The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War. Peter Parker

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