Книга - 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.’

Of those who survived, Air Mechanic Henry Allingham of the Royal Air Force was still in Belgium on the morning of 11 November. Ninety years later he recalled that his fellow servicemen ‘grabbed hold of anything that would make a lot of noise – to celebrate, you see. They let off stray shells, Very lights and whatnot. A lot of men, some who’d been right through the war, didn’t make it through the night.’ Others merely got very drunk, while Allingham himself went to bed and enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of a good night’s sleep. The revelling of his fellows took its toll and the following morning few of the ranks were ready to move out at 8 a.m. as planned. It was therefore not until three hours later that they began their long route march through Belgium to Cologne, where the defeated German people surprised Allingham by their friendliness. They may have lost the war, but they were presumably as relieved as the victors that it had finally ended. It was ‘a cheerless, dismal, cold misty day’ in the Forêt de Mormal on the Franco-Belgian border, Gunner B.O. Stokes of the New Zealand Field Artillery recalled. ‘There was no cheering or demonstration. We were all tired in body and mind, fresh from the tragic fields of battle, and this momentous announcement was too vast in its consequences to be appreciated or accepted with wild excitement. We trekked out of the wood on this dreary day in silence.’ Captain Guy Chapman of the Royal Fusiliers had a similar experience, marching back through the fog to Béthencourt: ‘The band played but there was very little singing,’ he recalled in his war memoir, A Passionate Prodigality. ‘We took over our billets and listlessly devoured a meal. In an effort to cure our apathy, the little American doctor from Vermont who had joined us a fortnight earlier broke his invincible teetotalism, drank half a bottle of whisky, and danced a cachucha. We looked at his antics with dull eyes and at last put him to bed.’

Others were rather more ebullient. Gunner G. Worsley of the Royal Field Artillery received the news of the Armistice while serving in France and remembered doing a cartwheel when a trumpeter sounded the ceasefire. He visited the house of a local woman who was inclined to think the war should continue until Berlin was taken. When Worsley complained that this might result in him getting killed, the woman replied, ‘Sanfairyann’ (the British soldiers’ approximation of the French expression ça ne fait rien – that doesn’t matter). ‘Sanfairyann be buggered!’ Worsley retorted. ‘I’m alive. The war’s over. That’s good enough for me!’ It was not merely French civilians who thought that the end may have come rather too soon. Even some British troops, embittered by their experience and worried that the ceasefire might prove only temporary, felt that the war should carry on ‘until Germany’s armies are really beaten in the field, her line broken and if possible her country invaded’. Private Albert Marshall recalled that when an officer told soldiers in the Essex Yeomanry advancing on Lille that there was to be an armistice, ‘You never heard so much grumbling and swearing in all your life, because we’d got them on the run. We wanted to drive them back to Berlin.’ Percy Wilson, who had been told by a recruiting officer that the war would be over by Christmas 1914, was still in uniform in November 1918, serving close to the German border. When an officer announced that the Armistice was to be signed, several soldiers were annoyed that they would not be allowed, as they saw it, to finish the job. ‘I don’t want a bloody armistice,’ one soldier complained; instead he ‘wanted to get over that border [and] show them what the war’s been like’. Eighty-six years later, the 105-year-old Wilson still believed that had the soldiers been allowed to pursue the Germans back over the border there would have been no Second World War: ‘They would absolutely have pounded the Germans to bits.’ There were similar reactions among some airmen. ‘I confess to a feeling of anticlimax, even to a momentary sense of regret,’ Cecil Lewis recalled in Sagittarius Rising, his classic memoir of life with the Royal Flying Corps. ‘We were a new squadron, fresh overseas, we wanted – particularly the new pilots – to justify our existence, to carry out in action the thing we had been training for.’

Not everyone who wanted to celebrate could always find the means to do so. Lewis was in a small and remote village just north of the Ypres Salient in Belgium when news of the Armistice reached him: ‘There was nothing to drink in the whole village and nowhere to go to. All we could find was a dump of Hun Very Lights, of all colours, left behind in their retreat. This pyrotechnical display was all we could contribute to the gaiety of Armistice night.’ At the RFC aerodrome in France, recalled Sergeant Charles Watson of 11 Squadron, a celebratory bonfire got out of hand when people began throwing full cans of aviation fuel on to it: ‘They went up with such a bang that troops nearby thought the war had started again.’ Elsewhere even worse behaviour prevailed. Private Eric Hiscock, a boy soldier who at the age of seventy-six published a resonantly titled survivor’s memoir, The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling, recalled drunken Australian soldiers going on the rampage in the red-light district of Boulogne, demanding that the local prostitutes should give their services free by way of celebration. At sea, meanwhile, there were no women with whom to celebrate, and sailors had to improvise. An order to splice the mainbrace was issued aboard HMS Revenge, remembered a former Royal Naval Seaman, 106-year-old Claude Choules, in 2005, and everyone received an extra tot of rum. The ship’s company was invited by the officers to join them in a celebratory dance on the quarterdeck, which they did to the accompaniment of the ship’s band.

Some of those who had been at the front were back in Britain when the Armistice was declared. Two of the war’s best-known poets, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, saw the Armistice being celebrated there. Graves was stationed near Rhyl with an Officer Cadet Battalion. ‘Things were very quiet up here on the 11th,’ he told his fellow poet Robert Nichols. ‘London was full of buck of course but in North Wales a foreign war or a victory more or less are not considered much. Little boys banged biscuit tins and a Very light or two went up at the camp but for the rest not much. A perfunctory thanksgiving service with nothing more cheerful in it than a Last Post for the dead; and then grouses about demobilization.’ In his celebrated memoir Goodbye to All That, however, Graves records: ‘The news sent me out walking alone along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan (an ancient battlefield, the Flodden of Wales), cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.’ Sassoon, meanwhile, was in Oxfordshire on indefinite sick leave after being wounded in the head in July. ‘I was walking in the water-meadows by the river below Cuddesdon this morning – a quiet grey day,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘A jolly peal of bells was ringing from the village church, and the villagers were hanging little flags out of the windows of their thatched houses. The war is ended. It is impossible to realise.’ That evening he travelled to London, where he was unimpressed by the capital’s ‘buck’: ‘masses of people in streets and congested Tubes, all waving flags and making fools of themselves – an outburst of mob patriotism. It was a wretched wet night, and very mild. It is a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years.’

