1. 310,000
the big interview: Harry Patch
the number of British casualties incurred
during The Third Battle of Ypres
Mud, blood and memories
Harry Patch is one of the very
few remaining veterans of the
First World War. Almost 90 years
have passed since the guns fell
silent over the trenches, but his
memories have not dimmed
Report:
Lorraine
McBride
Picture:
Allan House
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108-YEAR-OLD First World War veteran Harry Patch’s life is
a story of survival against the odds. His life has spanned the
20th Century and touched two more. Although frail, Harry
remains very much the trooper, and when the Defence Focus
photographer and I visited him at his care home in Wells,
Somerset, he was sitting alongside his 90-something girlfriend,
Doris (whom he gallantly walks to her bedroom every night),
smiling and keen to chat.
90 years ago, Harry was called up for war service, and
he joined the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and became
a machine gunner. In 1917 he spent his 19th birthday in the
trenches of Passchendaele in Belgium, and although he was
not called to go into action there, he watched as the men of the
Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiments went over the top and into
the teeth of German gunfire, at the start of what is sometimes
called the Third Battle of Ypres.
A little later at Pilkem Ridge it was Harry’s turn to face
the fire. He recalls the bewildered looks on the men’s faces
as they advanced. “We crawled because if you stood up
you’d be killed,” he says, pausing to catch his breath. “All
over the battlefield the wounded were lying there, English
and German, all crying for help. But we couldn’t stop to help
them. I came across a Cornishman ripped from shoulder to
waist by shrapnel, his stomach on the ground beside him. As
I got to him, he said, ‘Shoot me.’ But before I could draw my
revolver, he died. I was with him for the last 60 seconds of his
life. He gasped just one word: ‘Mother.’ That one word has run
through my brain for 88 years. I will never forget it.”
Harry endured several near misses. At one point, four
Germans were running towards him, one with his bayonet
pointing towards his chest. He fired, hitting the German in the
shoulder. When he stumbled on, Harry shot him in the leg,
sparing his life.
A few short weeks later a shell killed Harry’s three best
pals. There in the hellish trenches, Harry had enjoyed the best
friendships of his life. When he received a parcel of tobacco and
cigarettes from his doting mum, he always shared them around,
as did the other lads.
They had slept in lice-infested dugouts with hungry rats
scrabbling at their feet. “We daren’t have anything leather as
they’d chew it away,” he says. “They’d gnaw our laces, so we
kept our boots on. But we let the rats live. We weren’t interested
in rats, just the Germans.”
Relationships between officers and men were not always
so genial. “If you had an officer you didn’t like, one round was
enough,” he says somewhat enigmatically. “But ours were OK.”
Harry’s war service lasted two years, but he has spent
the subsequent 88 years reliving it. Now he finds himself in
increasing demand from the media, who are keen to hear the
voice of a generation that is almost gone.
After the war he worked as a plumber, and he ran his own
successful firm. He met his future wife, Ada, in Birmingham. He
was running for a bus and collided with her as she skipped down
the steps from a cinema. “I picked her up, dusted her down and
took her home,” he says, his eyes lighting up at the memory.
They had 58 years of happy marriage until Ada’s death in 1976.
Both of their sons are now also dead.
Looking
back: Harry
Patch has
seen too
much
SADNESS
He never intended to return to the battlefields. There was just
too much sadness. Eventually someone convinced him that he
should do so. But arriving at Pilkem Ridge, Harry found he could
not bring himself to get out of the coach. “I sat there and cried,”
he says.
He went back a second time some years later to meet the
German veteran Charles Kuentz. The two old soldiers had lunch
at Ypres and spent an emotional afternoon together, often in
silence, as they remembered the noise, gas, mud and the cries
of the fallen.
“He gasped just one word:
‘Mother.’ That one word has
run through my brain for 88
years. I will never forget it.”
issue #206 MAR/07
“It’s a pity he died,” Harry says of the former enemy who
became a friend. “He was the same as me: a pacifist. He
couldn’t see any benefit to war at all.”
Perhaps more than anyone else, he has a right to be cynical
about the way a nation’s youth can be taken to war. When he sees
TV news reports on Iraq or Afghanistan, he worries that history
could repeat itself. He is not the first to wish that, somehow, the
leaders who often get us into these situations could be made to
feel something of the burdon that young men and (these days)
women must carry in wartime. “If leaders can can’t agree, the
best thing would be to give them a rifle each, put them in a field
and let them fight it out,” he says.
Last year, Harry received a letter from Tony Blair, and he
subsequently met the PM. What did he tell him? “Exactly what
I’m telling you. War is organised murder, nothing else.”
He also told Tony Blair his view about the First World War
soldiers who were executed for alleged cowardice or desertion.
“Those people weren’t cowards,” he says. “Whether my words
had any effect, I don’t know. But three days afterwards, the
victims were pardoned.”
JUSTICE
Does he feel guilty surviving? There is no reason why he should,
but luck is a fickle thing, and those, like Harry, who have had it in
spades sometime ponder on the justice of it. His reply suggests
it is a delicate point. “I’ve often wondered…” His voice breaks
and he does not go on. The memories are flooding back.
Perhaps he remembers simply that he was as terrified as
the next man, and no more of a hero. He says that throughout
his time at the front, he dreamt only of going home.
“Stop now,” he whispers, and we do.
Harry Patch is, literally unique, as while a few other
veterans of the war survive, he is the only one who fought in the
trenches. Consequently he has attained some fame late in life.
He received an honorary degree from Bristol University and in
1999 received France’s Ordre National de la Legion d’Honneur.
The medal is displayed in his care home.
The tragedy of the First World War has been covered often
on television over the last few years, but Harry tends to avoid
it. When the home’s kindly matron suggested he might like to
watch a TV play about the war, he refused to tune in. “I don’t
need to watch,” he told her. “I was there.” DF
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