those sung by the troops during the First World War.’ An early sequence depicts the uniformed representatives of the main combatant countries more or less blundering into war, propelled by the scheming Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count von Berchtold (played by a gleeful John Gielgud), who dupes the silent and it seems senile Emperor Franz-Josef into declaring war on Serbia. This is a version of events that few professional historians would endorse, and indeed neither the crucial role allotted here to von Berchtold, nor even his name, features in such modern histories as Michael Howard’s The First World War (2002) or Norman Stone’s World War One: A Short History (2007). As in Clark’s The Donkeys, the generals are depicted as rivalrous, snobbish and backstabbing, and the casualties of both the Somme and Passchendaele are recorded on cricket scoreboards at Haig’s headquarters. The conversation between Rawlinson and Oxley used by Clark as the epigraph to his chapter on Aubers Ridge is reproduced accurately but ascribed to Haig and one of his ADCs. The film also made use of a notorious passage from Clark’s book in which, as one dissenting historian puts it, the author ‘maliciously suggests […] that Haig was more upset by King George V being thrown from his (Haig’s) horse than by the tragedy of the battle of Loos’. What many people remember as the movie’s most memorable shot did not in fact appear in the film but gained widespread distribution as a publicity photograph. It depicted Mills as Haig standing in front of the row upon row of white crosses, which (lined up on the Sussex Downs and without Haig) supplied the film’s final and enduring image.

  Another successful anti-war play that transferred to the screen was John Wilson’s Hamp, about a private serving in the trenches who is court-martialled and shot for desertion. It opened in Edinburgh in 1964 and was filmed that same year by Joseph Losey under the fiercely ironic title King and Country. A concern with the lives of ‘ordinary’ people that characterised the ‘new wave’ of British cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s was very similar to the growing interest in the ‘ordinary’ soldiers of the First World War, which is to say those serving in the ranks rather than the officer class. Directors such as Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz were keen to portray the working classes as complicated individuals rather than the cheerful Cockneys and chippy Northerners who had traditionally populated British films. In King and Country Private Hamp is just such an individual, at first suspected by the captain called upon to defend him of being a typical product of his lowly background, feckless and unreliable. It turns out, however, that Hamp is suffering from shell shock. He is nevertheless condemned to death as an example to others, and both he and the captain are seen as victims of not only the British class system but also the impersonal and implacable military machine. It is not without significance that Losey was an American who had come to work in Britain after being blacklisted in Hollywood in the wake of the McCarthy hearings. Equally significant was the casting of Tom Courtenay, a contemporary icon of rebellious youth after his roles in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), as the hapless victim of military justice.

  Renewed interest in the war continued to influence cinema throughout the decade. Although set in the Second World War, Richard Lester’s How I Won the War (1967) is about a group of soldiers suffering at the hands of an inept commander and owes much to common perceptions about the earlier conflict. Its release in the so-called Summer of Love, in which hippies and flower children demanded people make love not war, was timely, and the casting in a leading role of John Lennon when the Beatles were at the height of their popularity ensured enthusiastic and youthful audiences. Equally, Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) – which had the same scriptwriter, Charles Wood – may have been set in the Crimean War, but its account of heroic British cavalrymen sent by incompetent commanders to their certain deaths against a lethally armed enemy had distinct echoes of the Battle of the Somme. As in Oh! What a Lovely War, the older generation of distinguished actors (Richardson, Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Harry Andrews) took the roles of the generals and commanders, while David Hemmings – another youth icon of the period, who had made his reputation playing a photographer in Swinging London in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) – was cast as the doomed young Captain Nolan.

  Widespread concern about the Vietnam War was also a contributing factor to people’s views of wars. America’s involvement in this costly debacle caused protests not only in the United States but also in Britain. Such prominent public figures as Vanessa Redgrave, when not appearing alongside her father as the pacifist feminist Sylvia Pankhurst in Oh! What a Lovely War, could be found leading protests against America’s involvement in Vietnam outside the country’s embassy in Grosvenor Square. Peter Watkins’ Culloden had drawn upon Vietnam as well as the First World War, since the director saw parallels between what the English did in the Highlands in the eighteenth century and what the Americans were now doing in Vietnam. As in the First World War, young men were being conscripted and there was a sense that another generation was being sacrificed by politicians for no very good reason. One of the great anti-war anthems of the period, Country Joe and the Fish’s ‘I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag’, which everyone sang along to at Woodstock, asked the same questions about Vietnam that people were asking about the First World War and had some of the ironic fatality of soldiers’ songs from that earlier conflict:

  And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?

  Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,

  Next stop is Vietnam.

  And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates.

  Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,

  Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.

