The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War

Getting back to Britain in the first place was often difficult: one of the principal complaints among the armed forces was the slow pace of demobilisation. An end to hostilities did not mean an immediate end to war service, and even soldiers who had been in Britain on 11 November 1918 often had a long and frustrating wait before they returned to Civvy Street. The army had been very quick to recruit soldiers but less swift to let them go. ‘It had taken three days to get me into uniform,’ Harry Patch recalled, ‘but it would be five months before I got out of khaki and out of the army.’ The government’s decision to give priority to men whose particular skills were required to get the wheels of industry turning once more was particularly unpopular, chiefly because many of these so-called ‘key men’ had been considered too important to send to France and had been allowed to enlist only when the fighting forces had been seriously depleted. This meant that those who were last in were often first out – a policy that did not find favour among those who had been serving for much longer periods. Guy Chapman remembered the anger caused when the first person from his battalion to be demobbed was a man who had seen only fourteen weeks’ service: he was a miner and therefore needed back in England. This demobilisation by individual rather than by battalion was logistically complex and destroyed the sense of group loyalty that had kept men going during the war. Under pressure, the scheme was eventually abandoned, but while in force it led to mass discontent.

The discipline that had carried many of the soldiers through almost unimaginable hardships at the front seemed merely irksome now that the war was over, and it began to break down. On the Isle of Wight Harry Patch’s company particularly resented being ordered about on parade and taken for route marches by a peacetime officer who had risen from the ranks. The men finally refused to turn out for this officer, even when he challenged them with a revolver. They subsequently returned to talk to him with loaded weapons, and when he cocked the trigger of his revolver, the men responded by pulling back the bolts of their rifles. ‘Now, you shoot, you bugger, if you dare,’ one of the men shouted, and the officer very sensibly backed down. A brigadier was sent to Freshwater to sort out what had in effect been a mutiny. He listened to both the officer’s account and the men’s grievances. One man complained that they had joined up for the duration but were still waiting to be demobilised and return to their jobs three months after hostilities ceased. The brigadier, perhaps fearing that disaffection among the ranks would spread, gave orders that the company be excused parades. Thereafter they only did fatigues – little more than keeping the camp tidy – until they were demobbed. ‘We had decided ourselves that we were more or less civilians, and that army rules no longer applied to us,’ Patch recalled.

A small mutiny at Golden Hill Fort was easy enough to deal with, but by January 1919 much more worrying instances of military insubordination were occurring elsewhere. Fears of the sort of mass revolt that had occurred in Russia led to a misguided decision to keep British forces hard at it in order to distract them from any revolutionary ideas they might be entertaining now that they no longer had a war to fight and were anxious to leave the army as soon as possible. It was one thing to have demob delayed, quite another to be subjected to increased military discipline without any particular purpose in view.

The worst, most prolonged mutiny took place at Calais in January 1919 and was a direct result of the men’s impatience at the slow pace of demobilisation. Private John Pantling of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) stationed at the Val de Lièvre camp had been arrested and imprisoned for making a seditious speech to his fellow soldiers, some of whom subsequently broke into the jail in which he was being held and helped him escape. The sergeant who was guarding Pantling was then arrested, but released when the mood of the men was felt to be growing ever more dangerous. As on the Isle of Wight, a senior officer listened to the men’s grievances and agreed to some concessions and an improvement in conditions, but the subsequent setting up of so-called Soldiers’ Councils in the various army camps at Calais smacked too much of Soviet practices for the military authorities, and it was decided that Pantling should be found and rearrested. When he was, not a single one of the 2,000 men at Val de Lièvre answered the reveille. An equal number of men from a neighbouring camp joined the Val de Lièvre contingent in marching on GHQ to demand the release of the troublesome private. This was granted, but by now the mutiny had spread, with some 20,000 men involved. General Byng, a seasoned soldier who had led the Third Army to victory the previous year, was sent to Calais to put an end to the disturbances, but his troops simply joined the mutineers. Eventually a further meeting was organised at which further concessions were granted, and on 31 January the mutiny came to an end.

Such behaviour was not confined to troops still serving abroad, and January 1919 proved a testing time for Lloyd George’s coalition government, which – apparently without consulting the army – had promised rapid demobilisation. While General Byng was dealing with the RAOC in Calais, General Trenchard of the RAF had been sent to quell a disturbance at Southampton, where 20,000 soldiers had mutinied and taken over the docks. To his considerable surprise, Trenchard was manhandled by the troops he had come to address and was obliged to summon armed troops from Portsmouth together with a detachment of military police. These men surrounded the unarmed mutineers, who, perhaps aware of Trenchard’s reputation for ruthlessness, called off their action.

