Armistice Day 2010

Field of Remembrance, Westminster Abbey, London

Millions of people across the UK have observed a two-minute silence to mark Armistice Day Ceremonies have been taking place to honour all who have fallen since WWI, In London, a service was held for the 90th time at the Cenotaph memorial. Both the Cenotaph and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey were inaugurated at 11.00 am on the 11th November 1920. Britain was still in shock in 1920 when with the coming of peacetime it took stock of the carnage of the Great War. One in 10 males under 45 had perished in World War One. The dead and injured were remembered on the anniversary of the Armistice or ceasefire coming into effect at 11.00 am on the 11th November 1918, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. This was referred to as Armistice Day with the name being changed to the more meaningful “Veterans Day” in the United States. It is sometimes forgotten, including by those who should know better, that the day has nothing to do with support for “Our Boys” or for current military campaigns but is a time of remembrance and respect for those killed and injured in conflict. Fundamentally it is decrying the waste of human life in war and is pacifist in intent – as was the mood of the nation in 1920.


Grave of my Great Uncle, Pte. James McMahon of the Dublin Fusilliers in Beaurevoir Military Cemetery, Ainse, France. He died on the 8th October 1918 in the "Final 100 Days" attacking the Hindenberg Line

Abroad Prime Minster David Cameron laid a wreath at the site of the British Army's bloodiest battle since the end of WWII - at the Imjin River in South Korea. A total of 93 men from the 1st Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, died either during the battle or in captivity after being cut off by Chinese communist forces. Mr Cameron attended the War Memorial of Korea, alongside Black Watch veteran WO Peter Johns. Whilst defeated the battalion's defensive efforts ultimately helped prevent a direct assault on the capital, Seoul. The prime minister, who was in Korea for a G20 summit, spent several, moments in contemplation at the memorial in what is now known by Koreans as Gloster Valley.


David Cameron attended the War Memorial of Korea, alongside Black Watch veteran WO Peter Johns


The 2 minute silence being observed at the Lloyds of London Insurance Market

The three-day battle, from 22 April 1951, was the British army's bloodiest since WWII but proved pivotal to the Korean War. The 1st Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, were surrounded by Chinese communist forces. Running short of water and ammunition, the "Glorious Glosters" held their hilltop position throughout a full day and a night, repelling waves of Chinese attackers. The battalion lost 59 men and 526 were taken prisoner - 180 of them wounded. Another 34 died in captivity. But their stand delayed the advance of the Communist troops, preventing them from outflanking the UN and Republic of Korea forces who could then prevent a direct assault on Seoul. The 29th Brigade, of which the Glosters formed part, suffered 1,091 casualties, dead, wounded or missing during the Imjin River offensive. Chinese casualties numbered around 10,000. A total of 1,078 UK troops died and 2,674 were wounded during the Korean War from 1950-53.


Poppies at Trafalgar Square

In London the service at the Cenotaph was attended by the Archbishop of Canterbury, defence ministers, representatives of military associations, veterans and schoolchildren. Other events included the Duke of Edinburgh visiting the Field of Remembrance and the Grave of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey. A service of remembrance also took place at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.



Meanwhile, the Royal British Legion hosted Silence in the Square, giving people the chance to take part in the two-minute silence to remember troops past and present, and share in music, readings and entertainment. The event in London's Trafalgar Square features pop band The Saturdays, TV presenter Ben Shephard and actors Keeley Hawes and Ben Barnes. For the first time even the London buses and taxis slowly making their way around Trafalgar Square were hushed as the traffic lights all changed to red.




Locomotive "Valour" at Marylebone Station, London

At Marylebone Station the railway industry’s mobile memorial the freight locomotive “Valour” with its nameplate commemorating the fallen was hove to at Platform 5 as the centrepiece for observing the 2 minute silence at 11.00 am. From 1922 until 1938 the centrepiece of the annual Armistice Day commemoration had been the Great Central Railways war memorial locomotive, the express passenger 4-6-0 “Valour”. Sadly, the original `Valour' is no more, but, as the culmination of the 2003 ceremony, the freight locomotive no. 66715 was named as the new “Valour” and dedicated as a war memorial in its own right. Thanks to First GBRf there is once again a focal point for the honouring of the Railway employees who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country.


