The last fighting Tommy. Remembered

The final British soldier of the Great War passed away this week. Claude Choules, who was 110, died in a nursing home in Australia. He was the final combat troop to see the surrender of the German Imperial Navy and the scuttling of the fleet at Scapa Flow. For a long time, we have counted down a final resting place for this selfless generation to a war that no one wanted to talk about.

The interesting thing about Britain and war is that we seem to revel in all elements of it. Military terminology is laced in sporting adjectives and the Royal Wedding would not have been complete without a flyover from a Hurricane, Lancaster and the Spitfire. The current trend is raising money for cancer and armed forces charities, yet to a great extent Britain, until the Second World War, Britain was quite a pacifistic nation. World War One is inherently apart of that.

Empire was not necessarily conducive towards war-mongering and despite the ugly images of Amritsar, Hola or Palestine, Britain did its very best to keep the peace with few patrolling on the ground. In historical terms, British generals tend to be lionised because victories tended to come by surprise; mainly because our geography saw a greater need in sea power rather than land forces. The likes of Blenheim (Marlborough), Waterloo (Wellington) and El-Alamein (Montgomery) are etched in the nation’s psyche, yet other historical land battles are hard to come by.

Britain has had few, certainly over the past two centuries, army generals as Prime Ministers. The Duke of Wellington (Arthur Wellesley) stands out, yet the greater demands of Parliamentary democracy intertwined with Empire meant that Westminster had less input from military minds. Even Cromwell’s New Model Army was disbanded after it defeated the Charles the First’s loyalists. Compare that to the likes of continental Europe who saw military men dominate domestic politics for a century further.

The origins of World War One are often manifested in the Congress of Vienna, a century earlier that did not prevent all wars (Crimean, Franco-Prussian) but negated all out continental war. This was the first war that Britain legally enforced enlistment. This was common in Germany and France, yet Britain, who tended to avoid European affairs, finally asked its men to enrol. We now know, the pageantry and patriotism became blurred and much of Europe was converted into blood lands. The massacres and suffering decimated a generation and inflicted the vivid horrors of mechanical war to the ordinary.

People like Choules, and those that have gone before him, did not revel in their situation. To them it was pure and simply about duty. World War Two is frequently embedded in our national psyche because we did not see the wide scale human suffering across Europe. We remember the likes of Coventry and HMS Hood, and those who died. However, we do not lament the struggle of the Blitz, Dunkirk or the Battle of Britain. These are scorched in our memories as times of community and celebration. World War Two was an occasion when we emerged from the dark perils of solitude to emerge as victors. World War One was intolerable, unimaginable and suffering. The fighting was not brave because no one entirely knew what would ensue. Inevitably, men were slaughtered and families destroyed. The Great War should never be deemed as a grey conflict that preceded the heroism and gallantry of World War Two, it was a story in itself. Choules, was part of a generation of men that went over the top with the uncertainty of what would happen. The tragedy of the Great War was not the diplomacy and politics that happened after, it was the slaughter on the Somme, Passchendaele and Verdun. We should all remember that.

The life of Henry Moseley

Consequential theory in history, where academics forsee what could have happened has become very popular. What if D-Day had failed? What if the Cuban Missile Crisis went disastrously wrong? It is impossible to predict such events but it is interesting what scenarios could have befallen us. It also makes one think what would have happened if certain people had survived, would the world be a better place or worse?

The wasteful expenditure of life is written in poetic prose that encapsulated the horrors and the destitution of youth through the eyes of Rosenberg, Owen and Graves. It is something learnt by all school children in history and continued through life at Armistice Day and on Remembrance Sunday. I wonder whether people now look at town cenotaphs and recognise the dead. For some it is just a plaque scrawled with the names of thousands of men who died in a Foreign Field. When you study the individual names and the real people that died, it highlights their meekness, mercy and honour. It is true that many died in vain but it neglects their own private mortal history.

Commemorated at Helles memorial is a name unfamiliar with most people, but a scientist who made an impact in his short life. Henry Moseley was an English physicist who at the young age of 25 observed and measured through an X-Ray spectra that every element had a different energy signature, all relating to the number of protons within an atom; the atomic number. It was through these experiments that Moseley was able to decipher that at this sub atomic level we could work out the order of the periodic table and importantly, how many elements there were. Unlike atomic mass, atomic numbers are integers i.e. they categorically left no gaps meaning scientists could identify there were only 92 elements. As a scientist, Moseley did not have to enlist but did so through duty. He was tragically killed at Gallipoli in 1915 leading to the government to ratify that scientists would not be allowed to join the frontline. One colleague remarked:

“In view of what he might still have accomplished his death may well have been the most costly death in the war to the whole of mankind.”