  To some extent, then, revisionist military historians such as Brian Bond and Gary Sheffield are correct in complaining that attitudes to the First World War in the 1960s were anachronistic, more a reflection of the period than of 1914–18. Robert Kee, reviewing the American historian Barbara Tuchman’s August 1914 in 1962, wrote about the various generations and their attitude towards the First World War: ‘First there are the elderly who suffered in it and who in spite of many fine attempts to “work it out of themselves” in the years afterwards are still indelibly marked by it’; next came the middle aged, brought up after 1918, like Kee himself: ‘Later one read Sassoon, Blunden, Owen, Graves, Aldington, turned pacifist for a week, fought in a new war, voted Labour, anti-Labour, but always “The Great War” remained at the back of one’s mind, obscurely unfathomed.’ Finally came the new generation, for whom

  it is probably simpler. They are the first generation since the old order foundered in the Flanders mud for whom it has been relatively easy to grow up not taking anything that comes from ‘higher authority’ for granted. The history of the First World War (very much more than the Second) is a marvellous example of the inadvisability of doing so and it is close enough to be breathing down their necks. To the extent that the very young today automatically use their own minds more than their fathers and grandfathers did at their age, they are particularly sane and the madness of the First World War must seem to them particularly incredible.

  In Tuchman’s book, which concentrated on the political background to the outbreak of war and the first few weeks of the conflict, ‘the First World War mentality is out in the open: the complacency, the high morale and astonishing courage, the stupidity, the lack of imagination amounting in the context of so much lack of imagination all round to a dogged military virtue, the fantastic refusal to recognize reality when it clashed with preconceived notions of what really ought to be’.

  At the end of the decade, the historian Michael Howard wrote a leading article for the Times Literary Supplement on ‘The Deman
d for Military History’, particularly the history of the First World War, which appeared to have grown throughout the 1960s. Readers of military history, he felt, used to fall into two categories: ‘nostalgic senior citizens and bellicose children of all ages’. A new audience for military history, comprising people between the ages of eighteen and forty (that is, born between 1929 and 1951), was of course welcome to those who wrote military history for their living, but he questioned the interest of such readers in this subject. It was, he felt,

  compounded of fascination and disgust with values and habits of the past from which succeeding generations feel it necessary, at fairly regular intervals, to make prolonged and emphatic declarations of independence. As the generation of the 1920s felt it necessary to make clear by their literature and their habits their emancipation from the Victorian Age, so that of the 1960s feels, apparently, compelled to dance on the grave of the era of military imperialism which effectively ended with the Second World War: a dance inspired not by a joyful sentiment of liberation but by a determination to stamp the earth down as hard as possible on the coffin underneath.

  Like Oh! What a Lovely War and The Charge of the Light Brigade, ‘numerous instant histories of the First World War seem designed neither to provide the colourful excitement of popular military history nor a careful and sympathetic reconstruction of a bygone historical period. Their object is primarily iconoclastic.’ This was undoubtedly true, as was Howard’s assertion that the motive was not specifically pacifist: ‘Lord Raglan, Lord Kitchener and Lord Haig are held up as figures of fun not because they were soldiers but because they are seen as representatives of a particular social system.’

  As well as ‘instant histories’ of the sort Howard disparaged, the 1960s were also marked by numerous memoirs, biographies, anthologies and volumes of poetry concerned with the war. A new edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems, edited by C. Day Lewis, appeared in 1963, along with the first volume of his brother Harold’s trilogy of memoirs, Journey from Obscurity. That same year saw the publication of The Contrary Experience, an autobiographical volume by the poet and art critic Herbert Read, which included extracts from the diary he kept in the trenches and the letters he sent home. The second and third volumes of Harold Owen’s trilogy were published in 1964 and 1965, while Wilfred Owen’s Collected Letters appeared in 1967. There was also a major biography of Rupert Brooke by Christopher Hassall, published in 1964, followed by a huge volume of his letters in 1968. Michael Thorpe’s critical study of Siegfried Sassoon appeared in 1966, a year before the poet’s death. Two of the best-known anthologies of war poetry, Brian Gardner’s Up the Line to Death and I.M. Parsons’ Men Who March Away, appeared in 1964 and 1965 respectively, alongside John H. Johnston’s English Poetry of the First World War: A study in the evolution of narrative form (1964) and Bernard Bergonzi’s Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (1965). Those who wanted poetry of a rather less elevated kind could turn to John Brophy and Eric Partridge’s The Long Trail (1965), which collected soldiers’ songs, many of which had become familiar from Oh What a Lovely War!, alongside an extensive dictionary of soldiers’ slang.