Claude Stanley Choules

This Remembrance Day is all the more remarkable in that there is only one British Serviceman who fought in the Great War still alive. The total number of participating personnel in WW1 is estimated by the Encyclopaedia Britannica at 65,038,810 and from this number there were approximately 9,750,103 military deaths during the conflict. The only British veteran still alive is Claude Stanley Choules (born 3 March 1901) who, at age 109, one of the last three confirmed World War I veterans in the world, and is the last living witness to the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow. He is also the last living veteran to have served in both world wars, and the last seaman from the first. Choules is also the only remaining British male World War I veteran (the last female veteran being Florence Green), and the last World War I veteran living in Australia. He is the last living combatant of World War I. He is also the fourth oldest military veteran in the world. Choules became the oldest man born in the United Kingdom following the death of Stanley Lucas on 21 June 2010. All in all a quiet remarkable man who was swimming daily up to the age of a hundred. Like many elderly veterans he is decidedly pacifist regarding war as tragic and wasteful and has avoided Armistice ceremonies for some time.



Next Sunday 14th November Remembrance Sunday is commemorated at the Cenotaph in London, the 90th commemoration since the end of WW1. On the Sunday nearest to November 11th at 11am each year, a Remembrance Service is held at the Cenotaph to commemorate British and Commonwealth servicemen and women who died in the two World Wars and later conflicts. The Queen, religious leaders, politicians, representatives of state and the armed and auxiliary forces, gather to pay respect to those who gave their lives defending others. The service has changed little since it was first introduced in 1921, hymns are sung, prayers are said and a two minute silence is observed. Official wreaths are laid on the steps of The Cenotaph. The ceremony ends with a march past of war veterans; a poignant gesture of respect for their fallen comrades. In recognition of its service in WW1 when staff ran logistics services for the Western Front and WW2 when thousands sheltered in Tube Stations and both Tube and Bus services kept going through the Blitz the London Transport Old Comrades Association is the only civilian group allowed to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph as well as march alongside the armed forces.



This year Caroline Pidgeon, leader of the Liberal Democrat London Assembly Group, commenting on Transport for London’s plans to close several tube lines serving central London on Remembrance Sunday said: "Thousands of veterans and their families will wish to come into central London to take part in the Remembrance Sunday events at the Cenotaph. It is simply disgraceful that so many tube lines will be closed on this very important day, making access difficult if not impossible for veterans, their families and others wishing to honour our armed forces."




Cenotaph, Whitehall, London

Originally intended as a small part of the Peace Day events of July 1919, the Cenotaph was designed and built by Edwin Lutyens at the request of the then Prime Minister Lloyd George. Literally meaning 'Empty Tomb' in Greek, The Cenotaph was initially a wood and plaster construction intended for the first anniversary of the Armistice in 1919. At its unveiling the base of the monument was spontaneously covered in wreaths to the dead and missing from The Great War. Such was the extent of public enthusiasm for the construction it was decided that The Cenotaph should become a permanent and lasting memorial. Made from Portland stone, it was unveiled in 1920 with the inscription which reads simply "The Glorious Dead".

Armistice Day 2009 - End of a generation

The passing of the First World War generation was marked by a special memorial service at Westminster Abbey today as millions of people across Britain and Europe observed the two-minute Armistice Day silence.

Ninety-one years after the guns fell silent at 11am on 11th November, 1918, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh joined Gordon Brown, senior politicians and the heads of the armed forces in the solemn ceremony which commemorated the passing of the final three veterans of the war living in Britain, who all died this year. William Stone died in January, aged 108, followed in July by Henry Allingham, 113, and Harry Patch, 111. The only remaining British-born survivor of the war, former seaman Claude Choules, who is 108 now lives in Australia.


Poppies in the fountains at Trafalgar Square

Few can have been unmoved by the poignant sight at the last commemoration at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London of these last surviving veterans of the First World War joining serving soldiers in current conflicts to mark the 90th anniversary of the day peace returned to Europe. Then Henry Allingham, Harry Patch and Bill Stone led the nation as it remembered the sacrifices made by the 1914-1918 generation. They each represented the armed service they belonged to - for Mr Allingham the Royal Air Force, Mr Patch the Army and Mr Stone the Royal Navy. All three men laid wreaths at the Cenotaph in central London to commemorate Armistice Day. Sadly, but not too surprisingly, all have now died since that ceremony.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/07/farewell-old-soldiers.html


