When the Last Witness Dies
Remembrance Day and the end of memory
The last veteran of the First World War died in 2012. Her name was Florence Green. She served in the Women’s Royal Air Force, worked in the officers’ mess at RAF Marham, and lived to be 110 years old. I did not know this until I looked it up just now. I cannot tell you who the last British male veteran was, or the last French one, or the last German. They are all gone now, every single person who stood in those trenches or flew those rickety planes or drove those ambulances through the mud. The war to end all wars has ended twice—once in 1918, and again when the last person who remembered it died.
This matters more than it seems to.
There are still Second World War veterans alive, but not many, and not for much longer. They are all in their late nineties now, or older. Within a decade, perhaps less, they too will all be gone. And then both World Wars (these vast cataclysms that shaped everything about the world we inhabit) will exist only as history, not as memory. There will be no one left who can tell you what it actually felt like, sounded like, smelled like. No one to contradict the films and the monuments and the tidy narratives we have constructed.
I find this prospect both terrifying and oddly liberating, though I am not entirely sure why.
Temporary
The Cenotaph in Whitehall was not supposed to be permanent. This is the detail that has lodged in my mind like a splinter. Lutyens designed it in 1919 as a temporary structure, of wood and plaster, thrown up for the peace parade. It was meant to last a few weeks. But something about it caught the public imagination. People kept coming. They left flowers. They stood in silence. The government, not quite knowing what else to do, had it rebuilt in Portland stone the following year.
There is something telling about this temporariness. The men who came back from the Somme and Passchendaele and Ypres (those who came back at all) were not thinking about permanent memorials. They were trying to forget, mostly. Trying to sleep without seeing it again. Trying to explain to people who had not been there why they could not explain. The great wave of memorial building, the renaming of streets and parks, the careful preservation of memory, that came later, as the trauma began to scab over, as the need to make meaning from the meaningless asserted itself.
But the original impulse was different. The Cenotaph was supposed to be temporary because the war was supposed to be exceptional. An aberration. A break in the natural order that could be healed. This is what “the war to end all wars” actually meant, not that humanity had learned its lesson, but that we had finally invented death on a scale so appalling that surely, surely, we would not do it again.
We did it again twenty years later.
Bones
Remembrance Day emerged as a response to industrial slaughter. This is the key thing. This was not Waterloo, where you could count the bodies and bury them with some degree of dignity. Actually, that is not quite true. At Waterloo they did bury the dead, after a fashion, but then something remarkable happened. For decades afterwards, merchants sent workers to scour the battlefield for bones. Human bones. They shipped them back to Britain by the ton, ground them up in mills in Yorkshire and elsewhere, and sold the resulting powder as fertiliser. Bone meal. Phosphates for depleted soil. The dead of Waterloo ended up spread across English fields growing turnips.
This was not a secret. The Observer reported on it in 1822. Ships arriving at Hull with tons of bones from European battlefields. There was no scandal, no outcry. The dead were dead. The living needed to eat.
The First World War was different. This was a meat grinder. This was tens of thousands of men killed in a single day, their bodies churned into the mud, unidentifiable, gone. Entire villages and factories lost all their young men. The pals. Families received telegrams and had nothing to bury, nowhere to visit, no body to grieve over. You could not turn these dead into fertiliser even if you wanted to. There were too many of them, and besides, something had shifted. These were not professional soldiers or the swept-up dregs of society. These were conscripts. Everyone’s sons. Everyone’s husbands. Everyone’s brothers.
The two-minute silence, which we still observe, began as a kind of collective gasp. A national holding of breath. On the first Armistice Day in 1919, the whole country stopped. Traffic halted in the streets. Horse and motor. Workers put down their tools. Shop girls stood still behind their counters. For two minutes, an entire nation attempted to comprehend the incomprehensible. Language had failed. Grief was too large. All that was left was silence.
Ritual
I wonder sometimes if we have reached the exhaustion point of memory. If Remembrance Day has become ritual emptied of meaning, or whether ritual is precisely the point. After 106 years, do we remember because we feel something, or do we feel something because we have been taught to remember?
The poppy has become controversial in ways that would have seemed mad in 1920. Some people see it as militarism dressed up as mourning. Others see it as the last thread connecting us to sacrifice we can barely imagine. There are arguments every year about who must wear one, and when, and whether wearing one means you support all wars or just commemorate their dead. The Royal British Legion sells millions of them every year and footballers get castigated if they refuse to have them on their shirts.
None of this would have made sense to the men who came back from Flanders. They were just trying to survive Tuesdays.
Complication
Here is what we lose when the last veteran dies: complication. Living witnesses mess up tidy narratives. They remember strange details—the taste of tinned (corned) beef, the sound of rats in the trenches, the boredom more than the terror, or should that read terror more than the boredom. They contradict the myths. They refuse to be heroic in the ways we want them to be heroic. They were scared, often. They did not always understand what they were fighting for. Some of them enjoyed it, which is the most uncomfortable truth of all.
My grandfather shipped out at the end of the Second World War. He did not fight in it. His father (my great-grandfather) died near Dieppe in 1944 while serving in the Pioneer Corps. The Pioneers. The men who built things, who dug, who cleared, who did the unglamorous work that does not make it into films. He died of a ruptured spleen. I do not know how. Was he shot? Blown up? Was it shrapnel, or a vehicle accident, or something falling on him, or just some stupid piece of bad luck that could have happened anywhere? Nobody ever told me, or if they did I have forgotten, or perhaps nobody knew. He died near Dieppe in the Pioneer Corps. That is all I have. We do not make films about the Pioneer Corps.
