(First blogged 25th July 2009)
The press will no doubt be full of it tomorrow, but I can’t let this pass without saying something.
Harry Patch is dead, aged 111. The Last Tommy. And that’s a thing that seems to me somehow infinitely sad, for reasons that mine is probably the last generation to understand. And I want to commemorate it, no matter how distantly disconnected I might be.
Both my grandfathers fought in the 14-18 war. Both survived, but a great-uncle was killed in the first wave on the Somme. It was over 35 years before I was born, but the mere fact of knowing my grandfather meant that it coloured my thinking about war and government and what it meant to be part of the human race. We studied the poets at school, we tried to fathom the madness in our history lessons, we stared in horror at the photographs and the flickering monochrome film of Tommies going over the top.
It won’t be understood. The bare facts tell you nothing. But Harry Patch’s account of the Cornishman begging to be shot, then dying with the word ‘mother’ on his lips, is vivid and real. Or was, because now there’s no-one left to tell these stories.
So RIP, Harry. RIP with my long dead scoutmaster great-uncle at Beaumont Hamel. RIP with the latest unnamed soldier from 40th Regiment Royal Artillery The Lowland Gunners, attached to The Black Watch, 3rd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, killed in action today on a vehicle patrol in Lashkar Gah District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
I don’t need to say any more about this. Harry already has, and lived to the extraordinary age of 111 telling anyone who asked that war is futile. These are his words:
‘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.’