Mutinies were not simply confined to the army. Five hundred members of Trenchard’s RAF stationed in squalid conditions at Biggin Hill in Kent reacted to a particularly disgusting supper one evening by convening a meeting at which ‘The Red Flag’ was sung and a decision was taken to disobey orders. The following morning, as at Val de Lièvre, reveille was ignored and a deputation was sent to the commanding officer with a long list of demands. The authorities agreed to inspect the camp and capitulated almost at once, sending the men on leave while the whole place was overhauled. Meanwhile, there were small individual mutinies in the navy. The red flag was hoisted on a patrol boat at Milford Haven, while, encouraged by dockers and ‘agitators’, the crew of a large cruiser at Rosyth refused to sail to Russia. Further mutinies and demonstrations by soldiers awaiting demobilisation took place at Shoreham, Dover, Folkestone, Bristol, Sydenham, Aldershot and at Osterley, where in January 1919 some 1,500 members of the Army Service Corps, who had learned that they would be the last troops to be demobilised, commandeered lorries and drove them to Whitehall, where they obstructed the entrance to the War Office. The following month, finding food and transport entirely inadequate for their needs, 3,000 fully armed soldiers setting off back to France from Victoria Station decided instead to march on Horse Guards Parade. A nervous Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, receiving assurances that he could rely upon the loyalty of a reserve battalion of Grenadiers and two troops of the Household Cavalry, gave orders for the demonstrators to be surrounded and disarmed. Threatened with machine guns and fixed bayonets, the protesters surrendered, and like all the mutinies mentioned, this one ended without bloodshed.

Once demobbed, men still faced problems returning to civilian life. The thousands of servicemen who had been severely wounded in the war had to readjust to a drastically circumscribed world. Over 41,000 of those injured had lost one or more limbs, while a further 272,000 had suffered other sorts of incapacitating wounds. Others, who showed no visible signs of injury, were suffering from shell shock, ‘neurasthenia’, or other forms of battle trauma which made them unsuited to an immediate return to work: some 65,000 of them were awarded disability pensions. Even those who had emerged from the war able bodied and sound of mind often found themselves out of work. Andrew Bowie, who had served with the 1st Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders and would live to the age of 104, was just twenty-one when the war ended. ‘I was happy to get out of the army and to return home,’ he recalled, ‘but the prospects were very bad.’ Before the war he had worked in accountancy, but his small firm could not afford to re-employ him when he was demobbed. ‘You go away as a boy and come back as a man. What are you going to do? There were so many people like that. There seemed to be no future for you.’

Luckier veterans, mostly those who had been self-employed or in work as skilled craftsmen, found their jobs still waiting for them – though they were often expected to take a cut in wages. Many of the younger men had been apprentices before the war. This system, which stretched back to the Middle Ages, allowed youths to be taken on by a master craftsman who would teach them a trade in exchange for a guarantee that the apprentice would continue working for a set period after he had become skilled. A small wage would be paid while the apprentice learned his craft and the contract between him and his employer would be recorded in a document called an indenture, which would be cancelled at the end of the set term. Corporal John Oborne of the 4th Dorsetshires had been an apprentice joiner in Bath since the age of fourteen, and when the war started was put to work making boxes for shells and torpedoes while waiting to come of military age. After the war ended he stayed on in the army until the beginning of 1920 in order to save up the £50 he would need to buy a set of tools when he returned to his peacetime profession. His old firm was prepared to take him back to complete his apprenticeship, but the pay offered was less than what he would receive if he stayed in the army. He nevertheless completed his apprenticeship and remained with the firm until he retired in 1975, living on to the age of 104.

Harry Patch, on the other hand, refused to accept the terms offered by his old company, also in Bath. He had served three years of his apprenticeship as a plumber, from the age of fifteen, before being called up, and was expected to complete a further two years, at the same paltry wage of ten shillings a week, when he returned. ‘I was effectively being penalised for serving my country,’ he said. He was now twenty-one and about to be married and so refused the offer, doing odd jobs and private work instead. The problem for him now was that his old firm would not sign his indentures. He consulted his father’s solicitor, who offered the opinion that the war had rendered such contracts invalid. Even if Patch’s contract with his employer had not effectively been broken when Patch was called up, it was certainly broken by delayed demobilisation. Those who volunteered or had been conscripted had signed up only ‘for the duration’: by failing to release Patch from the army as soon as the war was over, the government had broken the contract once more. Patch nevertheless felt, as a matter of pride, that he was entitled to have his indentures signed. After a great deal of wrangling, and after he had accepted a job with another company, his employers eventually agreed. He remained in the plumbing trade for the rest of his working life.

