The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  The smallest detail taken from an actual incident in war is more instructive to me, as a soldier, than all the Thiers and Jominis in the world. They speak for the heads of states and armies, but they never show me what I wish to know – a battalion, company or platoon in action. The man is the first weapon of battle. Let us study the soldier for it is he who brings reality to it.

  It was this sense of the ‘reality’ of war which caught the public imagination. It gave veterans of the First World War, most of whom had kept their experiences to themselves, their voice – and, increasingly, their status.

  FOUR

  Head Count 2000–2009

  Old soldiers never never die;

  They simply fade away …

  First World War song

  There remain large parts of France and Belgium where it is impossible to forget the First World War. It is a haunted landscape, where the dead are ever present. This is precisely what the Imperial War Graves Commission intended. When in 1937 Fabian Ware reported on ‘the work and policy’ of the IWGC during its first twenty years in a slender volume called The Immortal Heritage, he calculated that in France and Belgium alone there were nearly a thousand specially built cemeteries. Within them were some 600,000 uniform headstones, supported by 250 miles of buried concrete beams and set in 540 acres of lawn, the grass of which had all been grown from seed. The cemeteries were enclosed by 50 miles of walls, and a further 63 miles of hedging had been planted. In addition, eighteen monuments to the missing had been erected, with some 54,000 names (40,000 of them British) recorded on the Menin Gate, another 35,150 (34,000 of them British) on the Tyne Cot Memorial, 22,500 (all British) on the Ploegsteert Memorial, 35,080 (all but eighty British) on the Arras Memorial, and an overwhelming 70,830 (70,000 of them British) on Lutyens’ Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, which dominates the skyline at Thiepval. In 1937 the missing themselves were still turning up at a rate of twenty to thirty a week, and some 38,000 of them had been discovered ‘by accident’ since official searches had been abandoned in September 1921. Even in the late 1980s the land would give up some twenty to thirty bodies a year.

  Great Britain has nothing to compare with these acres of the dead. The few casualties buried here mostly died in hospitals after being invalided home. Small clusters of IWGC headstones are occasionally found in churchyards or cemeteries, but there are very few cemeteries containing multiple casualties of the First World War: the largest is the Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey, which contains 1,601 burials; the St James’s Cemetery, Dover, contains 392 bodies, including those of nine unidentified men killed in the Zeebrugge naval raid in 1918; while the Cliveden War Cemetery in Buckinghamshire contains the graves of forty of those who died while supposedly recuperating from wounds on Lady Astor’s estate, most of them Canadian.

  Even so, reminders of the dead of the First World War are everywhere. Almost every city, town or village has its war memorial, either in the churchyard, on the village green, or at some other focal point of the community. Carved in stone or cast in bronze, Tommies stand with heads bowed and rifles reversed, remain on guard challenging all comers, wave encouragement to their comrades, or – as in Cambridge – stride off to battle bare headed with an almost unbearably jaunty optimism. Elsewhere angels and eagles stretch their wings protectively or fiercely, St Georges slay dragons, and victors flourish palms. Crosses, obelisks and urn-topped columns display their overfilled ledgers of the dead. In addition, most churches have a Roll of Honour listing ‘the men of this parish’ who died in the Great War. With their columns of names, war memorials may seem little more than inventories; but they can also tell a story. The memorial cloister at Eton College and the memorials to the ‘Pals’ Battalions’ in the industrial North commemorate the disproportionate casualties suffered by very different individual communities. On memorials in rural villages are carved names still locally familiar, suggesting that descendants have not moved far; or the same names repeated, suggesting families who lost more than one member, perhaps brothers, perhaps fathers and sons. The dead of the First World War may not be present in Britain the way they are in France and Belgium, but their memorials are so ubiquitous that we scarcely notice them as we drive or walk past. Most of the thousands of commuters who pour every day through the elaborate main entrance of Waterloo Station no more realise that they are passing beneath the London and South Western Railway’s War Memorial than they think about the Belgian battlefield of an earlier war that gave the station its name.

