Henry Allingham and
Harry Patch, two of the three surviving British veterans of
the First World War and the last two who saw action in the
trenches of the Western front, died within a week of one another
last month. Allingham was 113 and considered by some estimates
the world’s oldest man. Patch was a spry 111. The last surviving
British veteran of the war is
Claude Choules, 108, who served in the Royal
Navy and lives today in Australia. There are apparently no
surviving German or French veterans; a 108-year-old American and
a 109-year-old Canadian remain.
Men who live this long see a staggering sweep of history. In
Britain, they saw the British Empire fall and then eventually
decline into a country that seems eager to get on with the
business of extinction. Given the changes in fortune and outlook
that occur even in a normal-term life, we can only imagine the
shifts in perspective Allingham and Patch must have experienced.
Both men were modest and unsentimental about their war service.
Patch
told of watching a young soldier’s last moments at Passchendaele,
his body ripped apart, calling out “mother” as he died. In
response to a question about whether the lives Britain had lost
in the war — nearly one million, almost double its deaths in
World War II — had been worth it, he answered, “It wasn’t worth
one.” Allingham spoke of terrible sights at the Battle of the
Somme that would never leave him. “I saw too many things I
would like to forget, but I will never forget them, I can never
forget them,” he said. Their reflections sounded oddly
contemporary, similar to the skeptical views citizens of advanced
nations often have towards war today.
British prime minister Gordon Brown appropriately paid tribute to
both men, at one point describing theirs as “the noblest of all
generations.” While Brown’s sentiment may have been emotionally
sincere, it was almost certainly intellectually dishonest. For
many, Allingham and Patch represented a generation that marched
off to war mindlessly without protest, slaughtered in a senseless
conflict which soon grew beyond the reach of anyone’s ability to
stop it. Their generation embodied the old, death-shrugging ways
of the Empire and the broader West of a century ago. That world
has not only passed into extinction; many of its core assumptions
have been rejected by the generations that followed.
Brown’s “noblest generation” implies an example worthy of
emulation, but no one today wants to relive the deeds of the men
in the trenches, as British agony over the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan makes plain. Perhaps given the change in Western
attitudes toward war since 1918, words like Brown’s are as much
about assuaging the survivors’ guilt of a generation that hasn’t
had to fight as they are about expressing appreciation for the
deceased. Placing World War I combatants on a pedestal of
nobility makes them exalted, ethereal characters. It makes their
sacrifice something almost otherworldly, which helpfully excuses
our own failure to do anything so brave.
Like many veterans, Allingham and Patch seemed eager to be
regarded in more balanced, and more honest, terms. But war makes
balance of any kind difficult to attain, and honesty is no easier
to come by in our time than it was in theirs. The World War I
generation’s capacity to sacrifice for their fellows, to endure
hardship, and to confront horror with courage and grace does,
it’s true, seem far superior to our own abilities. But later
generations’ questioning of the merits of various wars, refusal
to tolerate human costs once largely accepted, and willingness to
challenge the nation-state’s demands on individual liberty, make
their own claims.
We cannot lament the toll of the Great War, and then its
even-worse sequel, without retaining some gratitude that such
global cataclysms have not been repeated. There are many reasons
for that, but modernist skepticism, so debilitating in other
respects, must surely have played a role. The words of Allingham
and Patch, late in their lives, remind us that doubt, too, has
its virtues.
