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

Warrior must have realised that the chances that the person they had lost was now lying among the most illustrious of the land were slender. There was also the question of just how representative of the Empire’s million dead the Warrior really was. Although no one actually quite voiced it, the general assumption was that this ‘British Warrior’ was of pure Christian descent. Some idea of the sort of person many imagined he might be was given by Arthur Machen (the creator of the ‘Angels of Mons’ myth) writing in the London Evening News on the day of the funeral. In an article he fancifully called ‘Vision in the Abbey: The Little Boy Who Came to the King by Way of Great Tribulation’, Machen imagined a boy playing in an idealised English countryside. ‘I see the little child quite clearly,’ he insisted, ‘and yet I cannot make out how he is dressed. For all I can see he may be the squire’s boy, or the parson’s, or the cottager’s son from that old whitewashed, sixteenth-century cottage which shines so in the sunlight. Or I am not quite sure that he is not a town-lad come to stay with relations in the country, so that he might know how sweet the air may be.’ What this little boy was clearly not was a member of the teeming immigrant communities of the poor inner cities, many of whom fought and died for their country. He nevertheless grows up, goes to war, is killed, and becomes the Unknown Warrior.

      A suspicion that the authorities at any rate did not really believe that the person they had buried in Westminster Abbey, that Christian repository of the great and the good of the land, could be anything other than a son of the Church of England was confirmed when the following year S.I. Levy, Principal of the Liverpool Hebrew Schools, wrote a letter to Dean Ryle pointing out that the tombstone had carved on it the line ‘In Christ shall all be made alive’. As Mr Levy politely pointed out, the religion of the Unknown Warrior was as much a mystery as his identity. Many Jews, he reminded the Dean, had fought and died in the war and were being mourned in Jewish homes across the land. ‘Among the unbounded wealth of biblical inspiration a line could have been selected which would not have offended the living religious susceptibilities of the unknown warrior, whatever his faith may have been,’ Mr Levy suggested, whereas the chosen line did ‘not meet the spiritual destinies of both Jew and Gentile’. Dean Ryle was not accustomed to being challenged and replied testily that given that the Unknown Warrior was lying in a Christian church it seemed only reasonable that one of the five texts selected for his tombstone should carry a Christian message. For all he knew, the Dean added, the Unknown Warrior might even have been a Muslim: ‘We cannot hope to please everyone.’

      Exactly who was lying in Westminster Abbey did not in the end greatly matter. The Unknown Warrior was intended as a symbol and largely accepted as one. The element of uncertainty over his identity may, however, explain the otherwise odd circumstance that even after all the pomp and ceremony that surrounded the Unknown Warrior’s burial, it was an empty tomb which remained the main focus of a grieving nation. People continued to lay huge numbers of wreaths at the Cenotaph every week throughout the twelve months following the funeral. These numbers swelled at Christmas, which was unseasonably mild in 1920, and The Times reported that on Boxing Day ‘There were more people there […] than on any day since the Great Pilgrimage came to an end. The base was nearly surrounded by wreaths of evergreen and holly, and the pile reached nearly to the top of the pedestal.’ Even a year later on 11 November 1921, when the Unknown Warrior’s temporary grave slab was replaced by a permanent one of Belgian marble inlaid with brass lettering made from melted-down bullet casings gathered from the battlefields, The Times insisted that ‘It was surely at the Cenotaph that the nation’s undying gratitude to its glorious dead found […] its fullest and most complete expression’. The heavens appeared to agree. Although a mist ‘obscured the vista’ on this ‘perfect November morning’, ‘immediately over the Cenotaph the sky was pure pale blue’.

      The commemoration of the dead had certainly gripped the country’s collective imagination, but many of those who had survived the war felt themselves forgotten. Among those laying wreaths that November morning was a delegation of ex-servicemen and their families from Poplar in the East End of London. Some of these wreaths bore inscriptions which ‘the police were obliged to censor as being likely to be objectionable to those who mourned at the shrine’. Among the inscriptions deemed offensive were ‘To the dead victims of Capitalism from the living victims of Capitalism’ and ‘To the dead not forgotten from the living forgotten’. While some of the veterans wore their war decorations, one had pinned to his coat the pawn ticket for which he had exchanged his medals.

TWO

       A Nation Remembers? 1921–1939

       Have you forgotten yet? …

       For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days …

      SIEGFRIED SASSOON, ‘Aftermath’

      While veterans who faced poverty and unemployment often complained that they had been forgotten, Britain continued to lavish money and attention upon preserving the memory of those who had died. Many felt that in commemorating the dead the nation was neglecting to fulfil its promises and obligations to those who had survived. By the time the Unknown Warrior had been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, the Imperial War Graves Commission had made considerable progress in the enormous job of providing permanent burial sites for his comrades left behind in Flanders and even farther afield. Most countries in which the war had been fought had followed France’s generous lead in handing over land in perpetuity to the IWGC, which meant that cemeteries could now be constructed in Belgium, Italy, Greece, Iraq, Palestine and Egypt. Similar arrangements would be made with Germany and Turkey.

      Once the land was acquired, it was necessary to come to some decision about how the dead should be commemorated. At the invitation of Fabian Ware, Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker (with whom Lutyens had designed a new capital of British India in Delhi before the war) had visited the battlefields in July 1917. Lutyens left a wonderfully touching account of what he found in France:

       The grave-yards, haphazard from the needs of so much to do and so little time for thought. And then a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way across miles of country where men were tucked in where they fell. Ribbons of little crosses each touching each across a cemetery, set in a wilderness of annuals and where one sort of flower is grown the effect is charming, easy and oh so pathetic. One thinks for the moment no other monument is needed. Evanescent but for the moment almost perfect and how misleading to surmise in this emotion and how some love to sermonise. But the only monument can be one in which the endeavour is sincere to make such a monument permanent – a solid ball of bronze!

      Bronze balls were not what Ware had in mind. He subsequently asked Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, to become an adviser to the Commission. After visiting France and Belgium himself, Kenyon submitted a report laying out the principles upon which he believed the cemeteries should be created. They should be surrounded by low walls, within which uniform headstones would mark individual graves arranged without regard for rank or status. In death all men would be equal, officers and their men lying as they had fought, side by side, the headstones merely recording rank, name, regiment, date of death, and age if known. The details, however, were left to Lutyens and Baker, who did not always agree about the design of the cemeteries. Lutyens wanted to avoid all religious symbolism and so came up with the Stone of Remembrance, a sort of non-denominational altar, or (as he described it) a ‘great fair stone of fine proportions’, raised on a shallow flight of broad steps. Inscribed on the stone were some biblically derived but religiously neutral words chosen by Kipling: ‘Their Name Liveth For Evermore’. The more traditionally inclined Baker felt that something specifically Christian and military was called for and designed a huge stone Cross of Sacrifice standing on an octagonal base and faced with a downward-pointing bronze sword. In the event, both designs were used, the Stone featuring in every cemetery containing over four hundred graves, the Cross in all but the smallest plots. In most cases the headstones would be set into concrete beams, buried invisibly beneath the earth, which would keep them both upright and aligned in proper military order.

      Appointed alongside Lutyens and Baker for the work in France