Henry Allingham, Harry Patch and Bill Stone

Being in Westminster and not too far from the Abbey which was the venue for the ceremonies you notice the minutiae of these occasions, the police checking lampposts and sealing manhole covers before hand, the veterans with their medals heading to the ceremony, the Guards colour party in great coats and bearskins marching briskly along the footpath from Wellington Barracks, the ambassador’s cars with their flags going down Toothill Street and the boom of the field in Green Park announcing at 11 the beginning of the silence and two minutes later the boom announcing it ending. Why Gordon Brown’s car passed along Petty France this morning on his way to the Abbey taking a different route from the back of Downing Street to the front of the Abbey. As is the way here these ceremonies are well oiled and practiced with no need for self important motorcades or grandiosity. Wars are and, we sometimes forget, have always been controversial but the orchestrated personal attacks on Gordon Brown by Rupert Murdoch and the tatty Sun “newspaper” represents a new low by the Dirty Digger and his hired help who arrogantly feel they can manipulate the British Public and British Democracy.


Theipval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

But none of this controversy about current military engagements should in any way to detract from the personal heroism or sacrifice of soldiers in battle and it is right that their bravery is commemorated each year on Armistice Sunday, the service held on the Sunday closest to Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the fighting in World War 1 at 11.00 am on the 11th November 1918. Indeed when you read the obituaries of those who served in the wars and the enormous responsibilities and decisions they had to undertake at a tender age you somehow feel that those of us whose lives have not been tempered by war have somehow led shallow lives by contrast. However we largely read about those who survive, not those who perished.

This was brought home to me some years ago when I made a personal journey to the battle fields for there were deaths on both sides of my family in the First World War. My wife’s great uncle Edward Kenny who died with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and my Great Uncle, James McMahon who died with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at Beaurevoir in the Ainse 5 weeks before the end of the war in 1918.


Private Edward Kenny

Private Edward Kenny, originally from Edenderry, Co. Offaly had fallen with the 2nd. Bn. Argyle & Sutherland Highlanders, at the Somme on the 27th August 1916 and he’s commemorated alongside 72,088 others at the dramatic “Monument to the Fallen” memorial designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens at Thiepval on the D73 road between Baupaume and Albert. This monument is for soldiers who fell at the Somme who have no known grave or were not identified and his name is inscribed on panel 15C. The entry in "Ireland's Memorial Record" shows he was 24 when he died. To escape from poverty in Ireland they had moved to Bonnybridge near Glasgow and worked in the summer months as “tattie hokers”, the term for agricultural labourer’s who worked on the back breaking potato (tatties in the Scots dialect) harvest for bed and board and low wages. He joined up with the venerable Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders who are based at Scotland’s historic Stirling Castle and is commemorated on the Roll of Honour there and at The Scottish War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle. Disgracefully, to visit the latter you have to pay an expensive admission charge into the tourist theme park which is the modern Edinburgh Castle. We were able to trace his war record from a photo which showed the distinctive hat band of the Argyle and Sutherlands. His brother (my wife’s maternal grandfather) served in the Merchant Navy during the war and survived to live to a ripe old age.


Edward Kenny's War record Card - Transferred to France 13/9/1915 - KIA 27/8/1916


Edward Kenny commemorated in "Ireland's Memorial Record" Click to see a larger image

My great uncle who fell in WW1 was Private James Mc Mahon of the 6th. Bn. Royal Dublin Fusiliers and by coincidence he hailed from Clara, Co. Offaly, the same county as my wife’s great uncle. Unlike my wife’s relative James McMahon has a grave in the Aisne, the Department beyond the Somme whose capital is Cambrai and where the front line had stopped when the hostilities ended with the Armistice at 11 in the morning on the 11th November 1918. James McMahon was killed on the 8th October 1918 at a village called Beaurevoir, one of roundly 90 young Dublin Fusiliers who were killed from the 8th to 11th October and are buried with him in the cemetery. He was killed, aged 20, just over 4 weeks from the end of the war taking part in the so called “March to Victory” which lasted for 100 days until the Armistice. While not obvious today when viewing the sleepy countryside, in 1918 this was the last part of the fortified Hindenburg Line being attacked by tired and inexperienced British Troops resulting in disproportionate casualties amongst the attackers.


