From memory to history

FLPA

OTHER wars have happened since. Some have taken millions of equally young and untried lives. Some have been fought in conditions—whether Russian snow, African jungle or Vietnamese swamp—that have been as trying and as terrible. Many, perhaps almost all, have been every bit as futile.

Yet the war which Harry Patch and Henry Allingham represented, as the last two fighting British servicemen, holds a different place in the common consciousness. In both Europe and in Canada the war that was fought from August 1914 to November 1918 is the Great War, whose barbarity and senselessness were felt to set a high-water mark for all the wars that followed. (In America, the civil war holds that place; but there too the single survivor from the Great War, Frank Buckles, still campaigns for a proper memorial.) Indeed, there were meant to be no subsequent wars. This was surely the last, convulsive gasp of the practice of resolving international disputes by soaking the ground with blood.

The fact that it was not has made no difference. It remains a live wound. In Britain its chronology still overhangs the national curriculum. Its poems and songs—such poems, such songs, as if war's horror and nonsense had never been articulated before—still lodge in people's heads. Yet for men like Mr Patch and Mr Allingham, who were there, the sheer overload of the war—on senses, mind, spirit and body—was so immense that for decades they had nothing to say. Only when they passed 100, under gentle nudging from other people, did they break their silence. The words tumbled out then, unable to be suppressed. In the end, said Mr Allingham, though oblivion was what war deserved, “it seemed more disrespectful to ignore what had gone on than to talk about it.” They wrote a book each, bending close to the page to append a spidery signature; they gave talks to schools, colleges, servicemen's associations, in voices that had almost worn away. Frail as birds, wrapped up as something precious and irreplaceable, they let themselves be wheeled to windswept beaches and cenotaphs. Journalists were received with spry, straight-backed politeness; and when they left the old soldiers continued to sit, erect but far away, with the sun gleaming on their medals.

With remembering, they brought back nightmares. Mr Allingham, in the dark, misstepped again into the vile hole where he could feel, against his groping hands, the floating carcasses of rats and parts of human bodies. He tried to haul himself out of the stinking water, belly-flopping over the muddy edge, but fell in again and again, up to his armpits. Mr Patch in his nursing home saw the linen cupboard light flash on, opposite his room, and cried out. He thought it was the explosion of the shell that had killed three of his mates in C Company, leaving nothing to find, and had sent into his abdomen a jagged chunk of shrapnel that was cut out without anaesthetic, with four men holding him down.

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He hadn't wanted to fight. His brother had been at Ypres, the first huge battle of the war, and had told him about the dirt of the trenches—dirt, rather than danger. He didn't like the sound of it, but was conscripted all the same. He was 18. Mr Allingham, by contrast, had no warning of what the war would be like. He was one of those who rushed to join up at the start, in August 1914, roaring on his Triumph TT motorcycle up to Pall Mall to volunteer as a dispatch rider. He, too, was 18. His mother had tried to stop him; but everyone, he remembered, was full of patriotism, eager to fight, especially if it meant they could quit some dead-end job. It was adventure. The gay, oblivious rush of the world to this war compounded its dreadfulness for subsequent generations, but Mr Allingham added a corrective. He remembered the streets thronged with people who were torn between excitement and dread. And he recalled the “real shock” when the first casualty lists came in for the British Expeditionary Force, showing 90,000 killed by Christmas. This was war on a scale outside anyone's experience.

The eagerness, therefore, was short-lived. Yet the technical side of the job—it was essentially seen as a job, for the government, for pay—brought both men satisfaction. Mr Patch was taught to fire one of the new Lewis guns, lying flat on the grass with his cap shading his eyes. (No recruit went without a cap in those deferential days.) He was put in charge of parts. He grew to like the gun's speed, lightness and accuracy, which let them hobble the enemy with a shot or two or “give him a burst”, as needs must. Manning the Lewis gun was team-work; to protect himself, he was issued with a Webley revolver. From the start, however, he tried not to use it.

Mr Allingham's craft were just “motorised kites”...Two carrier-pigeons, in a basket, took the place of a radio

Mr Allingham, meanwhile—having fallen in love with flying ever since he had watched an aircraft slowly circling as a boy—learned to fly Avro biplanes and Sopwith Schneiders, looking for German ships off the east coast of England. No sooner had flying been invented than it was turned to belligerence. His craft were just “motorised kites” made of fabric, wood and wire, with open cockpits, so that he needed to smear his face with Vaseline or whale-oil before going up. Like Mr Patch he had a Lewis gun, which at first had to be fired through the propeller. He also had an Enfield rifle. Two carrier-pigeons, in a basket, took the place of a radio; there was no parachute. “Ally” had his picture taken beside his craft, a hand casually in a pocket, proprietorial and proud. One man was in the trenches, one circling above: the ancient foot-slogger, the modern moth.