Other soldiers may have been in Blighty for the Armistice, but they were still on active duty. Private Harry Patch of the 7th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry was on an exercise on the Isle of Wight. He had been invalided home in September 1917 with wounds incurred when a shell had exploded above his Lewis-gun team in Belgium. He had spent ten months convalescing, but was eventually passed A1 and placed on a draft to return to the front. Rumours that a ceasefire might be declared had reached Golden Hill Fort, the hexagonal Victorian barracks at Freshwater in which Patch and his fellow soldiers were billeted, on the morning of 11 November. They were practising on a rifle range that day and had been told that if an armistice was signed a rocket would be sent up. When this happened everyone cheered and the officer in charge ordered them to get rid of their spare ammunition by firing out to sea so they wouldn’t have to carry it back to the stores. For Patch, the Armistice meant he would not have to return to Belgium as planned, and eighty-eight years later he remembered his feelings of joy and relief.

Some felt that the ceasefire had not come soon enough. Twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Norman Collins of the Seaforth Highlanders, who had been twice wounded, was on leave when the Armistice was announced. ‘I was up a bit late that morning, I was shaving, and the sirens went. My first feeling was “It’s too late – all my friends are gone – it’s too late. It’s no use having an Armistice now.”’ For others the ceasefire really was too late. One of the most famous stories about the end of the war describes a telegram delivered to a house in Shrewsbury at noon on 11 November. With the church bells ‘still ringing, the bands playing and the jubilant crowds surging together’, the family of the poet Wilfred Owen learned that he had been killed in action on 4 November. Even the morning of 11 November itself was not without its casualties, including Private George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, who is thought to be the last British soldier to be killed in action in the war. Evidence that the fighting went on up until the very last moment is provided by a plaque on the wall of a house at 71 rue de Mons in Ville-sur-Haine, where a hapless Canadian soldier, Private George Lawrence Price of the 28th Northwest Infantry, was shot dead by a sniper on 11 November at 10.58 a.m.

For most of those left alive at the front, a desolate landscape in which once bustling towns and villages had been reduced to piles of smoking rubble and acre upon acre of woodland reduced to splintered and blackened stumps, there was little enough cause for rejoicing. The longed-for day had finally arrived but the majority of combatants were too physically exhausted and emotionally depleted to enjoy it. Most of them simply felt relief that the war was finally over. In the great silence, men were able to reflect on what they had been through and remember the comrades they had lost. After years crouching in the front line, it was hard to imagine that snipers were no longer training their rifles on your trench. ‘You were so dazed you just didn’t realize that you could stand up straight and not be shot,’ one soldier remembered in the 1960s. ‘My first thought was “So I’m going to live”,’ another recalled almost three-quarters of a century after the Armistice. ‘I was stunned, total disbelief, and at the same time a secret and selfish joy that I was going to have a life.’ Others simply felt lost. The war had swallowed them up and occupied their every waking moment as it was to haunt their dreams in the future: it was hard to imagine what life would be like now that it was over. Some had joined up or been conscripted so young that they could remember no other kind of adult life. ‘Straightaway we felt we had nothing to live for,’ Sapper Arthur Halestrap of the Royal Engineers recalled. ‘There was nothing in front of us, no objective. Everything you had been working for, for years, had suddenly disappeared. What am I going to do next? What is my future?’

Halestrap’s future stretched farther ahead than he could possibly have imagined that November morning. Eighty-five years later to the day he would lead a service of remembrance at the Menin Gate at Ypres, rising from his wheelchair to recite lines from Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

First published in The Times on 21 September 1914, and intoned at countless Armistice Day services since, Binyon’s lines have become almost too familiar, but were given a new immediacy when spoken by a 105-year-old who by November 2003 was one of a handful of men still alive to have served in what, with good reason, is still sometimes called the Great War. Given the appallingly high casualty rates, few of those who fought on the Western Front had any realistic expectations of growing old or being wearied by age. Some who survived, however, attained very great ages indeed, achieving the rare distinction of having lived in three centuries.

Born on 8 September 1898, Arthur Halestrap could remember his parents receiving letters from relatives serving in the Boer War. He also remembered the death of Queen Victoria and the coronation of Edward VII. His father worked in Southampton for the White Star shipping line, and as a boy Halestrap had walked on the decks of the Titanic while it was in dock there. He had tried to enlist two months after the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, but at the age of sixteen was rejected as too young. He worked instead as a post office telegraphist, excellent training for someone who in September 1916 finally joined up as a signaller with the Royal Engineers.

It was not until January 1918 that Halestrap got to France, and his first experience of being shelled occurred when he was part of a convoy marching up to Brigade HQ in the dark. The horses that were pulling the wagon he was accompanying got stuck in the mud and panicked as the shells started falling, but to his surprise Halestrap did not really experience fear. His months of training had instilled in him a rigid discipline that ensured he got on with the job in hand whatever the circumstances, and he managed to get the wagon moving again across a landscape illuminated by Very lights and shell-bursts. He subsequently took part in the attack in which the British successfully breached the supposedly impregnable Hindenburg Line in September 1918. His job was to set up transmitter-receivers, which meant carrying cumbersome equipment up the line, then going over the top in order to erect radio masts in places that would not attract enemy fire. Although he was not always in the front line, he spent enough time in the trenches to become accustomed to lice, keeping his head down to avoid snipers, advancing under shellfire, and muttering apologies when obliged to walk across the battlefields’ litter of dead bodies.

In sum, his experiences, which may strike us today as extraordinary, were little different from those of millions of combatants. What made Halestrap unusual was that he was still alive to recall them all those years later. Like many combatants, he had survived a number of close encounters with the enemy. While he and a group of soldiers were taking pot shots at a low-flying German observation plane, the pilot responded in kind with a revolver. One bullet slammed into the table beside which Halestrap was standing, missing him by an inch. On another occasion a shell hit an old brewery where Halestrap and his fellow signallers had set up a radio station. Fortunately they had barricaded the windows with sandbags and were protected from the blast. Even when the Armistice had been declared, Halestrap, still in France, managed to outwit death. He caught Spanish flu, a global pandemic that between 1918 and 1919 killed more people than the war did: in Britain alone some 250,000 died. When Halestrap first showed symptoms, a senior officer reckoned that there would be little chance of him surviving the long and gruelling journey to a medical station and so decided to fill him up with rum, wrap him in a blanket and let him take his chances. Halestrap could remember nothing between being given the rum and waking up three days later apparently restored to health. In later years he made some thirty pilgrimages to the battlefields and cemeteries of France and Belgium in order to pay his respects to those who were less fortunate in their close encounters with death. He outlived both his wife and his two children and eventually died in his sleep, aged 105, on 1 April 2004.