  Even so, the First World War has become a point of reference, so much a part of our lives that we scarcely need allusions to it explained to us. An installation at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Hyde Hall in Essex in 2008, for example, consisted of nine headstones standing in isolation on a sloping hillside. On each of the headstones is incised the botanical name of a native plant species that has become extinct. The shape of the headstones is instantly recognisable as that adopted by the Imperial War Graves Commission, and the installation was given the title ‘The Fallen’. From a distance the stones do indeed resemble one of the many tiny war cemeteries found in northern France and Flanders. Few people now refer to those who are killed in action as ‘The Fallen’, but this was the title chosen by Morgan Matthews for an extraordinary television film in which he attempted to commemorate every single British soldier killed during the continuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Broadcast in November 2008, in the wake of widespread coverage of the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, it ran over three hours, listing every lost soldier by name and interviewing grieving families and friends. The names loomed out of a dark screen which appeared to have moving golden flecks in it, a motif explained towards the end of the film when a lone sculptor was depicted adding names to the national Armed Forces Memorial in Staffordshire, stone debris flying from beneath his chisel. This memorial is a huge Portland stone circle which at the time of its unveiling by the Queen in October 2007 bore the names of some 16,000 service personnel who have been killed while on duty since the end of the Second World War. Room had been left on the curved walls for 15,000 additional names, including those being added by the letterer in Matthews’ emotionally wrenching film. Widespread disquiet about Britain’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has meant that the general public has been less ready to give the dead of these wars their due than was the case in 1918. By calling his documentary The Fallen, Matthews provided an instantly recognisable historical reference point which aligned those who had died in these controversial conflicts with those of an earlier generation whose war had been far more popular. Similarly, if more light-heartedly, everyone understood the grim humour of an advert for the London Transport Museum that appeared in newspapers in August 2008, in the run-up to the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the war. Above the words ‘Hundreds of London buses took troops to the trenches in the First World War. Discover this and other moving stories at the new museum’ was a crumpled, period bus ticket: ‘Ypres. One Way from Dover via Calais’.

  The First World War has also become a staple of the national curriculum for British schools, though as part of the English literature rather than the history course. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and even R.C. Sherriff are listed as major writers to be studied for Key Stage 3, presumably falling into the Qualification and Curriculum Authority’s desired category of writers who have ‘influenced culture and thinking’. As a sample of how teachers might approach the literature of the First World War, the QCA’s website provides a ‘case study’ from a sixth-form college in Hampshire:

  In preparing students for unit 6 on war literature, the department organises a visit to Ypres. There is a substantial role-play of a military court, deciding on the question of the court-martialling and execution of deserters, based on a range of documents, from letters, poems and interviews to statistics and visual images. The role-play helps students enter the mindset of people at the time, rather than relying solely on the view of the war of the First World War poets and it
comes as a surprise to the students themselves that many of their role-plays end with decisions to execute.

  This somewhat macabre exercise is balanced by the more mainstream literary task of compiling ‘anthologies of war poetry, drawing on their knowledge of themes and content to present the poetry to a wider audience’.

  Trips to the battlefields of France and Belgium are no longer the preserve of veterans and historians or relatives of the dead. Not only are groups of schoolchildren conducted round these sites as an adjunct to their studies of the war, or the War Poets, but many other people are simply interested in seeing where an earlier generation had fought and died. Numerous books suggest walking tours of the battlefields, and specialist travel companies provide guided tours for coachloads of those who may not have any direct family link with the war but nevertheless want to learn something about it. It is possible, for example, to learn the extent of the war, which is neatly though coincidentally illustrated in the St-Symphorien Military Cemetery near Mons, where two headstones a few feet apart mark the final resting places of the first and last British soldiers to be killed in the war: Private John Parr, who died on 21 August 1914, and Private George Ellison, killed on 11 November 1918. The notorious ability of recruiting officers to be hoodwinked about the age of volunteers is apparent at Dartmoor Cemetery near Albert, where the oldest British casualty of the war, Lieutenant Henry Webber, killed by a stray shell on the Somme in July 1916 at the age of sixty-seven, is buried; or at Poelkappelle British Cemetery, which contains the remains of the youngest British casualty, Private John Condon, killed in August 1914 at the age of thirteen. A memorial stone in the Devonshire Cemetery at Mametz bears eloquent witness to the losses on the first day on the Somme: it was here on 4 July 1916 that the remnants of the 8th and 9th Battalions of the Devonshire Regiment buried 161 of their comrades in a trench beneath a sign that read ‘The Devonshires held this trench, the Devonshires hold it still’. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has an online ‘Debt of Honour Register’, which allows anyone to look up the names of all those who died and to find their grave or memorial. Individual entries list the name, rank, service number, date of death, age, regiment and nationality, give a grave or memorial reference, and describe the cemetery where the subject is buried or the memorial on which his or her name is inscribed.

  Anniversaries of the beginning and end of the war, or of major battles, are regularly marked not only in the press and on television and radio, but even by the morning post. The Royal Mail produced three sets of commemorative stamps under the collective title ‘Lest We Forget’, all featuring Flanders poppies. The first marked the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme in July 2006, the second the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele in November 2007, the third the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice in November 2008. Collectors could purchase commemorative sheets, bordered with lines from Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ on which the stamps were accompanied by extracts from letters written home from the trenches of Passchendaele and photographs of artefacts such as a whistle blown to mark the start of an attack at Ypres by an officer who was subsequently awarded a VC, and the football dribbled towards the German lines by men of the 8th East Surrey Regiment on the first day of the Somme. A surge of interest in family history, fostered by such television programmes as Who Do You Think You Are?, in which famous people go in search of their forebears, has also led people to take a particular interest in what their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did in the war. As part of its ‘Ninety Years of Remembrance’ season in November 2008, the BBC launched a website in which users were invited to ‘trace your WW1 family history’, the results of which could be posted on a Remembrance Wall, which at the time of writing had 5,837 combatants recorded on it.