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Frail as a bird, wrapped up as something precious and irreplaceable: Harry Patch

In a war of many stages and theatres, the defining battle was Passchendaele on the Western Front, where both men fought. Mr Patch was a “Tommy”, or foot soldier, the last of them to survive; Mr Allingham was a spotter and retriever of crashed planes. Three months of 1917 were consumed in moving five miles across Flanders, at a cost of 300,000 lives. Both men remembered, more than anything, the mud: “sticky, gluey mud”, “mud crusted with blood”, in which men sank and horses drowned. The rain was almost continuous. Mr Patch, in his sodden khaki, stood in a foot of water in the trench. In old age he visited the battlefield, now tidied and grassed over. Staring out from his wheelchair, he murmured: “Mud. Mud. Mud.”

Their next most vivid memory was of noise. Before an attack, the big 18-pounder guns would fire in succession “like non-stop claps of thunder. It took your breath away. The noise was ferocious. You couldn't hear the man next to you speaking,” said Mr Patch. But beneath them came fainter sounds that were much more terrible: the cry of “Stretcher-bearer!” from desperate men. When the guns ceased, the cries went on. Often they had to be ignored. The trenches had their own smell: an appalling stench of latrines, soldiers' feet, rotting cadavers and the creosote that was applied to stop infection. Mr Allingham, visiting briefly as he moved by army transports from one crash site to the next, was overwhelmed by it. Mr Patch, in his three-month stint, almost got used to it, so that he could discern the subtler perfumes of pipe-smoke and Woodbines (the pipes smoked upside-down, so as not to show a light). Both men remembered the smell of hot candle-wax trickled down the inside seams of jacket and breeches to kill the “blinking lice” that nested there, “each with its own itch”, as Mr Patch said; though Mr Allingham, in those days when his fogged eyes were sharp, once saw the lice processing along a drying line, and knew they would soon be back.

Their guns and aircraft were kept scrupulously clean, oiled and ready; they saw to it themselves. By contrast, they were bone-weary, filthy and underfed. Mr Patch would try to sleep on the firing-step of the trench: “You could have a doze. Not much more.” At first and last light he was obliged to be awake, in case of surprise. He was glad to see the sun going down or coming up, because it showed he had lived another day, or another night. Mr Allingham became expert at rough-sleeping, often under lorries: groundsheet and blanket spread on the mud, boots together as a pillow. Rats as big as cats pattered over both of them, bloated with feeding on the eyes and livers of the dead.

“No wonder the rats survived,” Mr Allingham would say. He was more surprised that he himself did. Everything was short. When his boots fell apart he took some, not without doubt and deliberation, from a nameless corpse; they served him well. Starving, he scooped up the ubiquitous plum-and-apple jam (neither plum nor apple, it was said), on crusts of stale bread. For both men, this was the taste of the war. Mr Patch drank his water from old kerosene cans and said that, after a time, he could tell whether Shell or BP had been in the can before. In his kit-bag, along with his bayonet, his ammunition, his gas-mask and spare clothes—60 pounds of gear, which made the men look like hermit crabs, Mr Allingham said, when they moved from trench to trench—was tinned stew, bully beef and square white HP biscuits so hard that they were often thrown away. One day Mr Patch watched two dogs tussling over one, fighting to survive. But, he wondered, “What the hell were we fighting over?”

The world left behind

Parcels and letters from home reached the lines with surprising regularity. Mr Patch's mother always sent him two packets of 20 cigarettes and an ounce of tobacco, a precious treat. The home he dreamed of in the trenches was Combe Down, near Bath, where his father was a stonemason and his brothers worked at bricklaying and cabinet-making. Green Somerset hills, where he skated on frozen meadows, scrumped apples and hunted for birds' nests in the hedges. The boy Harry would creep along the vegetable trenches, clogging his boots with mud, to get at gooseberries without his mother seeing. But “Somerset people are not warlike,” he said once, his soft voice still carrying the burr of the place. “It is not something we can make up. Why should I go out and kill someone I never knew?”