Unusual as Halestrap’s story is, it is far from unique. Most of those whose experience of the Armistice I have described lived on into their nineties and beyond, becoming a select band who could recall for much later generations a war that scarred a century. The year Halestrap led the ceremony at the Menin Gate, it was reckoned that he was one of twenty-seven surviving British veterans of the First World War, the youngest of whom was 103. Thereafter the numbers steadily dwindled. Thirteen men (including Halestrap) and two women were interviewed for a two-part BBC television documentary, The Last Tommy, but seven of them had died by the time the programme was broadcast in 2005. A year later, the official count stood at nine, not all of whom had seen active service. Numbers were continually being readjusted – and not always downwards. There have been occasional discoveries of ‘new’ veterans, who had not previously identified themselves – though in Britain, apart from a man whose claim could not be verified because crucial documents were missing, none of these had seen action. Unlike their great-grandchildren’s generation, for many of whom celebrity at any price has become a major ambition, these veterans did not want fame or court publicity. They understood, however, that people were bound to be interested in them and they remained gracious when calls were made on their rapidly dwindling time and energy. Most of them were perfectly ordinary people who after the war continued to lead perfectly ordinary lives until longevity forced them into the limelight.

As increasing attention was drawn to this small group of men and women, it became clear that eventually it would soon diminish until only one member was left: the Last Veteran. To be the last of anything is an achievement of sorts, but on the whole it is a melancholy and potentially lonely one, as much about extinction as survival. It makes us think of the threatened species with whom we share the planet, as the writer J.R. Ackerley did in 1964. Ackerley suggested a parallel between a death in the animal kingdom and the death of a generation:

In 1914 a tragedy occurred, so shocking, so awe-inspiring, so poignant and so irreparable that if all mankind had put on sackcloth and ashes it would scarcely have seemed an adequate expression of their shame and repentance. Doubtless the First World War springs to your self-important minds. Let it spring off again. […] It was the death of a pigeon. She was female, and she died of old age on September 1, 1914, at one o’clock in the afternoon.

This solitary bird was in fact a passenger pigeon called Martha, living in Cincinnati Zoo, and the last of her once abundant species. One of the final great hunts of the passenger pigeon, which was killed for its meat, took place over five months with a casualty rate of some 50,000 every day. No wonder Ackerley saw a parallel between this mass slaughter and what had happened on the Western Front – particularly since he was writing in 1964 when the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war was being widely marked. He had himself been wounded in action on the Somme on 1 July 1916 and therefore became one of the 60,000 casualties suffered by the British that terrible day.

The chances were always that the Last Veteran would in some ways be no more distinctive of his kind than Martha was of hers. After leading a life for the most part no different from that of many of his contemporaries, he would nevertheless achieve the signal distinction of being the last Briton to have fought in the Great War. The significance of this did not escape politicians, and there were suggestions that this man, whoever he might turn out to be, should be given a state funeral. This was put before the House of Commons by a former leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith, on 18 April 2006. The idea had been around for some time before this, and Duncan Smith had been prompted to propose it formally after being approached by one of his constituents. Duncan Smith had wondered whether such an event might be considered invidious since there were still many people alive who had fought just as bravely and honourably in the Second World War. The constituent immediately replied that ‘the first world war was different, and that everyone who fought in the second world war recognised that. There was something peculiar about the conditions and nature of that conflict.’ Duncan Smith went on to outline what it was about the First World War that set it apart from other conflicts: the huge casualty figures (one million dead and two million wounded in the British Empire alone); the fact that the bodies of almost half those killed on the Western Front were never found; the appalling conditions in the trenches. Duncan Smith also quoted two examples from the ‘flood of letters’ he had received on this subject, both from nine-year-old schoolgirls who supported the idea of a state funeral. He concluded:

A society that forgets its past and is embarrassed about remembering the sacrifice of those who have gone before is one that loses its past and, with that, loses its future. As those young people I referred to were able to remind me and many of my colleagues, there is something special about pausing to remember. We are not dwelling on or glorifying war, but remembering the sacrifice of those whose sole responsibility was to aid and abet their colleagues and to protect and defend the society in which they lived, and which nurtured them.

A short debate followed in which Duncan Smith’s proposal was broadly welcomed, although everyone agreed that nothing could be done without first ascertaining the wishes of the family of the last veteran to die. If for any reason the family did not want a state funeral, it was suggested, a national service of commemoration should be held instead. Don Touhig, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence, cautioned that however appropriate a state funeral might seem, and whatever popular support there was for it, there might be logistical difficulties in ascertaining who really was the last veteran. More than half the service records of the period had been destroyed during the Blitz, and so reliance was put upon those veterans who had identified themselves. No one was under any obligation to identify themselves and there might be veterans who preferred anonymity or had either by choice or oversight not made themselves known: as recently as March of that year two new French veterans had been ‘discovered’. To further complicate matters, Touhig stated that the government’s definition of a last veteran was rather more flexible than the generally agreed one. He argued that anyone who had served during the war, and even those who had not finished their training and were still in Britain when the Armistice was declared, should be recognised as veterans. It became clear that some sort of service of commemoration might be a more workable arrangement than a state funeral, and this was what the government eventually decided upon. On 27 June 2006 the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, announced that: ‘A National Memorial Service will allow the whole nation to honour the valour and spirit shown by the veterans of WW1 and will commemorate an entire generation.’ This would take place in Westminster Abbey within about twelve weeks of the death of ‘the last known World War One veteran’. As with Duncan Smith’s original proposal, the ceremony would be modelled on the one that took place on 11 November 1920 when Britain’s Unknown Warrior was laid to rest in the Abbey ‘among the most illustrious of the land’.