James McMahon's grave Beaurevoir, Aisne, France

Like all the Commonwealth cemeteries it is beautifully maintained and lies on the edge of the village with the standard layout of the Cross of Remembrance and a shelter for visitors which also holds the Book of Remembrance. James lies in a row of other Dublin Fusiliers aged from 18 to 21 with his name on the headstone given as “B. J. McMahon”. I wasn’t expecting to feel a great deal of connection with somebody who died so many years before I was born but being there amongst the graves of so many young Irish soldiers who all died on the 8th October 1918 was surprisingly moving.


James McMahon commemorated in "Ireland's Memorial Record"

In our fallen relatives home towns of Edenderry and Clara there are still “British Legion” houses provided for ex-soldiers and their families and in the decades of poverty and economic stagnation many Irish families were quietly grateful for the “War Pensions” they received. Ireland was neutral during the Second World War but many served in the British forces and many also worked in England both to survive and help the war effort including my Grandfather and two uncles who travelled on British Legion travel warrants and worked for the electronics firm Lucas in Birmingham during the war whilst living in a company dormitory. My father at the age of ten and his family on the other hand came in the other direction as refugees from the devastating blitz in Coventry.



On Armistice Day I too am proud to wear a poppy not in support of British Militarism or to legitimise the wanton waste of life in war. Rather I wear it to remember the great sacrifice of Edward Kenny and James McMahon and all their comrades who made a brave personal choice to fight for the greater freedom of humanity and paid the ultimate price for their beliefs.


Gurkha Tul Bahadur Pun VC

I leave the last word to the “Last Tommy” Harry Patch who thought that his comrade’s sacrifice had been in vain because what the world achieved was not “Peace in our Time” but rather it set the scene for the conflict of WW11. He expressed himself movingly and plainly in interviews in 2004;


Harry Patch 1898 - 2009

“I was taken back to England to convalesce. When the war ended, I don't know if I was more relieved that we'd won or that I didn't have to go back. Passchendaele was a disastrous battle — thousands and thousands of young lives were lost. It makes me angry. Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Herr Kuentz, Germany's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?"

......."It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands. T’isn’t worth it … the First World War, if you boil it down, what was it? Nothing but a family row. That’s what caused it. The Second World War – Hitler wanted to govern Europe, nothing to it. I would have taken the Kaiser, his son, Hitler and the people on his side … and bloody shot them. Out the way and saved millions of lives. T’isn’t worth it."

See also;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/towards-somme-personal-journey.html

Farewell Harry Patch: funeral of Britain's last Tommy

The funeral service for Britain's last surviving World War I veteran Harry Patch who died aged 111 has taken place at Wells Cathedral in Somerset.



Thousands of people lined the streets of Wells as his coffin was taken to the cathedral where the service was relayed on big screens to crowds outside.



At the end of the funeral service two bugles sounded the Last Post.



A quiet man who did not talk about the war in public until he was 100, he may have been surprised to see that his passing led television and radio bulletins and prompted banner headlines in the Sunday papers. "Too many died... war isn't news," he once said. When he is buried with him will go the last living connection to World War 1 and this cataclysmic event will finally be “History”.



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/07/farewell-old-soldiers.html





http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/08/world-war-one-in-slideshow.html

World War One In SlideShow

We now know that the war to end all wars did nothing of the sort and did little for “small nations” either. It is hard to explain the “Causes of the Great War.” In his weighty book of the same name the historian A.J.P. Taylor cannot come to a definitive conclusion but, as he observes, it was the first truly industrialised war and it was industrialisation which made possible the scale of the awful bloodbath as “Defence was mechanised but attack was not,” The aim of the domino effect of the alliances which clicked robot like into action after the assassinations in Sarajevo was to preserve the established order, “For King and Country” as it was expressed in Britain.



But after the dust had settled there were no more Hapsburgs, Romanoff’s, Hohenzollern’s or Ottomans and the Saxe-Coburg Gotha’s had become “Windsor’s”. The war and the humiliating peace left a legacy of instability both in Europe and in the former Ottoman territories only some of which has been resolved today. It removed a whole generation and those left behind bore deep scars. They included a French Captain, Charles De Gaulle, left for dead by his own side at Verdun in no-man’s land for two days before being taken prisoner by the Germans, an Austrian corporal Adolph Hitler who was gassed and wounded and unemployed after the war in a collapsed German economy who concluded his country was not defeated on the battlefield but by its own lack of willpower and subversive elements on the home front who were not “proper Germans” The novelist J.R. Tolkien was a survivor of the Somme and wrote a mythological parable of the horror and inhumanity of mechanised warfare and a plea for the decency of humanity, “The Lord of the Rings.”



