Harry Patch, the Last Veteran and the Unknown Warrior
Remembrance should be painful, unsentimental and monitory – or else it is not worth doing
They have been increasingly painful to watch in recent years: the surviving First World War veterans, all well over a hundred years old, pushed to the Cenotaph in wheelchairs; the oldest of them – Henry Allingham – trying and failing to lay his wreath unaided at the ninetieth anniversary Armistice Day ceremony in 2008. It was not simply their extreme old age that made looking at them unsettling. Living relics of a war waged nearly a century ago, these men carried a representational load that removed them from time. They were the First World War, and they helped to ensure that it remained a presence, unfathomable and troubling, in the early twenty-first century.
Bearing their wreaths alongside the RAF veteran Allingham, who was aged 112, at the ninetieth anniversary ceremony, were two other centenarians: Bill Stone, 108, who had served with the Royal Navy but had not seen active service, and Harry Patch, 110, who had fought in the trenches with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry at the Battle of Langemarck. Already accorded heavy symbolic status, the three became involuntary participants in a macabre contest to see who would become the sole survivor. Stone died on January 10 and Allingham on July 18, 2009. For a week before his death on July 25 at the age of 111, Harry Patch therefore assumed the ultimate representational burden. As Peter Parker notes in his absorbing and moving book The Last Veteran, a strange symmetry arose between commemorative emblems: those of the Last Veteran and the Unknown Warrior. Selected at random in 1920 from four sets of remains which were exhumed from temporary cemeteries at Ypres, Arras, the Aisne and the Somme, and buried with ceremony in Westminster Abbey, the Unknown Warrior became a figure on to which the bereaved could project their loss. Similarly chosen by “an accident of longevity”, Harry Patch came to stand for all those who had fought in the conflict. Ninety-one years after the end of the First World War, it was as though the Unknown Warrior had at last been named.
Fate, it seemed, had made an inspired choice. Although he was seen by some as a Doric figure, Patch, the plumber from Somerset, showed prickly resistance to the obscuring conventionalities of Remembrance. He refused to join veterans’ associations, never attended a regimental reunion, avoided all war films and did not become a member of the British Legion until bribed with a bottle of whisky to do so in the last year of his life. At memorial services, he reiterated his view that negotiation was preferable to armed conflict and made pointed reminders that he was honouring the dead of both sides. Armistice Day (which became Remembrance Sunday after the Second World War) was, he said, “just show business”. His own private day of remembrance was September 22, the date of the shelling that wounded him and killed three of his comrades in 1917.
In his refusal to allow services of remembrance to become ceremonies of forgetting, Patch expressed the frustration and ambivalence that has attended First World War commemoration, since 11 o’clock on November 11, 1918. Tracing the history of the way the conflict has been constructed and memorialized, Parker uncovers some powerful early reactions. Virginia Woolf thought there was “something calculated & politic & insincere” about the Peace Day celebrations in 1919. She had a point: the Victory Parade was routed through Vauxhall, Kennington and Lambeth because the Peace Celebrations Committee felt that those boroughs “were much more British on the whole than the East End which was largely composed of foreigners”. Absent from the Parade were troops from the Indian subcontinent (some 1.27 million had fought): bringing forward the planned date from August to July at a late stage, the government forgot about the 1,500 Indian troops who were still at sea, en route from Bombay. At Chertsey, former servicemen refused to take part in the celebrations as they hadn’t secured their pension rights, while in Manchester unemployed veterans held their own parade, carrying placards demanding better treatment. On Armistice Day 1921, by which time unemployment had passed 1 million, a delegation of ex- servicemen from Poplar laid a wreath at the Cenotaph inscribed “To the dead victims of Capitalism from the living victims of Capitalism”; one of the soldiers had pinned to his jacket the pawn ticket for which he had exchanged his medals.
As early as the 1930s the view was that it was time to move on. The proposal to unite commemorations for the First and Second World Wars was commended by The Times in November 1945 on the grounds that “personal memories of the late war are vivid and poignant for all, while those of the earlier belong now to older folk alone”. Writing in Theology in 1965, the Revd Ronald Coppin suggested that Remembrance Sunday be quietly dropped from the calendar: “since the passing of the 1914–18 war generation the public desire to remember has slowly withered”.
An impetus to forget a war might suggest the need to remember it; the urge to remember might indicate that the time has come to forget. The death of Harry Patch gives the issue new pertinence; and raises the question of what the loss of the Last Veteran means for the nation’s engagement with its first industrial-scale armed conflict. This year the Armistice Day ceremony was styled as marking “the passing of a generation”. Patch, Allingham and Stone were there in absentia: the BBC included footage of their last appearance together in its coverage, and the Dean of Westminster, standing before the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, intoned, “Their names we honour”. One wonders if their absence will be so strongly felt next year.
While alive, they were talismanic. Yet Parker rightly points out that the First World War veterans were not always accorded veneration; it was only in the 1960s, with the vogue for oral history and an egalitarian interest in the experience of the ranks, that their testimony began to be valued and collected. Interest in the very last survivors arose from a sense that “a living link” was about to disappear; a schoolteacher whose pupils made cards for Patch’s final birthday commented that “it’s really impossible to talk about the Great War and talk about the millions of people who were killed or wounded, but if you talk about one person they really understand, they really make connections”. But Harry Patch and the others were more than human metonyms. As Parker’s essential book shows, their death takes from us not just a human trace of the trenches, but a living reminder that remembrance should be painful, unsentimental and monitory – or else it is not worth doing at all.
Peter Parker
THE LAST VETERAN
Harry Patch and the legacy of war
328pp. Fourth Estate. £14.99.
978 0 00 726550 3
Kate McLoughlin is the author of Martha Gellhorn: The war writer in the field and in the text, 2007, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to War Writing, published earlier this year.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6931524.ece
No comments:
Post a Comment