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Sunday 27 May 2012

Reflections on Passchendaele

The last Tommy says: 'It was a waste of time'

Harry Patch, 109, recalls his career in Kitchener’s army

‘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.

More articles from: James Delingpole | this section

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