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/towards-somme-personal-journey.html

Farewell Old Soldiers

Armistice Day London 2008

I am hardly a supporter of British Militarism or military adventurism which the Red Tops treat as some jolly jape under the heading of “supporting our boys” or “finishing the job.” This begs the questions, too rarely asked in the same Red Tops, of what are we supporting and what is the job? Indeed I’ve pointed out elsewhere that Britain’s colonial history contains many disgraceful episodes when it acted as the Great Imperial Bully and we have also decidedly mixed feelings in Ireland on this count.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/04/britain-in-iraq.html

But none of this is in any way to detract from the personal heroism or sacrifice of soldiers in battle and it is right that their bravery is commemorated each year on Armistice Sunday, the service held on the Sunday closest to Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the fighting in World War 1 at 11.00 am on the 11th November 1918. Indeed when you read the obituaries of those who served in the wars and the enormous responsibilities and decisions they had to undertake at a tender age you somehow feel that those of us whose lives have not been tempered by war have somehow led shallow lives by contrast. However we largely read about those who survive, not those who perished.

Few can have been unmoved by the poignant sight at the last commemoration at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London of three of the last surviving veterans of the First World War joining serving soldiers in current conflicts to mark the 90th anniversary of the day peace returned to Europe. Henry Allingham, 112, Harry Patch, 110, and Bill Stone, 108, led the nation as it remembered the sacrifices made by the 1914-1918 generation. They each represented the armed service they belonged to - for Mr Allingham the Royal Air Force, Mr Patch the Army and Mr Stone the Royal Navy. All three men laid wreaths at the Cenotaph in central London to commemorate Armistice Day. Sadly, but not too surprisingly, all have now died since that ceremony.



Henry Allingham, who was in the Royal Naval Air Service in the war and later with the RAF, was the world's oldest man when he died 12 days ago aged 113. Since his death, the last WWI veteran in Britain, Harry Patch, has also died. Mr Patch was conscripted into the Army aged 18 and fought in the Battle of Passchendaele at Ypres in 1917 in which more than 70,000 British soldiers died. At the end of the service the bells of St Nicholas's tolled 113 times, once for each year of his life, and five replica World War One planes - Mr Allingham was the last surviving member of the Royal Naval Air Service and a founder member of the Royal Air Force - performed a flypast.


Henry Allingham, 1896 - 2009



The veteran was being buried with full military honours. Guests included the Duchess of Gloucester; the veterans minister Kevan Jones and senior figures from the Royal Navy and the Air Force. Henry Allingham was, at the age of 113, the world's oldest man when he died on July 18 and, with Harry Patch, one of Britain's last two survivors from the Great War. Harry Patch died exactly week later, making Claude Choules, 108, who lives in Australia, the last living British veteran of the war.

Mr Allingham's medals were carried by two of his 16 great-grandchildren who are both currently serving in the US Navy, his late daughter Jean had gone to America after WW2 as a GI Bride. Outside, a crowd of hundreds watched as the service was relayed on a big screen. Among them was Dennis Goodwin, founder and chair of the First World War Veterans' Association, who said he would never forget Mr Allingham. "I have been to many veterans' funerals but this is most special because it coincides with the end of an era." There are now only three surviving veterans of the First World War, none of them living in the UK.

John Babcock, who turned 109 on 23 July, was with Canada's Boys Battalion in England but the war ended before he turned 18 and could go to the front.

Frank Buckles, 108, joined the American army aged just 16 and was held in reserve in England from December 1917. After six months he was sent to France but never saw action on the frontline.

Claude Choules, 108, served with the Royal Navy during World War I. Originally from Worcestershire, he now lives in Perth, Australia.



The First World War and the Flu Epidemic of 1918/19 produced a death toll of unimaginable proportion and we should not forget the callousness with which lives were thrown away. Indeed, in a telling indication of the attitude among the General Staff to casualties there were more allied deaths on the morning of 11th November 1918 alone than there were on D-Day in 1944. The respected American author Joseph E Persico has calculated a shocking figure that the final day of WWI would produce nearly 11,000 casualties, more than those killed, wounded or missing on D-Day, when Allied forces landed en masse on the shores of occupied France almost 27 years later. What is worse is that hundreds of these soldiers would lose their lives thrown into action by generals who knew that the Armistice had already been signed. The recklessness of General Wright, of the 89th American Division, is a case in point. Seeing his troops were exhausted and dirty, and hearing there were bathing facilities available in the nearby town of Stenay, he decided to take the town so his men could refresh themselves. "That lunatic decision cost something like 300 casualties, many of them battle deaths, for an inconceivable reason," says Mr Persico.