A state funeral for the Last Veteran would undoubtedly have provided a neater symmetry than a mere service of commemoration, since it would have marked the end of a prolonged period of national mourning which started with the state funeral of the Unknown Warrior. Not only was the Unknown Warrior, like the Last Veteran, an individual representative of all those who served in the First World War, he was also an individual chosen at random, or at any rate by chance, just as the Last Veteran achieved that status by an accident of longevity.

Ever since the Armistice there have been arguments, not all of them seemly, about how the First World War should be remembered, commemorated and represented. In all this the veterans have played a significant and sometimes controversial role. Veterans were not always seen as remarkable, fêted and honoured because they provided a link with a particularly poignant piece of our history. Over the years they had been treated with a great deal less deference and consideration, had been obliged to fight for their rights, had been involved in later battles in which the weapons were bricks and batons and the enemy was the forces of law and order in their own country. They had been both the centrepiece of our national acts of commemoration, and dismissed as increasingly irrelevant, standing in the way of liturgical reform. Above all, they had remained a constant reminder of a major historical event that in all sorts of ways, not least the psychological, shaped the twentieth century.

In Britain the international catastrophe that was the First World War has been adopted as a peculiarly national trauma, one that has cast its shadow down the years and haunts us still. There have been other wars since 1918, and in all of them combatants have had to endure privation, discomfort, misery, the loss of comrades and appalling injuries. Even so, the First World War continues to exert a hold upon the collective imagination in Britain in a way it does not in, say, the USA. The statistics are, of course, extraordinary. On the First Day of the Somme 20,000 British soldiers were killed, the equal of the entire sum of casualties of the Boer War. The number of British service personnel killed in the Second World War was less than half the number killed in 1914–18. Even when you add in the many more civilian casualties Britain suffered during the Second World War – some 60,000 – the overall number of deaths is still smaller than the dreadful tally of the Great War. Over 30 per cent of British men who were aged between twenty and twenty-four in 1914 were killed in action or died of wounds; of those aged between thirteen and nineteen the figure is more than 28 per cent; some 200,000 women were left widows and 350,000 children left without fathers.

Bad as this was, it was not unique to Britain. France, Germany and Austria each not only lost more combatants than Britain, but also lost a higher proportion of their overall population: France lost 1 in 28, Germany 1 in 35, Austria 1 in 50, Britain 1 in 66, Italy 1 in 79, the USA 1 in 2,000. Furthermore, although the mass slaughter on the Western Front was indisputably awful, for all the talk of ‘mechanised killing’ it does not compare with the industrialised murder carried out by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It remains a grim statistic that of the six million British who fought in the First World War roughly one in eight were killed, but they were at least killed fighting in defence of their country or for some sort of patriotic principle rather than simply rounded up for liquidation. It is not even a question of numbers. The long lists of names on First World War memorials, many of them from the same family, tell of the losses sustained by individual villages, towns or cities, but none of them speaks so eloquently of communities destroyed as, for example, the interior walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, where the names of some 80,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust from Bohemia and Moravia are inscribed, arranged by where they once lived: men, women and children, street after street after street. The bomb that fell on Hiroshima in 1945 eclipsed anything produced by even the greatest bombardment of the trenches, resulting in between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths in an instant.

Regardless of the historical and demographic facts, when remembering the First World War the British continue to talk about a lost generation. There is a sense that as a nation we have never quite recovered from this loss, that the flower of British youth was cut down in Picardy and Flanders, that an irreplaceable wealth of talent and an almost prelapsarian state of innocence were destroyed for ever between the years 1914 and 1918. Cast out of the Edwardian Eden, where it was somehow always perfect summer weather, we have ever after tended to look yearningly back rather than expectantly forward.

The war has become part of who we are. It occupies a disproportionately large place in our sense of the world and its history and remains a seemingly endless resource not only for historians, but for novelists, poets, dramatists and composers, for cinema and television. The sounds and images of the war are so imprinted on the national consciousness that we recognise them instantly: the foreign place names such as Mons, Ypres, Loos, Passchendaele and the Somme, which retain a familiarity even for those who could not point to them on a map; the lines of men at the recruiting offices on 4 August 1914 and the rows of crosses (now replaced by rounded headstones) that marked where those bank-holiday crowds ended up; the scarlet poppies blowing in a landscape rendered unrecognisable by shellfire; the mud and the blood, and the big guns in France that could be heard this side of the Channel. When in 1980 Kenneth Macmillan created a ballet using Poulenc’s Gloria, all he had to do was place tin helmets on the dancers’ heads to make this joyous piece of music into a requiem. Indeed, the war is constantly used – some might say dragged in – as a reference point in the arts: Andrew Davies’s television adaptation of A Room with a View (2007) dispensed with E.M. Forster’s happy ending and had George Emerson killed in the trenches, while Kenneth Branagh’s film of Mozart’s The Magic Flute (2006) sent Tamino off to the Somme. The complex philosophical ideas, with their Masonic elements, that characterise the struggle between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute could, Branagh felt, be presented to a wider audience if the action was moved to the Western Front. ‘By giving each an army and presenting visually the landscape of the First World War, there is a sense of import and scale about the actions of these characters,’ he said. ‘The Great War provides a territory both literal and metaphoric that is as emotive and complex as the opera itself.’

This territory is a disputed one. Our popular notion of the war – formed largely by what was written about it by those who fought in the front line, and by later artistic reimaginings of it – is that it was indeed uniquely horrible; that it was conducted by an incompetent High Command that repeatedly sacrificed thousands of men in order to gain a few yards of churned earth; that it was characterised by ‘mud, blood and futility’. There is, however, another view of the conflict, one argued by such leading military historians as Correlli Barnett, John Terraine, Hew Strachan, Brian Bond, Nigel Cave, Gordon Corrigan, Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior, and supported by a generation of younger so-called ‘revisionist’ historians such as Gary Sheffield. These historians point out that not all the generals were callous incompetents, nor all rankers hapless and unwilling victims; they insist that some of the battles were brilliantly planned and fought; they remind us that we did after all win the war. They are exasperated by the Anglocentric attitude to the war that prevails in Britain, pointing out not only the war’s international dimensions but also the even larger losses sustained by other combatant countries. The British tendency to think of the war only in terms of the Western Front, they argue, gives us a hopelessly skewed impression both of its conduct and of its wider significance. They dismiss the War Poets as unrepresentative, complain about the way the war is taught in schools where literature is given precedence over history, and retain a particular loathing for two of the most enduringly popular representations of the war, the play Oh What a Lovely War! and the television tragicomedy Blackadder Goes Forth. In short they feel that the British are obsessed with the ‘tragedy’ of the war and are incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Their view of popular representations of the war can be summed up by the title of Gordon Corrigan’s 2003 study: Mud, Blood and Poppycock.