Some veterans had gone to the war straight from school without ever being trained for any sort of job other than fighting, and had no experience of the workplace. Others had spent so long in the services that through lack of practice they had almost forgotten the skills they once had, or had missed out on the technical advances that had been made in their absence. Employers were reluctant to take such men on, and this bred even more resentment among the veterans towards those who had stayed behind and were preferred as employees. It was reckoned that around one million men returned from the war to find they had no job. The government provided those who had served in the ranks with unemployment benefit, but former officers were supposed to have sufficient private means to keep them going and were left to fend for themselves. While still in France awaiting demob, Guy Chapman’s battalion was visited by representatives of the commission for the employment of ex-servicemen. Chapman was told that at twenty-eight he was ‘far too old’ and that consequently nothing could be done for him. A fellow officer was told that ‘military distinction was a quite useless recommendation for civil life’. The writer Gilbert Frankau, who had joined up immediately at the outbreak of war and served as an officer at Loos, Ypres and on the Somme, spoke for many in his poem ‘Only an Officer’:

Only an officer! Only a chap

Who carried on till the final scrap,

Only a fellow who didn’t shirk –

Homeless, penniless, out of work,

Asking only a start in life,

A job that will keep himself and his wife,

‘And thank the Lord that we haven’t a kid.’

Thus men pay for the deeds men did!

Unemployment among all classes would remain a major problem in the immediate post-war period, and veterans sporting medals reduced to playing barrel-organs in the streets or peddling matches, shoelaces and other small items became a common and shaming sight. A poignant postcard of the period, on which a poem about the sacrifices made in France and the broken promises about employment back home was printed, came with the following message:

PLEASE READ THIS. Can you help this Ex-service Man by buying this Poetry. PRICE TWOPENCE. So please patronise an Ex-Soldier, Out of Work. NO PENSION. NO DOLE. I am a Genuine Discharged Soldier NOT AN IMPOSTER. I am compelled to sell these to keep myself, wife and children.

Sold entirely by unemployed Ex-service men.

Even those in employment were often dissatisfied with wages and working conditions. In Glasgow in January 1919 an agreement negotiated on behalf of engineers and shipbuilders between the trade unions and employers for a forty-seven-hour working week was rejected by the Clyde Workers’ Committee on the grounds that a forty-hour week was preferable because more people – in particular discharged servicemen – would be needed for jobs. Accustomed to the ‘red’ reputation of the Clyde, the employers and government did not take too much notice of the strike called by the CWC at the end of January. After four days, however, 40,000 men had laid down their tools and were joined not only by Glasgow’s electrical workers but by 36,000 Scottish miners. Ex-servicemen were used as pickets, naturally arousing public sympathy, and on 29 January some 60,000 people attended a demonstration in George Square, Glasgow, while a delegation was granted an audience with the Lord Provost. A vain attempt to disperse the crowd by mounted police led to a pitched battle not only in the square but in other parts of the city, and many were injured. Fearful that Scottish troops might side with the strikers, the government sent massed English troops to Glasgow, some of them in tanks. Peace was restored and on 10 February the strike was called off, its aim unrealised. Politicians nevertheless feared that without the war effort to hold the nation together, discontent and dissension would spread throughout society.

In the immediate aftermath of war, the interests and aims of workers often coincided with those of former servicemen. Indeed, the earliest associations of veterans had a strong political dimension, and the British Legion – associated latterly with garden fêtes and genteel volunteers selling poppies – grew out of surprisingly radical beginnings. The Legion itself did not come into existence until 1921, but a number of other veterans’ associations were founded while the war was still being fought. There had long been charitable organisations set up on behalf of British war veterans, ensuring that old soldiers did not simply fade away in penury. The professional soldiers who fought in the First World War, however, were outnumbered by civilians who, in the language of the times, had answered the nation’s call, either by volunteering or because they had been conscripted. In return, it seemed only right that they should be entitled to benefits provided by the state rather than having to rely upon handouts from charities. Veterans who had left the service began organising themselves into associations that would lobby for pensions and for disability and unemployment allowances.