Bill Stone, 1900 - 2009

It was with this in mind that I made a personal journey to the battle fields for there were deaths on both sides of my family in that war. Edward Kenny who died with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and my Great Uncle, James McMahon who died with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at Beaurevoir in the Ainse 5 weeks before the end of the war in 1918. When I visited James McMahon’s grave I wasn’t expecting to feel a great deal of connection with somebody who died so many years before I was born but being there amongst the graves of so many young Irish soldiers who all died on the 8th October 1918 was surprisingly moving.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/towards-somme-personal-journey.html


Grave of my Great Uncle, James McMahon,1898 - 1918, Beaurevoir, France.

We now know that the war to end all wars did nothing of the sort and did little for “small nations” either. It is hard to explain the “Causes of the Great War.” In his weighty book of the same name the historian A.J.P. Taylor cannot come to a definitive conclusion but, as he observes, it was the first truly industrialised war and it was industrialisation which made possible the scale of the awful bloodbath as “Defence was mechanised but attack was not,” The aim of the domino effect of the alliances which clicked robot like into action after the assassinations in Sarajevo was to preserve the established order, “For King and Country” as it was expressed in Britain.

But after the dust had settled there were no more Hapsburgs, Romanoff’s, Hohenzollern’s or Ottomans and the Saxe-Coburg Gotha’s had become “Windsor’s”. The war and the humiliating peace left a legacy of instability both in Europe and in the former Ottoman territories only some of which has been resolved today. It removed a whole generation and those left behind bore deep scars. They included a French Captain, Charles De Gaulle, left for dead by his own side at Verdun in no-man’s land for two days before being taken prisoner by the Germans, an Austrian corporal Adolph Hitler who was gassed and wounded and unemployed after the war in a collapsed German economy who concluded his country was not defeated on the battlefield but by its own lack of willpower and subversive elements on the home front who were not “proper Germans” The novelist J.R. Tolkien was a survivor of the Somme and wrote a mythological parable of the horror and inhumanity of mechanised warfare and a plea for the decency of humanity, “The Lord of the Rings.”

The “Last Tommy” Harry Patch thought that his comrade’s sacrifice had been in vain because what the world achieved was not “Peace in our Time” but rather it set the scene for the conflict of WW11. He expressed himself movingly in interviews in 2004;

“I was taken back to England to convalesce. When the war ended, I don't know if I was more relieved that we'd won or that I didn't have to go back. Passchendaele was a disastrous battle — thousands and thousands of young lives were lost. It makes me angry. Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Herr Kuentz, Germany's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?"

......."It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands. T’isn’t worth it … the First World War, if you boil it down, what was it? Nothing but a family row. That’s what caused it. The Second World War – Hitler wanted to govern Europe, nothing to it. I would have taken the Kaiser, his son, Hitler and the people on his side … and bloody shot them. Out the way and saved millions of lives. T’isn’t worth it."


Ypres

Harry Patch will be buried after a service at Wells Cathedral near Bath this coming Thursday 6th August. A quiet man who did not talk about the war in public until he was 100, he may have been surprised to see that his passing led television and radio bulletins and prompted banner headlines in the Sunday papers. "Too many died... war isn't news," he once said. When he is buried with him will go the last living connection to World War 1 and this cataclysmic event will finally be “History”.

No doubt his passing will be marked with full military honours and the greatest respect, as is only right. But, is this Irish Republican alone in thinking that on such a momentous occasion, as a token of respect to all who died, his passing should be marked with nothing less than a full State Funeral? And am I alone in feeling that the Queen should break with convention and attend this last opportunity to honour first hand all those who fought in her Grandfather’s name “For King and Country”? Even a non-royalist would be churlish to suggest she has not always shown good judgement and felt the pulse of the Nation. I cannot imagine that her sound instincts are saying anything to her other than “We shall be there” to say farewell to this remarkable old soldier.


Harry Patch 1898 - 2009