Harry Patch, 109, recalls his career in Kitchener’s army
Two years ago, when he was a mere spring chicken of 106, the last surviving Tommy, Harry Patch, was invited to inspect the Lewis guns at the museum of his old regiment, the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, in Bodmin, Cornwall.
To help jog his memory, a young major in his party fumblingly demonstrated how to change the magazine. ‘I said: “Major, you’d have to be quicker than that in action,”’ recalls Harry in his soft Somerset burr. ‘I said: “Here. Give me the Lewis gun and set your watch.” So I took the magazine off and put a new one on. “There. Now how long was that?” I said. “Two seconds,” they said.’
How marvellous it is to be in the presence of living history. At 109, Harry may be only Britain’s second oldest man but he holds distinctions far more extraordinary than that: he is the only man left to have fought at Passchendaele; the only one left to have gone over the top. Indeed, of the five million infantrymen who fought between 1914 and 1918, Harry Patch is now the last man standing.
‘No idea,’ says Harry, when you ask him the obvious: how on earth he made it so far. He doesn’t drink; he gave up smoking when he was 60; he does a little light stretching when he feels like it, but that’s about it. ‘I’m happy and I don’t have any ambitions. I achieved what I wanted when I became a member of the Royal Sanitary Institute, when I wanted to be either a building inspector or a sanitary engineer.’
Which does, rather, put Harry’s world view into perspective. As far as Harry’s concerned he’s a retired plumber whose rich and varied life — at least by the cloistered standards of his rustic-idyll childhood in Combe Down, near Bath — has included two marriages, two sons and stints as fireman in Bath during the Blitz and working with GIs during the build-up to the Normandy landings.
But for almost everyone else, the only part of Harry’s life that counts is the tiny segment of it (one 54th) he spent serving as a private in Kitchener’s army from his call-up in October 1916, through the third battle of Ypres — Passchendaele — to his discharge two years later.
A few days before the 90th anniversary of his first journey over the top at Passchendaele I’ve come to his (very friendly, well-run) state care home in Somerset to squeeze out of this gentle, surprisingly lucid old boy with clear blue eyes and still-perfect sight his most painful Great War memories.
Among the worst is that of the ‘lad from A Company’ he encountered on his way up the line, ripped from shoulder to waist by shrapnel. ‘Shoot me,’ gasped the boy, but before anyone could draw a revolver he was dead. ‘And the final word he uttered was “Mother!” I was with him in the last seconds of his life. It wasn’t a cry of despair, it was a cry of surprise and joy. I think his mother was in the next world to greet him and he knew it. And from that day I have always remembered that cry, and that death is not the end.’
For years afterwards, Harry couldn’t bring himself to discuss the war. Only after his 100th birthday did he begin to tell the stories which, even now, cause him to choke up halfway through and descend into mournful introspection. It was the fate of his Lewis-gun crew which grieves him most. They were a tight-knit group, bound by the fact that as machine-gunners with the telltale ‘suicide badge’ (a laurel wreath with LG in the middle) on their sleeves, they were all for the chop if the Hun ever captured them.
‘We shared everything. If you had a pair of clean socks and a fellow had socks with holes in it, he’d have the clean socks and threw the others away. I remember Bob [his crew’s no. 1] had a good thick sweater when he came out one time, and whoever was on lookout that night had that sweater on.’
Every fortnight Harry halved his parcel of Royal Seal tobacco with the crew’s other pipe smoker, while his two packs of 20 BDV cigarettes went to the other three, 13 each, with everyone taking turns to get the one extra. ‘To calm nerves almost all men smoked, and if they could get enough, they would chain-smoke.’ To hide any tell-tale glow, Harry smoked his pipe upside down with his thumb over the tobacco so that it didn’t fall out.
On 16 August 1917, after much anxious waiting, Harry’s five-man Lewis team took their turn to go over the top into the no-man’s land rendered a quagmire by constant shelling and the unseasonal rain. ‘We were always told, going up or coming back, that if a fellow slipped into a shell-hole filled with water, to leave him there because it was liquid mud; if you tried to get him out, you’d go in yourself and that was it.’
Driven forward by an officer with drawn revolver (‘I got the distinct impression by the set look on his face that anyone that didn’t go over would be shot for cowardice’), Patch and his pals advanced through a sea of bodies. They had a pact: ‘Bob said we wouldn’t kill, not if we could help it. He said: “We fire short, have them in the legs, or fire over their heads, but not to kill, unless it’s them or us.”’
Somehow they survived the attack unscathed but not the return to the rear, a month later. ‘The only thing I saw was a flash; I can’t recall any noise at all but I certainly felt the concussion of that shell bursting. I looked down and saw blood oozing out from the area of my stomach.’ Harry had copped the Blighty wound which would see him safely home and out of the war. The no. 3, 4 and 5 of his crew were blown to pieces.
Harry Patch never wanted to go to war and never saw it — as Sidney Rogerson or Ernst Jünger did — as his making. ‘It’s a waste of time,’ he says, 90 years after seeing some of its worst at Passchendaele. ‘Each war is conducted by people sitting in a comfortable office and not the ones stuck in the bloody trench.’
The Last Fighting Tommy by Harry Patch with Richard Van Emden is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). James Delingpole’s Coward on the Beach is published this week by Bloomsbury.