A wise old West Country man
A book just published about Somerset's Harry Patch, The Last Veteran, is the work of a professional writer who never met the old soldier and did not even know he would be the subject of it until a week before he died.
Yet it comes closer to the essence of Patch than any number of well-meaning tributes to him published before and at the time of his death in late July. Which is quite a tribute to the London-based author Peter Parker, who had no idea who the last veteran would be when the bulk of his book was written.
That said, in any number of ways, he's pleased that it was Harry Patch.
"I wrote an earlier book about the Great War, and was approached to do this one three or four years ago," he says. "There were nine possible candidates back then, and I knew whoever it turned out to be, it would be a more or less ordinary man who had enjoyed extraordinary longevity.
"I said I could do it only if I could incorporate the last veteran's story into a wider exploration of the way World War I has been thought about and commemorated, and how it has affected not just its own but later generations, and the values we have today.
"And that's what I did. Most of the book was written long before the last veteran, whoever it turned out to be, died. As it happened, there was just a week between the death of Henry Allingham at the age of 113 and Harry Patch, who was briefly Britain's oldest living man, at 111.
"With the greatest respect in the world to Henry Allingham, I'm glad it was Harry. He had been a Tommy, an infantryman in the trenches, while Allingham had been in the Royal Naval Air Service and RAF.
"It was the Tommies who were central to so many people's concept of the war.
"Apart from that, though Henry Allingham had spoken out against war, he was a more conventional man than Harry Patch, more willing to play the Establishment game.
"I also felt an affinity to Harry because he was a son of the English countryside, and I'm from rural Herefordshire. My father was a farmer at Pembridge and my mother still lives there, though I'm now in East London."
It is ironic that many people's abiding image of Harry Patch will be of him as one of the ever-dwindling band of World War I veterans who were helped or wheeled up to the Cenotaph in Whitehall to lay wreaths on Remembrance Sunday.
In fact, for most of his life he shunned the ceremony, dismissing it as "just show business". His own remembrance, he explained, came on September 22, the day in 1917 when a number of his mates were killed and he himself was invalided out of the war: "I'm always very, very quiet on that day, and I don't want anybody talking to me."
Towards the end, however, he knew what was expected of him, and went along with it – while never missing an opportunity to speak out against the futility and stupidity of war, and to stress that soldiers of all sides, friend and foe, should be honoured in the remembrance; German soldiers marched alongside his coffin at Wells Cathedral on August 6.
Peter Parker fears that this wise old West Country voice – all the more haunting as it was reduced to an other-worldly whisper in the final years – is already sorely missed, and will become increasingly so.
"He was contrary, bloody-minded in a very English kind of way, and not cowed at all," he explains. "He'd lived through a time when World War I veterans were publicly revered as heroes, but came back to suffer unemployment and all manner of hardships.
"He went for years not saying much, but he repressed what he felt, and when all that bottled-up emotion rose to the surface, it came out in grief and anger.
"A lot of this country's views about World War I have been shaped by the poets who experienced it and wrote anti-war poetry as a result of it – writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden," he says.
Parker also perceptively homes in on the late Sixties, when America's exploits in Vietnam appalled the rock 'n' roll generation of the entire Western World, and a succession of films and plays, culminating in the bitter Oh! What a Lovely War, seemed simply to reflect what was the accepted wisdom.
It is a legacy that lives on, and if you look around this weekend, you will not see an over-abundance of red poppies blooming on the lapels of the ageing baby boomer generation.
Most of them have grown to know the Royal British Legion is a blameless organisation looking after the interests of ex-service people in need – yet to buy one of their poppies seems somehow a betrayal of youthful idealism.
"More recently, revisionist historians have argued that the popular 'Lions led by Donkeys' view of World War I is not correct," says Peter Parker.
"For instance, they reason that the last year before the armistice was well fought, British strategies were good – and after all, we did win the war.
"Where Harry Patch had an enormous advantage and was of priceless value was that he'd been there, he'd seen it – and he knew the truth.
"Now that he's gone, and all the rest have gone, we don't have anyone to left to say: 'I know what I'm talking about. I know what it was like. I was there'."
The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War, by Peter Parker. Fourth Estate, £14.99
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