The earliest grouping, formed in September 1916, was the National Association of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers, which had strong links to both the Labour and Trades Union movements. The similarly named National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers, formed in April 1917, was sponsored by a Liberal MP and held its inaugural meeting at the National Liberal Club. It was open only to those who had served in, or risen from, the ranks, presumably because the Federation felt, as the government did, that former commissioned officers could look after themselves. The Comrades of the Great War was proposed in August 1917 by Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Norton-Griffiths, a Conservative MP (supported by Lord Derby, the then Secretary of State for War), with the express intention of providing an organisation without what he considered the radical, even revolutionary, affiliations of the other associations. The most radical of them all was the short-lived National Union of Ex-Servicemen (NUX). This was founded in 1918 by John Beckett, a former soldier and a member of the International Labour Party who believed that ex-servicemen’s associations could flourish only if they maintained links with other workers’ organisations whose aims were deemed more or less identical. Workers’ organisations often agreed, as may be judged by the pronouncements of Wal Hannington, a trade union official and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He regarded the unemployed former servicemen ‘who had come from the bloody battlefields only to be cast on to the industrial scrap-heap of capitalism’ as key components in the political struggles of the post-war period. There was a great deal of unseemly infighting among the disparate ex-servicemen’s groups, but by the end of the war they had become a force to be reckoned with.

By the summer of 1919, the Federation was rumoured to have two million members and was described in the House of Commons as ‘a huge shapeless, and menacing mass, on the verge of collapse into anarchy’. Evidence of this had been seen a few days earlier when the Federation organised a demonstration in Hyde Park to protest about the lack of employment opportunities for discharged and disabled servicemen. Having listened to speeches in the Park, and passed a resolution that ‘unemployed ex-servicemen shall immediately be found work at trade union rate of wages’ or, failing that, an increased unemployment benefit of £1 8s (rising to £2 for those with children), the 10,000 or so protesters declared their intention of marching on Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. Prevented by a police cordon at the top of Constitution Hill from approaching the Palace by the most direct route, the demonstrators took another, where their way was once again barred. In Victoria Street the road was being dug up, and this provided the protesters with wood blocks and chunks of concrete, which they hurled at the police, and scaffolding poles, which they used to trip up the horses of the mounted division. Having abandoned their attempt to storm the Palace, they headed for the House of Commons, where they ‘swept away a line of mounted policemen’ in Parliament Square and ‘surged forward alongside St Margaret’s Church, throwing missiles at the flying line of police’. Mounted police reinforcements that had been held in reserve then charged the crowd, ‘drew their truncheons and used them freely’. Numerous people on both sides ended up in hospital. It took almost an hour to disperse the rioters, who departed only after they were addressed by James Hogge, the Liberal whip who had formerly been the Federation’s president and was still lobbying on their behalf in Parliament.

It was against this background of military and civil unrest that plans were made to celebrate the peace, and Virginia Woolf was not merely voicing the cynicism of pacifist Bloomsbury when she wrote that there was ‘something calculated & politic & insincere’ about the first of these great public events, the Peace Day celebrations in July 1919. In observing that they were ‘some thing got up to pacify & placate “the people”’, she had a point. Although the Armistice had been declared on 11 November 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the official end of the war, was not signed until 28 June 1919. Peace Day in Britain, which was to be celebrated somewhat paradoxically by a military parade, was originally set for early August to coincide with the anniversary of the outbreak of war. At the suggestion of the King, who wanted this Victory Parade of all the Allies to take place as soon as possible after the signing of the treaty – and possibly did not want to be seen to be lagging too far behind the French, who would celebrate their own victory on Bastille Day, 14 July – the government subsequently moved the date forward to 19 July. Recognising that jubilation would need to be tempered by some acknowledgement of the massive losses Britain suffered in gaining that victory and securing the peace, Lloyd George proposed at a very late stage that a monumental catafalque should be placed on the parade route so that the passing columns of soldiers could salute their dead comrades. Something similar had been planned by the French for their celebrations. Lord Curzon, who headed the Peace Celebrations Committee, declared that a catafalque – technically a raised platform on which a body rests temporarily before a funeral – might do for papist Continentals but would be regarded by the British population as wholly alien. A huge cross at Admiralty Arch was suggested as an unimaginative and somewhat crass alternative, but fortunately someone had the sense to consult Sir Edwin Lutyens, who had been advising on the layout of military cemeteries in France and Belgium.