  The Internet has indeed made such searches easier and has become a conduit for a great deal of often esoteric information about the war. There are innumerable websites dedicated to the subject, providing a host of facts, statistics and images for the interested browser. Long-established organisations such as the Western Front Association (WFA) have used websites to reach a new and younger audience. Founded in 1980 ‘with the aim of furthering interest in the period 1914–1918, to perpetuate the memory, courage and comradeship of all those who served their countries in France and Flanders and their own countries during The Great War’, the Association is at pains to stress that it ‘does not seek to justify or glorify war’ and ‘is entirely non-political’: its object is simply ‘to educate the public in the history of The Great War with particular reference to the Western Front’. It has some sixty-five branches, not only in Britain, but in most of the Allied countries, has the leading military historian Correlli Barnett as its president, and has boasted descendants of both Haig and Kitchener on its board. Its current membership stands at around 6,500 members worldwide and it produces its own magazine, Stand To!, published three times a year, as well as an in-house Bulletin.

  Along with the British Legion, the WFA played a significant role in the restoration of the two minutes’ silence on 11 November. While acknowledging the importance of Remembrance Sunday, the Legion had been campaigning for some time for the actual anniversary of the Armistice to be marked once more, precisely because it more often than not fell on a working day when any cessation of activity would be more impressive than it would be in the middle of divine service on a Sunday. There seemed to be considerable public support for this idea: in 2002 the Legion announced that independent research they had commissioned reported back that 92 per cent of the population (including, significantly, 91 per cent of young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four) thought the Silence should be observed on 11 November and that Remembrance should be part of the national calendar. In a letter to the Legion, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, lent his support, and this was echoed by the Lord Chancellor, who that year invited all courts to observe the Silence. A large number of local authorities followed suit, suggesting meetings should be halted for two minutes, and leading employers, including shops and supermarkets, banks and building societies, power and transport companies, encouraged their staff to stop work for two minutes’ silent reflection. All aircraft movement was halted at Manchester Airport, while trains and buses would also stop where possible. It was estimated that some forty-five million people observed the Silence that year, and in subsequent years the Silence at 11 a.m. on 11 November has indeed become a national ritual.

  The resurgence of interest in the First World War at the beginning of the twenty-first century came about partly because there was a sense that what linked us directly to this vital part of our history was about to slip from our grasp. For much of the twentieth century, those who fought in the war and survived it had been very much part of the fabric of our lives in Britain. It was not merely that they appeared wearing ribbons and medals with their poppies every Remembrance Sunday, but they were our fathers and grandfathers, a living link with this increasingly distant event that nevertheless continued to cast its long shadow over the century. Reviewing a clutch of books about the First World War in May 2008, the historian Francis Beckett suggested that ‘The war’s extraordinary vividness is because it left a whole generation deeply and irreparably damaged, and that generation is close enough for many of us to have known members of it.’ Beckett did not in fact know his maternal grandfather, who died in March 1918 after being hit by a shell the previous month. He did, however, witness the effect of that death on his mother, who had been nine at the time ‘and never got over it’. ‘In her last years, in the 1980s, her once fine brain so crippled by dementia that she could not remember the names of her children, she could still remember his dreadful, lingering, useless death. She could still talk of his last leave, when he was so shell-shocked he could hardly speak and my grandmother ironed his uniform every day in the vain hope of killing the lice.’

  While over the years some veterans learned to speak of their experiences, others never did. The urge not to inflict harrowing stor
ies on children and grandchildren as well as a more self-protective sense that some memories were better left undisturbed and unexamined meant that the link between history and its living witnesses was in many cases never forged. To take an example close to hand, both my grandfathers fought in the war but died when I was too young to formulate let alone ask the sort of questions I would like to put to them now. They might not have answered anyway. One of them served as an officer in Palestine with the Royal Army Medical Corps and was awarded the Military Cross, but when asked about this distinction would reply that they gave medals out to whoever came down to breakfast first. He was a stalwart of the village’s British Legion, the annual fete of which was held in the garden of his house. He may have survived the war, but it got him in the end. He had been wounded by a shell and over half a century later the shrapnel left in his body led to his having a leg amputated. He survived the operation but succumbed to a heart attack while recuperating in hospital. My other grandfather served as a private in the Honourable Artillery Company in France, was also wounded, and was taken prisoner in 1917. Every Armistice Day he would lock himself in his study, speaking to no one. I don’t remember this, but something of the dismal atmosphere he created must have communicated itself to me: as a child with no sense of history, I believed that he had suffered the terrible fate of a later generation and had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese. The fact that neither man ever spoke of his experiences if anything gave the war an even more terrible because hidden presence.