  The surge of interest in the War Poets would continue throughout the following decade, which saw books on David Jones and Julian Grenfell; the collected poems and biographies of both Ivor Gurney and Edward Thomas; the Collected Works and three biographies of Isaac Rosenberg; Jon Silkin’s critical study Out of Battle and his Penguin Book of First World War Poetry; and various other books on the literature of the First World War, most notably Paul Fussell’s seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). It was also during this period that the testimony of veterans began to be regarded as invaluable sources for understanding or studying the 1914–18 conflict. As we have seen, the 1960s were marked by an increasing interest in the lives and history of ordinary people. History no longer belonged to the well educated and the articulate, those who could write and publish their own versions of events. In the preface to his History of the Germanic People (1824) the German historian Leopold von Ranke (a forebear of the soldier-poet Robert Graves) wrote: ‘You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell you how it really was.’ Since the world had apparently ignored the warnings of history provided by the First World War, those who had taken part in it were increasingly called upon to tell later generations how it really was. Oral history became popular as a way of preserving people’s experiences, and the spoken rather than the written word was seen as adding a new layer of authenticity to the way we reconstructed the past. Unprepared and unmediated, words spoken into a tape recorder were felt to have an urgency no written text could match. Furthermore, the testimonies of those without either the education or inclination to put down their memories on paper could now be preserved, so that the database was becoming socially much broader, rankers beginning to contribute as much as the officers had previously done. Recordings also preserved the different ways in which people of different classes and from different parts of the country expressed themselves, which again made the rapidly accumulating data seem wider in its scope.

  Given that the generation of 1914 was now ageing fast, institutions and individuals began amassing material for dedicated archives. The Imperial War Museum had been collecting written testimonies and other artefacts ever since it was founded, but it was in the early 1970s that it began building a sound archive in which veterans of the First World War recorded their experiences for posterity. Although the recordings now in the museum’s collections span a considerable period, there was a large surge in acquisitions between 1973 and 1975, when these veterans would on average be in their seventies and eighties. The largest private archive of material about the war was established in 1967 by the historian and academic Peter H. Liddle, specifically ‘to preserve permanently evidence of personal experience in the 1914–1918 war in order that this important aspect of British, Commonwealth and European heritage shall never be lost’. Since it became a national archive (now housed at the University of Leeds), this collection has amassed the written and spoken recollections of well over 3,500 veterans. Liddle himself has published numerous books drawing upon his archive, which is now used by scholars from all over the world.

  One of the first books to make extensive use of the testimony of veterans was Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme (1971). In order to trace men who had been present on 1 July 1916, Middlebrook placed advertisements in ninety national and local newspapers and journals. As a result he managed to track down 526 British survivors, but many of them died while he was carrying out his research: ‘I failed to get replies to an increasing proportion of the letters written during the three years it took to prepare the book for publication.’ Even forty years ago, then, these living witnesses were beginning to thin out. Although Middlebrook outlined the military strategy of the battle and provided detailed maps, the sense that this was history from the bottom up, as it were, was indicated by the book’s emphatic and empathetic dedication to the ‘front-line soldiers of all nations, 1914–1918’. Of the ten soldiers Middlebrook chose as the principal representatives of the British army on 1 July 1916, there was one lieutenant colonel, two lieutenants, one lance corporal, one RSM, four privates and a bugler.

  Middlebrook’s approach was shared by several other historians, notably Lyn Macdonald, who has written a series of books about the First World War, starting in 1978 with They Called It Passchendaele. Subsequent titles include The Roses of No Man’s Land (1980), dealing with nursing at the front, Somme (1983), 1914: The Days of Hope (1988), 1915: The Death of Innocence (1993), To the Last Man: Spring 1918 (1998). These are all compiled from the reminiscences of veterans, linked by Macdonald’s own commentary, while her 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War (1988) combined personal testimony with haunting photographs, contemporary cartoons, advertisements and newspaper clippings, and even t
he death certificate of a soldier ‘Shot by sentence of FGCM [court martial] for “Desertion”’. Denis Winter’s resonantly titled Death’s Men (1978) is an account of ‘the infantryman’s war […] made up of small details and large emotions’. Winter emphasised that in this book the war would be ‘described by men who had little idea of time, place or importance’ – just as Harry Patch had little idea of the ‘bigger picture’ during the Battle of Passchendaele. It is significant than none of these three authors started out as professional or academic historians. Middlebrook was a Lincolnshire farmer who was inspired to write his book (and several others subsequently) after visiting the war cemeteries in France and Belgium. Lyn Macdonald was a BBC producer who first became interested in the oral testimony of veterans while making a radio documentary, and Denis Winter was a schoolmaster who, as his author note in Death’s Men puts it, ‘still attempts to teach history’. Naturally, professional military historians remain suspicious of such ‘amateurs’ and indeed of any kind of oral history, but such books have enormous public appeal. It was Winter who provided the most eloquent defence of the kind of history he wrote in the epigraph to Death’s Men, which was taken from Aron du Picq, a ‘pioneer writer on the behaviour of men in war and Crimean war veteran who died in battle in the Franco-Prussian war’, who compared his own method with that of two well-known historians of the Napoleonic era: