The Last Fighting Tommy

Thursday, March 26, 2009 7:20 | Filed in Books, History, Reviews

Last year, I bought a book called The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, the Only Surviving Veteran of the Trenches, and promptly placed it in my TBR pile. For one reason or another, it didn’t make its way across to being actively read until this week.

And that’s a shame.

Harry Patch: The Last Fighting Tommy (Amazon)

Harry Patch — now 110 and counting [update: Harry died age 111 on 25th July 2009] — is the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of the first world war. To many of us now, the Second World War is remote history, known only from film cliche, and not from any real experience, even if you have a family connection that is remembered. The First World War is considerably more remote — virtually beyond living memory.

For a book called ‘The Last Fighting Tommy’, I would maybe have expected the book to focus very much on life in the trenches, the suffering and bravers of the ordinary soldiers, and so on. The beauty of Harry’s book is that it doesn’t just do that.

It’s basically the story of his life, not just the first world war, and so in many ways it provides a snapshot of what life was like ‘back then’: what kids got up to, what school was like and so on. There was certainly a lot more ‘discipline’ (of the physical kind) at school, people would let their kids wander off and play in caves in quarries, and children would fire catapults trying to hit bats living in the caves. The past surely is a different country.

Obviously there is a lot about the First World War, some of which may well be different to your preconceptions of it some ninety years later…

We heard rumours, for example, that people in the towns were being given white feathers to embarrass them into joining up, casting aspersions on their manhood if they didn’t. I didn’t see anyone receive one, and no-one tried to hand me one eitherHarry Patch

However, when Harry reached 18, he was soon called up… and qualified as a marksman, not only earning a little extra pay but ending up as the No. 2 for a Lewis Gun team. At this point in the book, Harry’s story is now and again interrupted by other text, setting the scene and giving a more overall view so that it is easier to slot Harry’s memories into the overall context of the war.

You can’t really appreciate what it must have been like to go through simply from reading about it: despite listening to Harry’s stating that there was no sanitation, no clean clothes, sinking into mud, filth, the inevitable rats, how lousy the whole thing was (in terms of both lice and unpleasantness), and boredom interspersed with not knowing whether you would be alive to see the sun set, it’s difficult to actually truly understand the conditions. But sometimes the anecdotes can be very vivid:

We came across a lad from A Company. He was ripped open from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel, and lying in a pool of blood. When we got to him, he looked at us and said, “Shoot me”. He was beyond all human help, and before we could draw a revolver he was deadHarry Patch

Harry was wounded, and sent home to recover, but before he could return to active service the war ended. He returned to his previous career — plumbing — and was improving his status in his chosen profession, and briging up his family, and then the Second World War broke out, during which time Harry served in Britain in the AFS.

We dealt with fires all night as best we could until around 9 a.m. We were just damping down smouldering houses when a warden came along and said that we’d parked our pump across an unexploded bomb. We had no idea. When we bent down, we could see the bomb lying on the road: in the dark we’d almost driven right over the top of itHarry Patch

As a piece of history, viewed through the memories of one man, you get a astonishing picture of what life was like ‘back then’, and not just through the impersonal means of reading a history book: you’re reading about the life of one man, and his memories.

Of course, memories can be fallible, and while I don’t wish to be cynical or disrespectful to Harry, but he is almost always presented in a favourable light in the book. That’s not to say he’s being deliberately misleading, but maybe over the passage of time, some memories have been twisted more towards what he would like to have happened.

Maybe this is just 21st Century Cynicism™, but when Harry is almost always unfailingly painted in a good light — taking a more risky shot to injure an enemy soldier rather than kill him; being elsewhere when his squad have a mini-mutiny; uncovering a scam that was costing his employers money; being sceptical that Chamberlain’s ‘piece of paper’ would work and so on, you start to wonder whether all of these can possibly be correct. If they are, then Harry is even more of an extraordinary man, and deserves my apology.

But it may be the editing: when quoted elsewhere, Harry can be disarmingly honest. For example, in reference to the German soldier he deliberately injured:

Now, six weeks after that, a fellow countryman of his pulled the lever of the gun that fired the rocket that killed my three mates, and wounded me. If I had met that German soldier after my three mates had been killed, I’d have no trouble at all in killing him.BBC History: The Last Tommy Gallery

Now that’s honesty for you. Not always portraying himself in the best light. This book maybe suffers a little from pro-Harry editing which — until I encountered that other source — gave me the impression that maybe Harry’s memories were ‘edited’. But they obviously weren’t: it was the book which was edited — and I think inccorectly so. Harry’s warts-annd-all experiences and thoughts would have told the story better.

But none of this detracts from the story, from the social commentary. For example, the attitude to Black GIs was something that I’d heard of before…

…the warmth and friendliness of British people for Black American GI’s caused the American Military to insist that certain restaurants, hotels in pubs impose a colour bar. In Manchester a number of pubs retaliated by imposing a colour bar of their own, allowing ONLY Black GI’s into their establishments.phrases.org.uk

…but it’s still surprising to hear the differences between the way the British looked upon the black American GIs, and the way the white American GIs looked on them.

One thing I noticed straightaway was that none of the black and white GIs shared a tent. Nor would they walk down the street together. It was very marked that the whites couldn’t stand the blacks. I didn’t know why. I was surprised at the antagonism; in fact, I got on very well with the black troops, not least because I found them better behavedHarry Patch

Harry Patch’s memoirs are fascinating: not simply as a record of what it was like to serve in the First World War (as well as being badly injured and having your mates killed around you) but also in reflecting what society was like in South West England from 1900. It’s a war memoir, but it’s far from being just a war memoir — Harry’s time in the army covers only about 40% of the book.

I’ll leave the last word to Harry, though. I think he deserves it.

They will have written their pieces in the papers for when I finally go; the last trench fighter has to be newsworthy. [...] Well, if they have written the obituary, all I can say is that I hope to live long enough that they will have to update it, and more than once! Then I can fade away. Isn’t that what old soldiers are meant to do?Harry Patch

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    Must read that.

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