Speculation surrounds whether Moseley may have received the Nobel prize for Physics a year later, but the amount he contributed to this world in his short life, like others, exacerbates the great loss to us all.

Sportsmen at war: The Killing Fields.

2010 will be the first time that all 20 Barclay’s Premiership clubs will bestow a place on their shirts for the British Legion’s poppy of remembrance. In the past few years, football crowds have become used to minutes of applause in respect to their fellow professionals and for other celebrated figures of the game that have died; though admittedly, applause appears to hide the otherwise boisterous minority observed during a minute’s silence. The Poppy Appeal has become more visible with Britain’s involvement in recent international conflicts and certainly sportsmen and women have contributed a great deal to help those affected by war injuries. Twickenham has held many events to raise money and create awareness for injured servicemen and women. Sport has a great history in war and in previous generations it was common to see sporting heroes of the day to enlist for frontline service, something unimaginable by today’s professionals.

World War One was the first time that British men enlisted en masse to fight for their country; something common on the continent but new to Britain, but this was a desperate occasion. One of the most popular ways of drumming up support was through the ‘pal’s battalion’. This simply was creating platoons of men from local industries or communities; it was literally fighting at the front with your next door neighbour and best school friend. As we know, the war wasn’t over before Christmas and many battalions were massacred. 584 out of the 720 men of the Accrington Pal’s were killed, missing or injured on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Rows upon rows of houses, in the small Lancashire town, had their curtains drawn in their early days of July 1916. Communities were destroyed by the futile clamour over the top, over and over again.

Perhaps one of the most moving stories is that of the Hearts team. The squad of the 1914/15 side had won their first title since 1897 and had won eight games on the trot, including a game against the Danish national side. It was during this season that amateur sports like rugby, golf and hockey had stopped, as more men signed up to go to the front. In fact, the Glasgow Herald questioned after the November 1914 Old Firm clash how much the fates of Rangers and Celtic mattered when the ‘greatest of all internationals’ was being played in Europe. It was not until late November when the Royal Scots was formed and all of Hearts’ first XI and five reserves enlisted. Many of their fates were sealed along with many others on the first day of the Somme. Inside forward Henry Wattie and Duncan Currie both fell on the first day. Paddy Crossan was wounded by a shell and his lungs ruined by gas. He was so badly injured that his right leg was labelled for amputation, he begged the German surgeon not to amputate saying, ‘I need my legs, I’m a footballer.’ His leg was saved and he survived the war but died in 1933.

It wasn’t just football that suffered. World number one and New Zealand tennis player Tony Wilding was killed by shell fire. England’s rugby captain Ronnie Poulton-Palmer was killed at Ploegstreert Wood. Around 34 county cricketers were killed in combat, including the Warwickshire all-rounder Percy Jeeves. It is said that P.G. Wodehouse’s character Jeeves was named after him. Wodehouse had been a great fan.

The same thing happened during World War Two, though many sportsmen were not posted to frontline positions like their previous generation. High-profile footballers like Tom Finney served in Monty’s Eighth Army in North Africa and Stan Matthews served his time in the RAF. Not all were fortunate, Hedley Verity, the Yorkshire and English spin-bowler was killed in action at Monte Cassino and the Ajax footballer Eddy Hamel was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

War is no longer fought on such grand theatres and mass enlistment/national service no longer exists. It is no use to ask hypothetical questions of whether today’s professionals would do the same, it is best to reflect that these men represented their countries at the highest level in sport and delayed their careers for more purposeful causes, often with their lives’. Their stories paint ones of humility and heroism, Premiership footballers may play in hostile arenas in Europe; but ultimately it was nothing like Ypres, Passchendaele or the Somme.

The Unknown Soldier of the Great War.

Today in France, after 94 years, soldiers of Great Britain and Australia were finally laid to rest in Fromelles. I guess many people will wonder why that after so many years would so much effort and perspective be made to such an insignificant part of history. I found that previous sentence extremely difficult to phrase because I believe, even coming up to a century, these men are worth remembering and it would be a blotch on our own history to deny them that right.

World War One is etched in everyone's memory as bloody, attritional and inevitably wasteful. It was a war in Europe that Marshall Foch predicted would eventually settle nothing; it saw specks of hope in the Christmas Day truce; but ultimately the canvas would paint the grey, vivid and ugly slaughter at Verdun, the Somme, Ypres. It was the first time Britain and the Commonwealth conscripted on mass and it was first time that every family Britain was affected with some form of loss.

Yet, despite the suffering and the huge gap in history denied to these men, the reburials and the identification of some of the remains give new gloss to the Great War. The ineffable legacy of the Unknown Soldier and his worthy sacrifice is being replaced by the reinstallation of dignity, of his soul, of his being, even his name. Millions suffered for the rest of their lives; but we can now respect them as people, not purely as statistics.