THE FINAL thread of human memory has been snapped. With the recent death of Harry Patch (aged 111), the last of millions of lights has winked out. In a Somerset nursing home last month, the fighting experience of the Western Front shifted forever from the warmth of the living brain to the cold pages of the history book, writes Tom Farrell.
It was pure coincidence that Harry Patch was in Ypres, western Flanders, last September, on the same weekend as my own visit.
Every evening at 8pm, courtesy of a local fire brigade band, the last post blasts out from under the barrel-vaulted interior of the Menin Gate. On September 27th, Harry Patch paid his final visit there.
Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield and completed in 1927, the gate is a neo-classical victory arch, etched with 54,896 names, a kind of architectural corollary to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. For the Menin Gate commemorates not remains without a name, but names without remains.
They are etched into the panels, the soldiers known to have died, but whose bodies were devoured by the mud of the Ypres Salient.
As the fading eyes of Harry Patch, eyes that first opened to see Victorian England, wandered over those walls one last time, he perhaps contemplated how close fate brought him to becoming another name there.
As a 19-year old private at the third Ypres (Passchendaele) Battle in 1917, he took shrapnel in the groin and was recuperating when the armistice was signed.
Random fate was something I contemplated the morning after his visit, as I crossed the highway that links Ypres with Ghevulelt. It was 90 years to the day that my own great grandfather was killed somewhere near that road, one of nearly 35,000 Irishmen lost in the war.
The task of researching family members is made easier by the internet. A few taps of the keyboard and up comes the website of the Commonwealth War Graves Commissions (CWGC). With a name and an address, I was able to learn the exact date and grid reference for his death.
But even online, there are gaps in the picture. So I went to Pearse Street Library and got out Neill's Blue Caps, a history of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers by Col HC Wylly. But the picture still remains obscure.
My family have postcards, carefully stitched with the British and Belgian flags, wishing my grandfather a “Happy birthday from Daddy”. These would have been sent in October 1917. The Military Medal he was awarded suggests he survived Operation Michael, the terrible German offensive of spring 1918 where the Dublins were decimated.
What Wylly’s book did divulge was that on September 27th, 1918, a heavy and continuous bombardment of the entire front began. Early on September 29th, the Lancashire Fusiliers attacked along the front line under an intense barrage of high explosive and smoke. The Dublins, held in reserve, followed to capture territory and pushed forward until by dusk, the 86th Brigade held the line just off the Dadizeel-Gheluvelt Road.
The CWGC informed me that my ancestor was killed a day before and Neill's Blue Capsnotes that the Allies inadvertently took casualties at the start of the bombardment.
Was my great grandfather felled by German fire or did he fall victim to what these days would be called a “friendly fire” incident? It is unlikely I will ever know.
Still, unlike those whose Australian, Canadian or Scottish accents had whispered around the recesses of Menin gate the previous evening, I at least had a grave to visit.
The Hooge Crater Cemetery, designed by Edwin Luytens, takes its name from a roaring detonation that threw a tower of pulverised earth hundreds of feet skywards in July 1915.
As with the more famous Messines Ridge, where southern Irish soldiers and Ulstermen fought alongside each other, a tunnel had been burrowed under the German positions weeks before. It was packed with ammonal, the most potent explosive of the era.
The grey-white slabs of Hooge, kept moss and lichen-free by the CWGC, stretched away and blurred in the distance. Occasionally a wreath or fading poppy was affixed to the headstone of some young Welshman or New Zealander. Of the 5,924 British and Commonwealth graves there, around 3,600 of them were “known unto God”. He was 20 rows from the rear: Private James Murphy, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 1st Battalion. He had been moved to Hooge in July 1919 along with the bodies of two other Dublin privates named Nugent and Horsham, recorded as killed the same day.
Bucolic as the Flanders countryside now looks, it takes only a little effort to visualise the mud and iron nightmare of nine decades ago. But no living person can truly imagine its scale. How can anyone today grasp the awfulness of the moment when the guns fell silent and the men stood with bayonets fixed? The wail of officers’ whistles would have been that of a banshee, calling men and boys to their doom. Scrambling over sandbags, past coils of barbed wire, instant oblivion from a bullet was probably the quickest, cleanest way to die.
It has taken nearly a century for that world to fade forever from human memory. With Harry Patch gone, we will forever look at the first World War across a gulf that can never be crossed.