The impact of such books on interpreting the war in universities is considerable, and there is no doubt that many of them are meticulously researched and cogently argued. Their impact on the public at large, however, is as yet limited. As Gary Sheffield comments in the introduction to The Forgotten Victory (2001), which is one of the best, most approachable and most persuasive of these ‘revisionist’ histories: ‘For the last decade and a half I have sat in academic seminars in which historians have complained about the difficulty of shifting public opinion on these issues. It seems that every time an important new book comes out, another popular book or television programme appears repeating the same old tired myths.’ The two sides in this argument have become – to use an appropriate verb – entrenched, and it seems unlikely that either will yield in the foreseeable future.

It is no part of this book’s aim to take up this quarrel, but in tracing the way in which the First World War has been remembered and commemorated, and by looking at the way in which the experiences of those who fought in it on the front line have shaped this process, the many corrective ‘facts’ adduced by military historians are less relevant than what the majority of people in Britain have believed and continue to believe about the war. We do not define ourselves as a people by facts, but by received ideas – ideas that have a symbolic rather than a literal truth. Among the long-cherished ideas that the British have about themselves is that they believe in fair play and favour the underdog, they are phlegmatic and always see the funny side of any given situation, and they are among the most tolerant people in the world. All these notions could be ‘disproved’ by citing examples of contrary behaviour, but they persist as a generally accepted truth. As far as the war is concerned, we may no longer believe that angels appeared to protect the British at the Battle of Mons in 1914, that a Canadian serviceman was ‘crucified’ on a barn door near Ypres, or that Germans bayoneted babies and boiled down corpses in order to produce soap, but we still believe – with considerable justification – that the First World War was a great national tragedy and that an entire generation was profligately and unnecessarily sacrificed.

By giving a scholarly overview of campaigns and strategy military historians can usefully and instructively tell us what the war was about; but what really interests us is what it was like. For that we have always turned to those who were there, notably the poets and memoirists, but latterly to those more ordinary people, the diminishing band of living witnesses whose voices had yet to be stilled. As one schoolchild who met 110-year-old Henry Allingham in 2007 remarked: ‘The books tell us about the battles but they don’t tell you what people who were there thought about them.’ The gulf between military history and personal experience was demonstrated by the man who did indeed become Britain’s Last Veteran, Harry Patch, when talking about Passchendaele: ‘I’m told we attacked on 16 August, but the date doesn’t mean much to me. I know it was about six weeks before I was wounded, so I suppose the middle of August is about right. I remember the names – Pilckem Ridge was one and the other was Langemarck – but it is such a long time ago that I can’t quite connect them up in my head.’ Patch may have forgotten the exact dates and places, but he knew what a battlefield was like – not from the maps that were studied at GHQ, but because in 1917 he was stumbling over one.

For Patch, the First World War was not about military intelligence, the deployment of battalions or the plan of attack. It was about wading around in filth with no opportunity to bathe or change your lice-ridden clothes for the whole four months you were at the front. It was about discomfort and fear and exhaustion and having your best friends quite literally ‘blown to pieces’. As the last British Tommy to revisit the battlefields over which he and so many other men had fought ninety years before, Patch commented in 2007:

Some of the boys buried here are the same age as me, killed on the same day I was fighting. Any one of them could have been me. Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am now the only one left. Just like them, when I went over the top, I didn’t know whether I would last longer than five minutes. We were the PBI – the Poor Bloody Infantry – and we were expendable. What a waste. What a terrible waste.

It is the living witness of the men on the front line that we have lost now that the Last Veteran has died.




ONE (#ulink_42731963-09fb-530b-91f9-c084d970e334)


The Unknown Warrior 1919–1921 (#ulink_42731963-09fb-530b-91f9-c084d970e334)

The tomb and the Cenotaph bear witness to the greatest emotion this nation has ever felt. Children are brought here every year; and so the memory, without the sharpness, perhaps, felt by us who lived through it, goes on with another generation. In this way a nation keeps alive its holy places.

H.V. MORTON, The Spell of London (1926)

In the immediate post-war period a number of large, well-orchestrated public events – culminating in the funeral of the Unknown Warrior on 11 November 1920 – showed a nation drawn together in grief. It would be hard not to be moved by the sense of national unity that these occasions suggested, but they took place against a background of considerable unrest in Britain. The country had not only been involved in four long and costly years of war but had endured numerous social and economic problems on the home front. Even before the war, the long Edwardian summer of myth had in reality been disrupted by serious industrial disputes. To the increasing alarm of employers, trade unions had grown in power since the beginning of the century and Britain had begun to be dogged by strikes which were largely the result of wages failing to keep pace with inflation. It was not at all clear that the wave of popular patriotism that appeared to overwhelm the country when war was declared would sweep away the widespread differences between employers and workers. A joint meeting between the Labour Party, the Trades Union Congress and the General Federation of Trade Unions was convened towards the end of August 1914 with the intention of urging employers and workers in key industries to pull together for the duration of the war. A great many workers, some of them in industries vital to the war effort, had already abandoned their jobs in order to join up, and serious labour shortages were soon apparent in engineering, munitions and mining. For some people, working and living conditions were such that a spell in the army seemed to offer a lucky escape from poverty and drudgery into a life that provided a secure wage, free food and clothing, and the possibility of adventure overseas.

Those who stayed behind soon realised that their value to the country had increased, and they not unnaturally felt that their working conditions should reflect this. Rumours and even evidence that some manufacturers were making huge profits from war production and not passing anything on to their employees fuelled anger and led to a series of strikes. The first serious one occurred in Glasgow in February 1915 when 5,000 engineers, whose union had been asking for a rise of twopence an hour since the previous June, laid down their tools. The dispute spread until some 10,000 members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers at eight engineering plants were on strike, but it lasted only a little under three weeks. Dissatisfaction with the settlement of the strike led to the forming of the Clyde Workers’ Committee. In particular, the CWC challenged the 1915 Munitions of War Act, which had been passed in order to ensure the uninterrupted production of weapons and ammunition. Although agreed by trade union leaders, the Act was seen by many as an opportunistic erosion of workers’ rights, including the right to strike.

