The Last Veteran by Peter Parker

Author:Peter Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

FOUR

Head Count 2000–2009

Old soldiers never never die;

They simply fade away …

First World War song

There remain large parts of France and Belgium where it is impossible to forget the First World War. It is a haunted landscape, where the dead are ever present. This is precisely what the Imperial War Graves Commission intended. When in 1937 Fabian Ware reported on ‘the work and policy’ of the IWGC during its first twenty years in a slender volume called The Immortal Heritage, he calculated that in France and Belgium alone there were nearly a thousand specially built cemeteries. Within them were some 600,000 uniform headstones, supported by 250 miles of buried concrete beams and set in 540 acres of lawn, the grass of which had all been grown from seed. The cemeteries were enclosed by 50 miles of walls, and a further 63 miles of hedging had been planted. In addition, eighteen monuments to the missing had been erected, with some 54,000 names (40,000 of them British) recorded on the Menin Gate, another 35,150 (34,000 of them British) on the Tyne Cot Memorial, 22,500 (all British) on the Ploegsteert Memorial, 35,080 (all but eighty British) on the Arras Memorial, and an overwhelming 70,830 (70,000 of them British) on Lutyens’ Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, which dominates the skyline at Thiepval. In 1937 the missing themselves were still turning up at a rate of twenty to thirty a week, and some 38,000 of them had been discovered ‘by accident’ since official searches had been abandoned in September 1921. Even in the late 1980s the land would give up some twenty to thirty bodies a year.

Great Britain has nothing to compare with these acres of the dead. The few casualties buried here mostly died in hospitals after being invalided home. Small clusters of IWGC headstones are occasionally found in churchyards or cemeteries, but there are very few cemeteries containing multiple casualties of the First World War: the largest is the Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey, which contains 1,601 burials; the St James’s Cemetery, Dover, contains 392 bodies, including those of nine unidentified men killed in the Zeebrugge naval raid in 1918; while the Cliveden War Cemetery in Buckinghamshire contains the graves of forty of those who died while supposedly recuperating from wounds on Lady Astor’s estate, most of them Canadian.

Even so, reminders of the dead of the First World War are everywhere. Almost every city, town or village has its war memorial, either in the churchyard, on the village green, or at some other focal point of the community. Carved in stone or cast in bronze, Tommies stand with heads bowed and rifles reversed, remain on guard challenging all comers, wave encouragement to their comrades, or – as in Cambridge – stride off to battle bare headed with an almost unbearably jaunty optimism. Elsewhere angels and eagles stretch their wings protectively or fiercely, St Georges slay dragons, and victors flourish palms. Crosses, obelisks and urn-topped columns display their overfilled ledgers of the dead.

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