The name itself tells half the story — Harry Patch the humble private soldier who fought, came home and returned to a life of honourable obscurity. But Harry Patch, the last survivor of the First World War battlefields, was an extra-ordinary man. And that half of his character was only revealed when he was an old, old man.

For most of his life he had chosen not to talk about the blood and mud of France and Flanders. Then, as his years drew to a close, he began to bear witness to the sacrifice of his fallen comrades and he became the embodiment of the most famous line of First World War poetry: “At the going down of the sun ... we will remember them”. The memories were proud, clear and untainted with anger. He mourned the death of the Germans, against whom he fought, as well as the loss of the men with whom he had stood shoulder to shoulder. The schoolchildren, who were his favourite audience, were not urged to rejoice in victory or glory in triumph. Harry Patch preached the gospel of reconciliation.

Yesterday, the order of service at his funeral in Wells Cathedral left no doubt about the message and meaning of his final days. The congregation sang, “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” — a threnody for young men who died in battle when Harry Patch had grown old. And still the world had not learnt the lesson.

It would be absurd to claim that all the crowd that lined the route to Wells Cathedral were there to endorse Harry Patch’s view that nation should speak peace unto nation. The funeral symbolised different things to different people. Some of them were there simply to pay tribute to one old soldier. Others turned out for no better reason than to witness an “event”. Antiquity, in all its forms, fascinates mortal human beings, and Harry Patch was one hundred and eleven years old.

Times Archive 1917 A shattering blow

Never surely has an army been so hammered as the German Army is being hammered here

• Archive topic: Passchendaele

BACKGROUND

• Harry Patch: last survivor of the trenches is laid to rest

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The almost daily pictures of the returning dead from the war in Afghanistan have reminded us all of the debt we owe to our fighting Services. By paying their tribute to Harry Patch, perhaps most of the 5,000 men, women and children who watched the cortège pass — including some who had travelled for many miles — wanted to express their gratitude to generations of soldiers, sailors and airmen. Many of them, if only subconsciously, must have been there because of the thrall in which we are still held by thoughts of what was ambiguously called the Great War. Harry Patch was our last link with a time when soldiers’ lives were cheap.

The politicians called it “the war to end all wars” and for a while the people believed them. Then it became the symbol of pointless sacrifice — the conflict in which generals could believe, and say, that men were more expendable than guns. If there was a season when the mood changed it was the summer of 1916. Fifty thousand men were lost — killed, wounded or missing — on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

Half of the “missing” were drowned in the mud. Most of the bodies that were recovered were buried on the battlefields. But the Thiepval Monument records the names of “the fallen of the British Empire who have no known resting place”. Among them is the uncle I never knew, Private 2042 1/7 Battalion the Sherwood Foresters. He had survived Gommecourt Wood and the Hohenzollern Redoubt before — at the age of 19 and after nearly two years in the trenches — he made his last bayoneted charge. I only watched Harry Patch’s funeral on television, but it seemed to me that it was the last chance to pay public tribute to men such as Private 2042.

Half a generation was slaughtered. On the day that my grandmother received the War Office telegram — “Army Council expresses its deepest sympathy” — all the houses in the Nottingham backstreet where she lived drew the curtains in their front windows. It was not a sign of sympathy for her and respect for her son. Every family in the road had lost a close relative on the same day, in the same battle.

After the Somme, the war poetry changed. Rupert Brooke’s romantic notion that “dying has made us rarer gifts than gold” was replaced by Wilfred Owen’s bitter question, “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?” The gallantry of men and women who died in later wars was no less, and the suffering of their families and friends was just as great. But in our folk memory, 1914 to 1918 have become the years which the village war memorials commemorate. Paying tribute to its last veteran is a mark of gratitude that extends to all the names that were added between 1939 and 1945 and in all the years of conflict that followed. And it is a sign that we believe that the world should have grown out of the waste of war.

Since Harry Patch fought at Passchendaele — official estimate of losses after four months, 244,897 killed, wounded and missing — we have changed some of our ways. Mostly, the changes have been for the better. In Harry Patch’s war thousands of deaths were reported each day as a matter of course. Now we rightly mourn, and question, every loss. Again the poetry tells the story of the gradual change in attitude. In the Second World War, both the false romance and the very real bitterness of 25 years earlier was replaced by an admirable practicality. “Better by far, for Johnny the bright star/ To keep your head and see his children fed.”

We must wait to see what sort of poetry Iraq and Afganistan inspire. But the improvement in the national attitude is clear. Now, whenever a soldier is killed, whatever the circumstances of his death, we wonder if his surviving colleagues are finding Britain the “land fit for heroes” that their great-grandfathers were promised.

Extraordinary though it may seem, the prevailing emotions in the crowd that said goodbye to Harry Patch was probably not all that different from the feelings of the people who turn out in Wootton Bassett to show their respects to the dead of Afganistan, some of them nearly a hundred years his junior. Pride and patriotism. Grief and gratitude. And a determination that the survivors get a fair deal. All those honourable reactions ought to be united in a explosion of joy that an old soldier has died, peacefully, in his bed. The message of his last years was that we have a duty to do all we can to make sure that most lives of service end in the same way.

Roy Hattersley is author of Borrowed Time: The Story of Britain Between the Wars (Abacus)

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