Meanwhile a rent strike had also broken out in Glasgow, where landlords had attempted to raise rents and evict tenants who could not or would not pay. Many of the tenants were women whose husbands were at the front and who had entered the workforce, finding employment in munitions factories. The refusal of some 20,000 of them to pay rent gained support among other industrial workers, who threatened to come out on strike in sympathy. In order to prevent the disruption of war production, the government was obliged to introduce new legislation protecting tenants’ rights. The government also had to accede to the demands of miners in South Wales who came out on strike in July 1915 in a dispute with mine-owners. There was little else it could do since a prolonged stoppage of coal production would have been disastrous.

Back on Clydeside the ‘dilution’ of the munitions industry by allowing unskilled men and women to fill the large gaps left by those who had enlisted – by this time about a quarter of the workforce – was causing further unrest. A refusal in March 1916 to allow one of the leaders of the CWC to investigate the conditions under which such people were employed in one factory was seen as an affront to the rights of shop stewards and led to more strikes in 1916. Opposition to the Military Services Act, which introduced conscription at the beginning of March, fuelled additional protests in Glasgow and led to the arrest and imprisonment of several activists under the deeply unpopular and draconian Defence of the Realm Act, which had been passed without debate four days after war was declared in August 1914. The Act restricted trade union activity (strikes and lockouts had been outlawed in the munitions factories), regulated – which is to say decreased – pub opening hours, and generally cracked down on dissent and any other behaviour thought to be unpatriotic or unhelpful to the conduct of the war.

In 1918 even the police went on strike. Prevented by the Crime Act of 1885 from belonging to any sort of union, many police had nevertheless responded to an anonymous letter published in the September 1913 issue of the Police Review announcing that just such an organisation was being formed. Throughout the war many policemen secretly became members of the unrecognised and technically illegal National Union of Police and Prison Officers, which was established to address their grievances over pay and conditions. The 1918 strike was triggered by the sacking of a police captain who had been active in this union, which by then claimed to have 10,000 members and was demanding proper recognition. The entire Metropolitan Police Force of London, numbering 12,000 members, went on strike on 30 August, and the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, while refusing to recognise the NUPPO on the grounds that such an organisation could not be contemplated while the country was at war, nevertheless met with its representatives and agreed to many of their other demands. The union’s membership subsequently saw a rapid growth, reaching some 50,000 by the time of the Armistice.

The British people were suffering in their homes as well as in the workplace. German submarine raids caused massive losses among the merchant marine, which meant that there was a lack of imported goods, so food prices soared. Coal rationing was introduced in October 1916, and in December of that year a Food Controller was appointed as part of the newly formed Ministry of Food. People were encouraged to monitor their own consumption, but rumours in 1917 that Britain’s food supply was all but exhausted led to panic buying, after which rationing was introduced: sugar in December, followed by butter, meat, jam and tea.

It was one thing to eat less for your country in times of war, but rationing was no more over by Christmas 1918 than the war had been in 1914, and its continuation long after the Armistice caused considerable resentment. Victory may have been greeted with jubilation, but it did little to calm the industrial and social unrest that pervaded the country. A more general imbalance between supply and demand in goods was not much helped by the fact that there was no immediate return to peacetime conditions in factories either. The Munitions of War Act had obliged many manufacturers to adapt their factories for the production of vital armaments, and it would take time to reconvert production lines so that they could return to making the goods they produced before the war. The Defence of the Realm Act remained in place, and the gulf that had opened up during the war between the Western and Home Fronts, fuelled by mutual incomprehension and, on the part of the serving men, a degree of hostility towards those who for whatever reason had not joined up, was not healed by peace. Soldiers at the front had resented the fact that the jobs from which they were absent had been taken over by those who had stayed at home rather than join them on the battlefields. It was not only ‘shirkers’ who had usurped them in the workplace: women had been absorbed into the overall workforce in huge numbers and, newly emancipated, could hardly be expected to return to hearth and home the minute the war was over – although many of them did.

‘The unity of the nation which has been the great secret of our strength in war must not be relaxed if the many anxious problems which the war has bequeathed to us are to be handled with the insight, courage, and promptitude which the times demand,’ Lloyd George declared, and he decided to call a general election for 14 December. He felt that a new parliament ‘possessed of the authority which a General Election alone can give it’ would be needed ‘to make the peace of Europe and to deal with the difficult transitional period which will follow the cessation of hostilities’. Just how difficult that transitional period would be soon became apparent.

Often referred to as a ‘khaki election’ because it took place immediately after a war, the 1918 general election might equally have been dubbed a ‘petticoat’ one, since it was the first in which women – at any rate, women property-owners over thirty – had the vote. With the massive losses suffered in the war, the women’s vote was more significant than its legislators might have envisaged. Given that many of those in khaki were still on active service abroad and that many women were in mourning for a husband, son, father, brother or fiancé, it must have looked like a ‘black’ election as much as a khaki one at the polling booths. The shadow of the war certainly loomed over the election in Nottingham, where now redundant shell cases were used to make up the shortfall in ballot boxes. It was also the first election in which men who were not property-owners were allowed to vote, but they had to be twenty-one. Many former servicemen like Harry Patch, who was twenty when the election took place, discovered that while they were deemed old enough to be sent off to fight for their country, they were still considered too young to vote. The result of the election was an overwhelming victory for a coalition chiefly composed of Liberal and Conservative members under the renewed premiership of Lloyd George.

It was all very well to win a general election, but Lloyd George now needed to lead the country into a post-war future with all its attendant problems. Making the peace in Europe would prove to be a great deal easier than maintaining it at home. In his Special Order of the Day for 12 November 1918, the Commander-in-Chief General Haig had assured his victorious but exhausted troops that ‘Generations of free peoples, both of your own race and of all countries, will thank you for what you have done’. Similarly, the Liberal Party’s election manifesto had promised: ‘In the field of creative reform at home, social and industrial – our first duty is owed to those who have won us the victory and to the dependants of the fallen. In the priorities of reconstruction they have the first claim, and every facility should be given them not only for reinstatement, and for protection against want and unemployment, but for such training and equipment as will open out for them fresh avenues and new careers.’ Unsurprisingly after such promises, those returning to Britain from the battlefields expected to find it the ‘fit country for heroes to live in’ that Lloyd George’s government had pledged.