It was lucky that Lutyens was a quick worker. He produced a design almost immediately – supposedly within ten minutes of the idea being put to him on behalf of Sir Alfred Mond, who, as the First Commissioner of Works, was the government minister responsible for overseeing public buildings and statues. Lutyens’ design was of a symbolically empty sarcophagus on top of a pylon, a rectangular truncated pyramidal tower of the sort often used to flank temples in Egypt. Lutyens thereby transformed a catafalque (on top of which an effigy would logically rest) into a cenotaph, which, he explained, was ‘a monument to a deceased person whose body is buried elsewhere’ and was thus wholly appropriate to the circumstances. He understood that as a focus of national mourning for the whole Empire, with its many races and creeds, the Cenotaph had to be non-denominational. It therefore lacked any Christian symbolism or inscription, much to the displeasure of many in the Church. Its decorations were restricted to religiously neutral wreaths, ribbons and flags and the all-embracing words ‘The Glorious Dead’. Resembling solid stone but in fact constructed from wood and plaster, the Cenotaph was reasonably easy to erect in Whitehall during the fortnight left before the Victory Parade took place. No sooner had it been erected than people began to lay wreaths against it. These piled up to such a degree that they had to be cleared away in order to make room for the troops to march past on Peace Day.

It was originally proposed that the march should pass through the East End, but the Peace Celebrations Committee decided that the residents of Vauxhall, Kennington and Lambeth should be favoured instead on the grounds that they ‘were much more British on the whole than the East End which was largely composed of foreigners’ – in other words Jewish and other immigrants who had settled there and were clearly regarded as insufficiently assimilated, even though many of them had fought in the war. As a consequence, the route was redirected south of the river and would extend no farther east than St George’s Fields in Lambeth. On the morning of Wednesday, 19 July, some 15,000 servicemen from most of the Allied countries, arranged alphabetically (starting with the Americans) and led by the British, French and American commanders-in-chief, Field Marshals Haig, Foch and Pershing, set out from Albert Gate at the south end of Hyde Park, where many of the participants had bivouacked overnight. (Haig was evidently in a better mood than he had been at the Armistice when he refused a summons from Lloyd George to take part in a ceremonial drive through the capital with the French C-i-C and the Prime Ministers of France and Italy, declaring in his diary that he had ‘no intention of taking part in any triumphal ride with Foch, or with any pack of foreigners’.) Missing from this parade of the Allies were troops from the Indian subcontinent, whose contribution to the war had been considerable: some 1.27 million men, 827,000 of them combatants, among whom 49,000 sepoys (infantrymen) were killed in action. When bringing forward the date of the parade at such a late stage, the government had failed to take into consideration how this might affect those who had farthest to come. Working to the original timetable, 1,500 Indian troops had set sail from Bombay on 29 June; on 19 July they were still at sea.

Marching four abreast, the rest of the Allied representatives passed through Belgravia, heading south to cross the river over Vauxhall Bridge, through Kennington and Lambeth and the park where the Imperial War Museum would later stand. From there, they marched back north over the river via Westminster Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament, turning up Whitehall and saluting the Cenotaph as they passed. They then wheeled left through the south-west corner of a packed Trafalgar Square to go down the Mall to salute the King at Buckingham Palace. After this, the column marched along Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner, then along the south side of Hyde Park, ending up at Kensington Gardens, where everyone dispersed. As impressive as this parade of living soldiers was, it was as nothing compared with what might have been seen if the dead of the Empire had been able to march past the Cenotaph in their place. Someone made the calculation that if the dead were lined up four abreast in a continuous column, it would take them three and a half days to pass by. If they had set out from the north of England, the first of these ghosts would have reached the Cenotaph just as the last of them was leaving Durham.

The Victory Parade was followed by all manner of public entertainments in the London parks, including open-air concerts and theatrical performances, the climax of which was a massive firework display in which likenesses of the Royal Family, the Prime Minister and British military leaders were pyrotechnically created. In spite of some complaints that the money squandered on celebrating the peace would be better spent on alleviating the problems of unemployed former soldiers, similar peace celebrations took place all over the country, with parades passing through bunting-draped streets lined with cheering crowds.

Not that such events always went off smoothly. When mean-spirited local authorities in Luton refused to allow a group of ex-servicemen to hold a memorial service in a municipal park, the town clerk’s office was torched and firemen were forcibly prevented by incensed veterans from approaching the town hall as it was gutted. The army had to be called in to restore order, the entire town was placed under military occupation for four days, and the bill for damages was reckoned at some £200,000. Hopes that a Peace Day would pacify disgruntled former servicemen were further dashed at Chertsey, where several hundred of them refused to take part in the celebrations because they hadn’t yet secured their pension rights. Similar discontent was felt in Wales, where at Merthyr Tydfil jubilant celebrations were replaced by a sombre service of thanksgiving attended by 22,000 people, followed by a meeting at which a resolution was passed calling for higher pensions for former servicemen and their dependants. In Manchester unemployed servicemen held their own parade, carrying placards demanding better treatment. Elsewhere former soldiers boycotted the celebrations. They felt they had done quite enough marching during their war service and certainly weren’t going to turn out on parade for what they regarded as a display of militarism.

