The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War. Peter Parker

for King and Country

      The plain coffin was placed inside this elaborate box, which on the morning of 9 November was taken by horse-drawn hearse, through guards of honour and to the sound of tolling bells and bugle calls, to the quayside. There, saluted by Maréchal Foch, it was loaded on to the destroyer HMS Verdun, which would carry it across the Channel to Dover. The coffin stood on the deck, covered in wreaths and surrounded by a French guard of honour, as the ship moved slowly out of the harbour.

      The sight of HMS Verdun emerging from the heavy fog that hung over the Channel as it reached Dover inspired one musical student to compose a tone poem on the subject. Lilian Elkington’s atmospheric Out of the Mist received its first performance at a student concert in Birmingham later that year. ‘The opening is quiet, with muted lower strings, as the ship feels her way through the murk,’ the composer wrote in a programme note. ‘After a pause mutes are removed, the air grows brighter, and the deep gloom upon men’s spirits is somewhat relieved … Gradually the style enlarges and becomes more elevated as larger views of the meaning of sacrifice calm the spirit.’ The final section of the work is marked double-forte ‘as with a burst of sad exultation the representative of the nameless thousands who have died in the common cause is brought out of the darkness to his own’. This description exactly captures the mood of the country when the Unknown Warrior came home. He was greeted at Dover with the nineteen-gun salute usually reserved for field marshals and then handed over by the French to a British honour guard, which accompanied the coffin to the railway station to complete the journey to London by special train. All along the route people gathered to watch the train pass, and assorted uniformed groups stood on station platforms to salute its by now famous, though of course still anonymous, passenger. Even larger crowds, many of them women in mourning, greeted the train when it arrived at Victoria Station, where the Unknown Warrior remained overnight.

      Many of these people followed the coffin to Westminster Abbey on the morning of 11 November, tagging along behind the official escort. Draped with a Union flag that had been used by David Railton as an altar cloth at the front, on top of which were placed an infantryman’s helmet, belt and bayonet, the coffin had been loaded on to a gun carriage pulled by six black horses. Marching in front of the carriage were a firing party, and massed bands playing Chopin’s funeral march. Immediately behind came the twelve pall-bearers, selected from among the highest-ranking officers in the land: Earl Haig, Earl Beatty and Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard representing the army, navy and air force respectively, along with three other Admirals of the Fleet, three more generals and three more field marshals, including Sir John French who had commanded the British Expeditionary Force until relieved of his position in December 1915. These men were followed by representatives of the army, navy and air force, selected from all ranks, marching six abreast and all wearing black-crêpe armbands; then former servicemen, in mufti, marching four abreast. The procession made its slow way through the streets of the capital, which were lined with troops posted to hold back the mourners who, dressed in black, thronged the pavements and fell silent as the gun carriage passed.

      Eventually the procession turned into Whitehall, where the new Cenotaph was concealed under huge Union flags. Although the proceedings had a more military flavour than those on Armistice Day the previous year, the focus remained on those who mourned rather than on those who had fought and survived. A group of unemployed ex-servicemen had even been denied permission to join the funeral procession, perhaps as a result of the various demonstrations, some of them violent, in which many out-of-work veterans had participated during the two years since the war ended. Apart from a specially allocated block where 130 ‘Distinguished Personages’ waited, the pavements of Whitehall nearest the Cenotaph had been reserved for the ‘Bereaved’, selected by ballot and guarded by a line of servicemen from all three forces. With ten minutes to go to the eleventh hour, the gun carriage stopped beside Lutyens’ shrouded monument so that the King, in military uniform, could place a wreath upon the coffin, salute and retire. A choir arrayed on either side of the entrance to the Home Office building directly opposite the Cenotaph sang the hymn ‘Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past’, then the Archbishop of Canterbury said the Lord’s Prayer. On the first stroke of eleven, the King stepped forward again to unveil the Cenotaph. There followed a two minutes’ silence that was supposedly observed throughout the entire British Empire – though it seems unlikely that those tilling fields or hawking goods under a hot afternoon sun in some of the remoter corners of the Empire could even have known what was taking place in the tiny island kingdom that ruled them, let alone participated in this arcane ceremony. In most countries that had fought in the war, however, silence was observed. A notable exception was the United States, where Armistice Day was largely ignored. A year later the Americans would exhume and bury their own Unknown Soldier and mark 11 November as Veterans Day, but in 1920 people went about their normal business without interruption. Throughout Britain, however, the silence that reigned was as remarkable in its way as the one that fell across the battlefields of France and Belgium exactly two years earlier. At the Cenotaph, the end of the two minutes was signalled by eight buglers playing the Last Post, after which the King and other dignitaries placed wreaths at the foot of Lutyens’ empty tomb, then followed the gun carriage to Westminster Abbey, from the tower of which a single bell tolled.

      The nave of the Abbey was lined by 100 men who had been awarded the VC and other high military honours, but following a press campaign and a personal plea from Queen Mary the majority of the public invited to attend the service were bereaved women who had lost either a husband or a son, or (as was all too often the case) both. The Dean of Westminster conducted the brief service, during which the casket of the Unknown Warrior was lowered into the tomb excavated for it in the floor of the nave just inside the West Door. Like the Cenotaph, the grave had been sited where people were obliged to take notice of it, in the middle of a thoroughfare: anyone entering the Abbey would have to step round it. In a reversal of Rupert Brooke’s famous notion of ‘some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England’ because a British soldier was buried there, quantities of earth had been imported from the battlefields so that the Unknown Warrior would lie in the French and Belgian soil over which he had fought.

      Once the service was over and the congregation had stepped out into the late morning, the filled grave was covered with Railton’s flag and surrounded by Flanders poppies and wooden railings to protect it from the thousands of people who would visit the Abbey to pay their respects. Here, at last, veterans were given or had somehow achieved priority, and the first people to enter the Abbey after the service had ended were disabled former servicemen, along with their unemployed comrades who had been denied a place in the funeral procession. By 11 p.m., when, an hour later than originally planned, the Abbey doors were closed for the night, some 40,000 people had filed past the grave, round which a guard of honour with bowed heads and reversed rifles kept constant vigil. It was clear that the three days originally allotted for the people to pay their respects before the tomb was properly sealed would be entirely inadequate. Huge queues formed long before the Abbey opened again the following morning, and there were similarly long lines of people at the Cenotaph, where it was estimated that 100,000 wreaths were laid within three days of its unveiling. From Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square, people in their thousands waited patiently and moved slowly forward, their places immediately filled as others joined the queues. They came from all over the country, and the queues grew even longer as the time approached for the Abbey to be closed so that a temporary slab could be placed over the tomb. Even the Dean’s revised timetable could not accommodate those taking part in what had been dubbed ‘the Great Pilgrimage’, and it was not until 4 p.m. on Thursday, 18 November, a week after the funeral, that the doors of the Abbey were finally closed so that the tomb could be properly sealed. Once this was done, the pilgrimage continued: when the Abbey opened again the queues were almost as long as they had been in the week following Armistice Day.

      ‘Wonderful to think of this unknown boy, or man, lying here with our kings, our captains, our prophets, and our priests,’ one commentator wrote. ‘His fame is greater, too; he is Everyman who died in the war. No matter how many mothers believe that he is theirs, they are right; they are all of them right – for he is every mother’s son who did not come home from France.’ This may have been the intention, but everyone knew that the body was not that of any of the thousands who had been lost at sea or in theatres of war other than the Western Front. Even those who were not privy