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.

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 to the negotiations that took place between the military and ecclesiastical authorities about selecting the Unknown 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 (#ulink_b7fd5f2d-fd69-5c5b-9abd-687700977145)


A Nation Remembers? 1921–1939 (#ulink_b7fd5f2d-fd69-5c5b-9abd-687700977145)

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 and Belgium were Reginald Blomfield, who was both a distinguished architect and a garden designer, and Charles Holden, who had served in the war both with the London Ambulance Column and the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, and would go on to design many buildings for the London Underground. These four men allotted work on individual cemeteries to young British architects, with priority given to those who had served in the war. Elsewhere, John Burnet, who had worked for Kenyon at the British Museum, was given responsibility for cemeteries in Gallipoli, Syria and Palestine; Sir Robert Lorimer, who was best known for redesigning large country houses in Scotland, would work in Italy, Greece, Egypt and Germany; and Edward Warren, who designed numerous buildings for Oxford University, was allotted Iraq. The Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew was appointed horticultural adviser to the Commission, and Lutyens asked his old associate Gertrude Jekyll, doyenne of the Edwardian country garden, to provide planting plans for a number of cemeteries.

It would naturally be some time before the uniform designs could be put into practice, and ‘until such time as they could be handed over to the Imperial War Graves Commission for permanent construction’, the cemeteries were the responsibility of the Directorate of Graves Registration and Enquiries, which both organised and maintained them, assisted by such bodies as the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The Directorate also remained responsible for searching the battlefields for bodies once the war was over. The vast area to be covered was systematically divided up and allotted to individual ‘Graves Concentration Units’ consisting of twelve soldiers under a senior NCO, who went back and forth looking for corpses and for isolated graves, the occupants of which they exhumed and transferred to recognised cemeteries. Some 8,000 men were employed in this task, and by the time they had finished in September 1921, 204,650 bodies had been removed from the battlefields and reburied in these cemeteries.

Many relatives of the dead expressed a wish to visit graves as soon as possible after the Armistice, and so a number of religious organisations began conducting groups of the bereaved to France and Belgium. The best known of these was the St Barnabas Society, named after the patron saint of consolation, founded by a clergyman in 1919 in order to subsidise the travel of those who could not afford trips offered by commercial travel companies. Such pilgrimages proved popular. In the seven months between November 1919 and June 1920, for example, the Church Army arranged for 5,000 people to travel to the places where their men lay buried. During this period such places must often have seemed all too redolent of the circumstances in which such men had died. For all the good work carried out by the DGRE, most of the cemeteries were little more than a neat array of wooden crosses standing on bare earth in a bleak landscape where very little was growing. To reach them, mourners would have had to travel through villages that had been reduced to piles of rubble, along rutted roads lined with splintered trees, across ground still churned up by high explosives and littered with barbed wire, burned-out vehicles, abandoned weaponry and all the pitiful detritus of recent warfare. For those who had been unable to attend any sort of funeral for their husbands, sons, fathers and brothers, visiting graves even in these conditions seems to have provided comfort, and by 1923 some 78,500 of them had taken advantage of travelling facilities offered by the Salvation Army and the YMCA. In time these cemeteries would be tidied up considerably and landscaped with shrubs and flower beds. ‘The concept was to create a sentimental association between the gardens of home and the foreign fields where the soldier lies’, and these particular corners of France and Belgium did indeed begin to look as if they were forever England.

Elsewhere on the Western Front, a tourist industry rapidly developed independently of the pilgrimages conducted for the bereaved. While many people were content to learn about the actual circumstances of the war at the Imperial War Museum, which had been founded at Crystal Palace in 1917 and recorded over three million visitors between 1920 and 1923, others took advantage of the opportunities offered to visit Flanders and Picardy to see where the war had been fought. A number of unemployed veterans of the officer class took out advertisements in the press offering to conduct small groups of visitors round the battlefields by car, their recent first-hand knowledge of France and Belgium a guarantee of authenticity. As early as 1919, tourists could buy books such as A.T. Fleming’s How to See the Battlefields, but the most popular guides were the illustrated series to most of the major battle sites published by the Michelin tyre company, fifteen of which had been published in English editions by 1921. Prefaced with an overview of the military objectives and brief accounts of the individual attacks, complete with maps, the guides provided a detailed itinerary for the visitor. They also contained before-and-after photographs of devastated buildings and villages and recent photographs of the temporary cemeteries. These photos perhaps tell their own story – as well they might, since one would have no idea reading the Michelin guide to the Somme, for example, that 1 July 1916 was (and still is) the worst day in the history of the British army. Euphemistic phrases such as ‘came into contact with the second German positions’ abound, and the emphasis is firmly upon what few successes the Allies achieved, with figures given for numbers of Germans taken prisoner but none whatever for the 60,000 British casualties. ‘The first assaults on July 1 gave the British Montauban and Mametz, while Fricourt and La Boisselle were encircled and carried on July 3,’ we read. ‘Coltmaison and Mametz Wood, reached on the 5th, were carried on the 11th.’ The cost of all this is not mentioned: you would not know from this book that at Mametz Wood on 7 July alone the Welsh Division lost over 4,000 men. Estimates vary as to the overall casualties for the Battle of the Somme, which dragged on until mid-November, but after 140 days the British had lost some 400,000 men and advanced 6 miles. It was not, perhaps, a statistic anyone wanted to read in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Michelin guides contained enough information to be of interest even to those who did not want to make the journey across the Channel, and by January 1922 sales figures for the guides in Britain, France and America had reached 1,432,000. Later that year George V made a tour of the battlefields and cemeteries both to pay his respects to those of his subjects who had died and to inspect the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, of which his eldest son continued to serve as president. A heavily illustrated book about the royal tour, emotively titled The King’s Pilgrimage, became a bestseller when it was published in 1922.