Whatever the veterans’ feelings may have been, those who had come to mourn their dead evidently regarded Peace Day as worthwhile. The Victory March had no sooner passed the Cenotaph than crowds of the bereaved surged back and began laying flowers and wreaths once more. This may have been a civic nuisance, and may have aroused the fury of the Church Times, which declared that ecclesiastical buildings rather than this gimcrack secular shrine were the proper places for worship and commemoration, but the people appeared to have spoken. Because it was in essence a stage prop, the Cenotaph had not been designed to last more than a couple of weeks, but the original plan to dismantle it after ten days had to be abandoned because of public sentiment. A similar stay of execution had been granted an earlier memorial erected in Hyde Park in August 1918 to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the outbreak of war. Whatever the original intention, this huge, flag-draped Maltese Cross had become a focus for national grief, and the bereaved had made a habit of laying wreaths at its foot. Indeed, in a photograph published in the Illustrated London News of the shrine being blessed by Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of London, it is hard to make out the shrine at all beneath the mounds of flowers. When, the following year, it was announced that the shrine would have to be demolished because of its decayed condition, there had been an outcry, even though Lutyens had been commissioned to design a more permanent replacement. Plans for a new monument had, however, been shelved when the war ended. The temporary Cenotaph now fulfilled a similar public function and the cheers had scarcely died away after Peace Day than there were calls to replace it with a permanent one made of Portland stone. The cabinet had agreed to these demands by the end of July.

None of this meant that the temporary Cenotaph could be swept away there and then, inconveniently sited though it was in the middle of a major London thoroughfare, and it would remain in place until building work began on its more solid replacement. Throughout the rest of July, people continued to lay flowers, much to the annoyance of the Board of Works, who felt that this practice should be discouraged. All men who walked past it automatically doffed their caps, and representatives of numerous organisations – including some 15,000 members of the Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers en route to a rather more peaceful rally in Hyde Park than their previous one – continued to visit the monument and lay wreaths. There always seemed to be someone standing before it, head bowed in remembrance or recollection.

The Cenotaph also became the focus of the first anniversary of the Armistice, which attracted even larger crowds than those attending Peace Day. This was something of a surprise to the government, which, it seems, originally had no particular plan to observe the occasion. The notion of marking it with a two minutes’ silence in which the whole country would pause to remember the dead was put before the War Cabinet only on 4 November. The idea came from Sir Percy FitzPatrick, a South African author and politician, one of whose sons had been killed in action in 1917. Throughout the war a silence had been observed in South Africa at noon every day so that people could think about the sacrifices being made, and Sir Percy suggested to Viscount Milner, the Secretary of State for War, that a similar observance once a year in the mother country would be an appropriate way of ensuring that the Empire’s dead were not forgotten. The cabinet agreed, but this last-minute decision meant that the idea needed to be announced to the people quickly and forcibly. A personal request from the King that at ‘the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, there may be for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal activities’ was placed in all the newspapers on 7 November. Most papers followed this up with a reminder to the nation on 11 November itself, which fell on a Tuesday. Ensuring that everyone stopped what they were doing at the correct and same moment was complicated, but church and other bells, factory sirens, exploding maroons and artillery fire were all used to mark the moment. Given the very short notice people had been given, and the practical difficulties of stopping industry, commerce and even traffic in their daily round, it is remarkable how widely the silence was observed. There was no service at the Cenotaph, as there is today, but the King and Queen had sent wreaths and the British and French Prime Ministers arrived shortly before 11 a.m. to lay their own tributes. Equally, there was no parade or march-past by veterans: unlike on Peace Day, the focus of the first anniversary of the Armistice was bereaved civilians. As the maroons went off, silence fell over the vast crowd of men, women and children. Men removed their hats, women bowed their heads, soldiers stood to attention and saluted. As The Times eloquently put it: ‘the very pulse of time stood still’.

