The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War

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

This moving and timely book explores the way the First World War has been thought about and commemorated, and how it has affected its own, and later, generations.On 11 November 1920, huge crowds lined the streets of London for the funeral of the Unknown Warrior. As the coffin was drawn on a gun carriage from the Cenotaph to Westminster Abbey, the King and Ministers of State followed silently behind. The modern world had tilted on its axis, but it had been saved. Armistice Day was born, the acknowledgement of the great sacrifice made by a whole generation of British men and women.Now, almost a century later, Harry Patch, the last British veteran who saw active service, has died. Our final link with the First World War is broken.Harry Patch was born in 1898 and was conscripted in 1916. He served with a Lewis gun team at the Battle of Passchendaele and in September 1917 was wounded by a shell that killed three of his comrades. After the war, Patch returned to Somerset to work as a plumber, a job he continued to do until his retirement.The First World War was fought not by a professional army but by ordinary civilians like Patch, who epitomised Edwardian Britain and the sense, now lost, of what Britain stood for and why it was worth fighting for. The Last Veteran tells Patch's story, and explores the meaning of the war to those who fought in it and the generations that have followed. Peter Parker's illuminating and timely book is a moving tribute to a remarkable generation.

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_97379228-7ce3-5156-8c72-2903f262f116)

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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2009

Copyright © Peter Parker 2009

Peter Parker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007357963

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007440078

Version: 2014-12-01

DEDICATION (#ulink_e25d6971-70e9-5946-9f81-b8ab9f18b1b4)

For my godson Julius Lunn

– next generation –

CONTENTS

COVER (#u54886c9a-ee0c-518f-a5c8-2c92377403ed)

TITLE PAGE (#u3e4c5cfb-fa47-5f9c-a4ab-668bab5137cc)

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_a0cc62c2-3912-5941-b1bf-96ec9841b424)

DEDICATION (#ulink_3906130e-6b29-587d-a340-86a506342407)

PROLOGUE: Armistice 1918 (#ulink_d01f8455-c7c6-5e9a-9492-27e2c2a886f9)

ONE: The Unknown Warrior 1919–1921 (#ulink_ea877abf-5c35-5fd1-a9bf-fcda3953769e)

TWO: A Nation Remembers? 1921–1939 (#ulink_f0fd3dd0-5e86-59de-a4ea-f0a504a76823)

INTERLUDE: Old Soldiers 1939–1945 (#litres_trial_promo)

THREE: Fifty Years On 1945–2000 (#litres_trial_promo)

FOUR: Head Count 2000–2009 (#litres_trial_promo)

FOOTNOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

SOURCE NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

PRAISE (#litres_trial_promo)

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE (#ulink_c56d8952-c74e-5ed2-a70a-2c267fccf1dd)

Armistice 1918 (#ulink_c56d8952-c74e-5ed2-a70a-2c267fccf1dd)

Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance

To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,

As they had raised it through the four years’ dance

Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;

And murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’

THOMAS HARDY, ‘And There Was a Great Calm’

News that the Great War for Civilisation had finally come to an end was greeted by noisy rejoicing on the streets of London and other cities around the world, but what struck most people on the battlefields of France and Belgium was the silence. At 11 a.m. on Monday, 11 November 1918, after four and a quarter years in which howitzers boomed, shells screamed, machine guns rattled, rifles cracked, and the cries of the wounded and dying echoed in no man’s land, everything suddenly fell quiet. Across parts of Belgium a thick fog had descended that morning, with visibility down to ten yards. In the muffled landscape the stillness seemed almost palpable. Since for most soldiers news of the approaching armistice did not reach them until an hour or less before it was implemented, it is extraordinary that the guns really did fall silent at exactly the planned time. In one part of the line near Le Cateau a German machine gun was firing at the British troops in the opposite trench until the very last minute. ‘At precisely eleven o’clock an officer stepped out of their position, stood up, lifted his helmet and bowed to the British troops. He then fell in all his men in the front of the trench and marched them off.’