Others who visited the battlefields had been there not long before. While it is easy to see why veterans might wish to visit the battlefields and cemeteries many years later, the notion of them returning to places where they had so recently endured appalling conditions, and which nature had yet to heal, may strike us as odd. Many veterans were haunted by their experiences at the front, experiences they would be unable to forget however long they lived. These were not experiences that were easy to talk about or share with civilians, even if they were friends or family. Siegfried Sassoon made his notorious public protest against the political conduct of the war in 1917 on behalf of his suffering fellow soldiers partly in the belief that ‘it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise’. Now that the war was over, veterans were naturally wary of harrowing their families and friends, or worse still boring them, with stories from the trenches. ‘There was nobody interested anyway,’ George Louth recalled, ‘so it was useless telling them and if you did they would only laugh at you, say it wasn’t true. It wasn’t a conscious thing, nobody talked about the First War in those days, even my wife, even she never heard my story and we were married seventy years.’ Louth had joined up in 1915 at the age of eighteen and survived the first day on the Somme in 1916, but was invalided out in December of that year. He would live to celebrate his 103rd birthday in 2000, but ‘only once spoke about [the war] from 1918 until 1990’. This was to a woman enquiring after her husband, who had been ‘blown to pieces’ but was officially listed as ‘wounded and missing’. Harry Patch too never spoke about the war. He married happily in 1919, but not once in fifty-seven years of wedded life did he mention the war to his wife. ‘I don’t think she had any idea about my service, and never brought it up.’

Many veterans felt as if they had been set apart from civilian life altogether, and that the only people with whom they could truly share their feelings were those they had served alongside. The veterans’ organisations not only campaigned for the rights of ex-servicemen, they also provided former soldiers with a community and would organise visits to France and Belgium. Ex-servicemen had been among both cemetery pilgrims and battlefield tourists from the very outset, paying their respects to friends who had been buried in haste and without pause for mourning, or visiting places where they had undergone what was fast beginning to seem the defining experience of their lives.

For some, the Western Front had proved so overwhelming that it became the only place they felt they belonged. The Imperial War Graves Commission needed hundreds of gardeners to tend the cemeteries it was building, and it recruited these from among former servicemen. By 1921, 1,326 veterans were employed by the Commission, and they had not only planted over 15 miles of hedges and 75 miles of borders, but had also seeded some 200 acres of bare earth with grass. Many of them spent the rest of their lives in France and Belgium, often marrying local women. Captain Frederick Osborne of the Royal Fusiliers, for example, joined up in 1914 with five friends and fought throughout the war, at the end of which he was the only survivor of the original group. After being demobilised, he returned to the Ploegsteert region and took a job looking after cemeteries. He married a Flemish woman, learned the language, and made his life in Belgium, staying on there after his retirement in 1962.

Britain itself continued to be something of a battlefield during the early 1920s with Armistice Day becoming a focus not only of national mourning but of protests intended to remind everyone that those who had returned from the war were still awaiting a home fit for heroes. In October 1920, disturbed by the continuing rise in unemployment (which still included a large number of ex-servicemen), a group of London mayors headed by the Mayor of London and future leader of the Labour Party, George Lansbury, requested an interview with Lloyd George at Downing Street. In support of this deputation, large numbers of the unemployed, many of them wearing their combat medals, descended upon Whitehall. According to Wal Hannington, the trade union official who was leading a North London contingent that day, the crowd was orderly, doing little more than cheering and singing. Nevertheless, Whitehall became severely congested and in order to clear the street mounted policemen charged the crowds, who were packed in so tightly on all sides that they could not retreat and ‘were compelled to fight back at the police or simply stand still and be clubbed down’. Eventually, the police were beaten back and the crowd surged up towards Trafalgar Square, but were stopped by reinforcements who struck the workers down as they tried to escape. Hannington recalled that ‘dozens of men lay in the roads and on the side-walks groaning with pain as the blood gushed out from wounds inflicted by police batons’. Then a policeman was dragged off his horse, which was commandeered and mounted by an unidentified worker who broke through police lines at a gallop, while men on foot followed in his wake. He managed to reach Downing Street before being ‘clubbed down’. The police eventually restored order and the crowd dispersed.

Wal Hannington’s Unemployed Struggles 1919–1936, from which this account is taken, may be one of the great classics of the British working-class movement, but it is a work of polemic and not always accurate. Hannington’s version of events, recalled some fifteen years later, is at odds with the contemporary reports of this incident in The Times, for example. The newspaper agreed that the crowd was ‘fairly orderly, though noisy’, and that the mounted police used newly introduced ‘long staves’ to belabour the protesters, between thirty and forty of whom suffered injuries, mostly to the head. The newspaper reported, however, that police had been obliged to intervene because a group of the unemployed decided to go to Downing Street to protest rather than, as had been originally planned, wait on Victoria Embankment for the deputation of mayors to report back on their interview with Lloyd George. These protesters ‘were heavily reinforced by many hundreds of irresponsible young hooligans who took a leading part in the afternoon’s disorders’. These young men apparently threw bottles, stones and brickbats at the police and caused considerable damage to government buildings: the stone balustrade of the Privy Council Office was demolished, several windows were broken at the Treasury and every single window was smashed on the ground floor of the War Office.

Hannington’s claim that ‘The mayors had not been received by Mr Lloyd George. He was not apparently interested in hearing about the plight of the workless and had conveniently left London’ was untrue. Indeed, Lansbury emerged from Number 10 after a meeting with the Prime Minister and attempted to restore order among his supporters. Furthermore, Hannington’s ‘unknown hero on the white horse’ was neither an ‘ex-cavalry man’ nor even a member of the unemployed, but a nineteen-year-old packing-case maker from Hoxton called Edward Cannadine, who had been exercising a horse and had ‘turned into Whitehall to see the demonstration’. At Bow Street Magistrates’ Court the following morning, he claimed that ‘Someone struck the horse, which got out of control, and he was unable to prevent it charging the police’. Quite what someone from Hoxton was doing exercising a horse in the middle of London was not divulged, but the horse clearly hadn’t been taken from the police since it had no saddle. Nevertheless, the court declined to believe that Cannadine was an innocent passer-by caught up in events beyond his control and fined him 40 shillings for ‘insulting behaviour’. A number of other protesters were charged with a variety of offences, including three men who had taken the opportunity to break into a jeweller’s and make off with £3,000 worth of diamond rings.





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