A national day of mourning seemed appropriate: there were, after all, a great many people to mourn. British Empire losses – those who were killed or missing, presumed dead – stood at a staggering 1,104,890. Frustrating as it must have been for those still in uniform long after the end of hostilities, there were many soldiers who never came back at all, since the government had decreed that the bodies of those killed in action would not be returned to Britain for burial. This would have been impractical while the war was still being fought, but the real reason behind the decision was that in the interests of national unity it was important that all the dead should be treated equally. The practice that had obtained after Waterloo, when officers’ bodies were shipped home while other ranks were shovelled into unmarked mass graves, clearly wouldn’t do in the present circumstances. While wealthier families might have been able to make private arrangements for their dead to be brought home, many of those whose husbands, fathers, brothers and sons had been killed would have been hard pushed to find the money for a funeral in peacetime, let alone to pay for a body to be transported across the Channel or from other even more distant theatres of war. Soldiers would therefore lie with their comrades where they had died.

This noble-sounding idea was not always matched by the circumstances in which ‘the Fallen’ were dealt with during the war. Some of the dead, uncoffined and with blankets serving as shrouds, were buried in civilian cemeteries, but by early 1915 it was already clear that the scale of the casualties was such that land would have to be acquired to create new military cemeteries. In the meantime, burials took place where possible behind the lines. These may often have lacked individuality, with several bodies laid together in specially dug trenches, but they were dignified affairs with a proper religious service conducted by a padre and attended by soldiers from the same company of the deceased. Given the chaos of battle, however, and the difficulty of bringing in the dead under fire, many soldiers were quite literally buried where they fell. Even when a soldier was identifiable, and had died recently and comparatively ‘cleanly’, burials in the field could be hurried and basic affairs, with bodies tipped into convenient shell holes and covered with a few shovelfuls of earth or mud while someone said a brief prayer. Personal effects would be placed in marked bags to be returned in due course to relatives, and the man’s tin helmet would be hung on a bayonet or on a rifle thrust into the ground, barrel first. Where there was no rifle or bayonet, a bottle containing a piece of paper inscribed with identifying details of the dead soldier would be stuck in the ground. In some places burial parties had time to use bits of wood and wire to fashion crude crosses.

Elsewhere it was a matter of gathering up remains that had been lying around for some time or had been scattered by shellfire, and doing the best you could. Even when people had been given a decent burial, the ground in which they lay was often later fought over as opposing armies advanced and retreated. The most careful burial could prove very temporary indeed as high-explosive shells churned up the earth once more, destroying graves and redistributing the dead piecemeal. Given these conditions, it is perhaps not so surprising that over 300,000 of the 750,000 British and Empire troops killed in action on the Western Front still have no known grave.

One of the jobs undertaken by the British Red Cross was to ascertain what had happened to those who were listed as ‘missing in action’. This term was not always a euphemism, and the Red Cross was occasionally able to bring good news to distraught relatives. Soldiers unaccounted for may have been lying unidentified in hospitals, or been taken prisoner. Stories abounded of soldiers separated from the regiment during battle and found wandering behind the lines wholly disoriented, or perhaps suffering the effects of shell shock. Mostly, however, the missing were rightly presumed dead. The Red Cross’s job was hampered by the fact that at the beginning of the war no system of recording burials had been organised, so that even when a soldier was known to have died and had been given a proper burial, it was not always easy to find the site. The careless practices of Waterloo had long since been abandoned, but marking and maintaining soldiers’ graves in distant engagements such as the Boer War in South Africa remained a fairly haphazard affair. This may have been deemed acceptable for Tommy Atkins, the professional soldier, but many of the dead of the First World War were civilian volunteers and conscripts and their families expected them to be treated accordingly.

It was while working with the Mobile Unit of the British Red Cross Society based at Lille that Fabian Ware, a former editor of the Morning Post, took it upon himself to begin making a note of British graves and their locations. The Unit had been formed in September 1914 after the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, had asked for volunteers to go in search of soldiers who had gone missing and might well be wandering lost in the chaos that often prevailed in the aftermath of battle. It was a curiously amateur yet effective organisation, made up of people in civilian vehicles who not only drove around looking for lost soldiers but also collected the wounded and transported them to hospitals. Ware subsequently persuaded the Adjutant-General of the British Expeditionary Force that his project to record burial sites should receive official War Office backing, and in March 1915 a Graves Registration Commission was created. Ware himself was given the rank of major and by October the Commission had registered over 31,000 graves, all of which had their temporary markers replaced by wooden crosses on which details were indelibly recorded. Lists of names and locations were drawn up and Ware entered negotiations with the French authorities to acquire land in perpetuity for the construction of British war cemeteries.