The war poets, too, painted this world, of girls making daisy chains and men with horse-teams ploughing, the tranquil river meadows and the deep-leafed woods. It stood in dreadful contrast to the reality they stared at: the trees as stark sticks, all branches and leaves shelled away, in a landscape criss-crossed by duckboards and pitted with shell-holes like the surface of the moon. Mr Allingham's transports sometimes slithered into these, and had to be dragged out with chains. Back home lay a land of birdsong; but now the dawn chorus, as Mr Patch remembered it, was machinegun and small-arms fire directed into the morning mist, to ease the fear of waiting. Some called it “early-morning tea”. Even Mr Allingham, a city boy from Clapton in London's East End, whose boyhood was spent playing cricket between lamp-posts and hawking horse-manure from door to door, longed for the England of gardens and fields. Once, visiting the Flanders office of a church mission, he saw a bowl of roses freshly sent from home and found himself crying.

Between salvaging bits of aircraft from the mud, Mr Allingham would read and re-read the small-print Bible his fiancée Dorothy had given him. English wild flowers were pressed between the pages. Mr Patch, in the thick of battle, automatically recalled the lessons heard on Sundays: Moses on Mount Sinai, the Good Samaritan. But surrounded as he was by “devils coming up from the ground” and “hell upon this earth”, he soon lost all his faith in the Church of England. What he clung to in the end was his memory of a young Cornishman, torn open by shrapnel from shoulder to waist “and with his stomach on the ground beside him”. He asked Mr Patch to shoot him, but died first, murmuring “Mother!” It was not a cry of despair, but of surprise and joy. He had seen her; she was there. Death, of which Mr Patch was scared “all the time”, was apparently not the end.

Epiphanies like these enabled him to cope, after a fashion. From day to day, black humour helped more. The shell that killed his mates was a “whizz-bang”, no sooner whistling over than exploding: “And you'll see all the wonders of no man's land/If a whizz-bang/Hits you.” A Mills bomb, the first segmented grenade, was a “pineapple”. Cigarettes were “coffin nails”. At the front, Mr Patch suppressed his terror by making up saucy endings to the nursery rhymes he had learned at home, under the apple trees. Mr Allingham, for his part, sang, and went on singing to the end of his days, in a voice that was gradually fading and cracking like a record on a gramophone, the bitterly comic songs that fixed this war in the public mind:

Take me back to dear old Blighty! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me ANYWHERE...

“War isn't worth one life.” They did the job they were asked to do—“for 18 pence a flippin' day.”

He sang to tell himself he was all right; and to keep down the worst of his memories, of pilots he had known consumed in seconds by crashing or merely landing planes, holding up their charring arms through the flames. Death was so commonplace that nothing was mentioned. “You'd just hope it was quick,” he said.

An acorn's words

In old age both men had an urgent message, so urgent that it almost exhausted their small supply of breath. “War's stupid,” said Mr Allingham. “Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway.”“T'isn't worth it,” said Mr Patch. “War isn't worth one life.” They did the job they were asked to do—“for 18 pence a flippin' day.” And they knew that the German enemy, too, were fighting under compulsion. From the first day, Mr Patch made a pact with his mates on the Lewis gun that they wouldn't shoot to kill, only to wound. As far as he knew, he kept his pledge. Even the German who tried to bayonet him in no-man's-land was only to be brought down with bullets in the leg. Similarly Mr Allingham, billeted with a German family after the Armistice, gave them the two precious oranges he received from Dorothy for Christmas. “We were all victims,” said Mr Patch.

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At 110 Mr Allingham went to Germany to meet Robert Meier, aged 109. For his birthday, Mr Meier—who was to die three months after they met—had been photographed grinning broadly in the spiked helmet of a Dreckfresser, literally a mud-eater, a German infantryman. He had last worn that gear on the Western Front. Chicken soup and oatflakes, he said in his sprightly way, had kept him going since. Side by side, the two old men were wheeled to the local war memorial, where they laid a wreath and, for a long, gentle moment, shook hands.

Mr Patch, too, went abroad at 106 to meet Charles Kuentz, aged 107. He took a bottle of Somerset cider; Mr Kuentz, who was to die the next year, brought a tin of Alsatian biscuits. Mr Kuentz had fought at Passchendaele, some few hundred yards from the British lines. He had been conscripted at 19, straight from grammar school, and he too, until the age of 100, had refused to talk about the war. They went together to the German cemetery at Langemarck, where 44,000 Germans were buried, and Mr Patch laid a wreath. He had got better at doing that; on the first occasion he'd been asked to he had simply sat and cried. At Langemarck, on impulse, he picked up an acorn from the ground and gave it to his “enemy”. “Now we are friends,” said Mr Kuentz.

They were silent after that, staring out over the graves. They had no common language, but one common thought. That war was hell; that they wished it would never happen again, but knew it always would; and that though it hurt almost too much to remember, they owed it to the millions of dead never to let the world forget.