Once created, cemeteries required considerable effort to maintain, and so in January 1916 Ware set up the National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves. News of this organisation’s work had reached Britain, and relatives of the dead began to direct their enquiries to this new body as well as to the Red Cross. In order to answer these enquiries, the Graves Registration Commission was reorganised in the spring of 1916 into the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries (DGRE), supplying relatives with information about and even photographs of burial sites. The intention was that after the war was over people would be able to visit these graves, but at the time such pilgrimages must have seemed a very long way off.

In May 1917, the National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves became the Imperial War Graves Commission, constituted under royal charter and with the Prince of Wales as its president. The Commission undertook the daunting task of providing a marked grave for every corpse, even those whose headstones would merely read ‘A Soldier of the Great War: Known Unto God’, a designation for the unidentified chosen by Rudyard Kipling, who had been appointed literary adviser to the Commission, and whose own son, killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, was among those with no known grave.

Someone who conducted many burial services at the front, both of the known and unknown, was an army chaplain called David Railton. The son of a leading figure in the Salvation Army, Railton served on the front line as a padre throughout the war and had been awarded an MC in 1916 for tending the wounded under fire. It was Railton who came up with the idea after the war that a single unidentified serviceman should be brought home to Britain as a representative not only of those whose bodies had never been found or identified, but of all those who had been killed in action. In August 1920 he sent this proposal to the Dean of Westminster, Herbert Ryle, who, in passing it on first to George V and then to Lloyd George, shamelessly claimed it as his own. The King rejected the idea as in poor taste, and there was some worry that such a gesture might reopen wounds that were in the process of healing, but it won acceptance when placed before a cabinet meeting in October. Once again, preparations had to be made hastily since it was decided that a state funeral of this representative of all the dead should take place on Armistice Day, 11 November, followed by burial in Westminster Abbey.

By making the funeral of an unidentified soldier brought back from the battlefields the focus of the second anniversary of the Armistice, the Church had a chance to reassert itself at the centre of the commemoration. At the insistence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Thomas Davidson, there had in fact been a short service of dedication when the temporary Cenotaph was unveiled (Lloyd George had favoured an entirely secular event), but Lutyens’ empty tomb still seemed to the Church distressingly pagan. Now, however, there was an opportunity to reclaim Armistice Day for God.

Selecting the soldier who would become known as the Unknown Warrior was made into an elaborate procedure, and there are several different versions of what happened. The most reliable account is that provided by Brigadier-General L.J. Wyatt, GOC the British troops still based in France and Flanders, who took part and provided a written account in a letter published in the Daily Telegraph in November 1939. In conditions of strictest secrecy, four unidentified British bodies were exhumed from temporary battlefield cemeteries at Ypres, Arras, the Aisne and the Somme on the night of 7 November 1920. These exhumations were carried out by four carefully selected teams made up of an officer and two other ranks. Presumably the rankers were handed the shovels and sacks, while the officer was there to direct operations, but none of the men was told why the bodies were being dug up and brought back by field ambulance to GHQ at St-Pol-sur-Ternoise. The men were further instructed that if they discovered anything that revealed the rank or regiment of the soldier they had exhumed they should immediately rebury the remains and select another grave. The intention was that any of the relatives of the 517,773 combatants whose bodies had not been identified could believe that the Unknown Warrior might be their lost husband, father, brother or son; but on the advice of the Abbey, which was nervous about the possibility of receiving more recent and potentially noisome remains, it is probable that instructions had been given that the four disinterred soldiers should have died early in the war on the grounds that such bodies would have been reduced to mere bones.

The four sets of remains were placed in the corrugated-iron chapel at the cemetery of St-Pol-sur-Ternoise and each draped with the Union flag. Sentries were posted at the chapel doors and Brigadier-General Wyatt, accompanied by one of his staff, a Colonel Gell, selected one of the bodies at random. One story that had wide circulation was that the Brigadier-General was blindfolded, but this would have been both unnecessary and unbecoming to his exalted rank. Once the body had been chosen, it was placed in a plain coffin and, after an ecumenical (though Christian) service the following morning, was taken by field ambulance to Boulogne to lie in the chapelle ardente of the castle there. A French guard of honour stood beside the coffin that night, and the following morning a pair of British undertakers arrived, bringing with them a specially designed casket made of oak that had grown in the grounds of Hampton Court. It was bound with bands of studded wrought iron made in the foundries of Wales, and a crusader’s sword donated from the royal collection at Windsor was held in place on the lid by an iron shield on which was inscribed:

A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 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.