My great-grandfather’s older brother was Thomas Pearson. He was 21. He died in the first world war, at Arras on the 23rd of April 1917. He had been in France for 19 months. The battalion diary for the 8th Lincolnshire Regiment five days later, on the 28th of April, contains almost no narrative of their operations. Just: “Battalion in attack. Left of brigade front.” Then casualties.
The advance began punctually at zero hour, 4.20am, but owing to darkness and smoke from the barrage, which completely enveloped the troops, direction was lost. Instead of attacking Cuthbert Trench, the troops turned north and north east. They attacked the wrong trenches. Several of the attackers passed over and far beyond, nearly to Railway Copse. During this advance prisoners were taken and sent back, but were recaptured by the enemy. Gradually those who had advanced returned, unsupported. By nightfall the brigade was back in its original line.
Four officers missing and one wounded. Twenty-two other ranks killed. One hundred and sixty-four wounded. One hundred and five missing. In two battles, the 8th Lincolnshire lost 427 casualties. By the time they reached Beaufort on the 30th they were a skeleton of a battalion.
Thomas Pearson was reported missing on the 1st of June in the Spalding Guardian. “Eldest son of Mr and Mrs Pearson, of Little Duke Farm, Deeping St Nicholas.” Then on the 12th of June, the Lincolnshire Free Press carried the confirmation: “Young Deeping Soldier Killed.” The chaplain wrote to his parents. The Reverend T. H. Hardy. Chaplain to the Forces. “I have been asked to answer your enquiry about your son.” The letter is formal, sympathetic, formulaic in the way these letters had to be when there were so many of them to write. He tells them Thomas was killed on the 23rd of April, the first day of the second advance. “No one now with the battalion is able to give us any particulars of his death.” But his name is on the list of those buried by a Divisional Burial Party. “Carefully and reverently buried with a service conducted by an Army Chaplain.” The burial place will be kept sacred after the war, in accordance with the promise of the French Government.
The chaplain spoke to the men in Thomas’s platoon. “One of the very best. A thoroughly good pal and a fine soldier.” The kind of thing you say about the dead. Maybe it was true. Probably it was true. “On behalf of the Battalion, I offer you and his father our respectful Sympathy.”
On the same day, in the same newspaper, the family placed a notice in the Deaths column. “PEARSON – In loving memory of Thomas Pearson, eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Pearson, Deeping St Nicholas, aged 21. Killed in action April 23rd 1917. – From his sorrowing Father, Mother and Brothers.”
The chaplain was telling the truth. Thomas Pearson has a grave. The white stone is still there, in France, over a century later. The Lincolnshire Regiment badge carved at the top. His number: 16712. His rank: Private. His name. The date: 23rd April 1917. A cross. Grass around it, kept neat by the War Graves Commission, as promised. Someone has photographed it. I have seen the photograph but I have never been there. I have never stood where his parents would have stood, if they could have afforded the journey, if they could have borne it.
My grandfather told me once, when I was asking questions about family and memory, that there were family members who lived in villages not that far away (nothing in the age of the car) but as a child they never visited them. Never saw them. Not once. If you could not afford to visit relatives a few villages over, you could not afford to visit a grave in France. Thomas Pearson’s parents placed a notice in the Lincolnshire Free Press. That was what they could do. That was all they could afford to do.
The grave is there but Thomas Pearson is still gone. His parents are gone. His brothers are gone. Everyone who knew him is gone. All that remains is a name carved in stone and a few paragraphs in local newspapers and a war diary that does not mention him by name, only lists him as one of the 427 casualties in two battles that achieved nothing.
That is all I have.
My grandmother’s side has a sadder story, if that is possible. Richard Christian attested to the militia of the 4th Lincolnshire Regiment in May 1902. He drilled with them until 1908 when the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act disbanded the volunteer and militia units. He joined the Durham Light Infantry during the war, was later transferred to the 409th Company of the Labour Corps—the Kesteven and Lindsay company based at Lincoln. The Labour Corps took men who were wounded or deemed less than A1 fitness. Richard was 34. Either he had been wounded or he was not fit for the front line.
Richard survived the war. On the 19th of November 1918, eight days after the Armistice, he and his wife Kate became parents for the fourth time when baby Kate was born. Three days later, on the 22nd of November, both Richard and his wife died within hours of each other of acute influenza. The Spanish Flu. Baby Kate died on the 29th. I do not even know if that was her actual name, or whether she died too young to have been named at all, and was just recorded as baby Kate because her mother Kate had died a week earlier and someone had to write something down.
Richard is still commemorated by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission under his original regiment and number. He survived four years of war and died eleven days after it ended, not from a shell or a bullet but from a virus, along with his wife and newborn daughter. Three children were left orphaned.
I do not know what to do with this information. I do not know what it means, or what I am supposed to feel about it, or how it fits into our tidy narratives about sacrifice and duty and remembrance. Richard did not die heroically. He did not die in battle. He died at home, of the flu, along with millions of others, in a pandemic that killed more people than the war itself but which we barely remember because it does not fit the story we want to tell.
My great-grandfather died near Dieppe of a ruptured spleen and I do not know how it happened. The not knowing is its own kind of loss. Was it enemy action? An accident? Does it matter? It mattered to him, I suppose, in the moment when whatever it was happened. But that moment is gone now, and everyone who might have known is gone, and all I have is a name on a white grave in France and a cause of death that tells me almost nothing.
What do we do with the deaths that do not fit? What do we do with the 21-year-old who died in the smoke and confusion at Arras, who attacked the wrong trench and died anyway? What do we do with the Pioneer who died of a ruptured spleen near Dieppe, doing whatever he was doing when it happened? What do we do with the man who survived the great war only to die of flu eleven days after the Armistice, taking his wife and newborn daughter with him?
We put their names on graves, plaques, walls, I suppose. We stand in silence. We hope it means something.
Within ten years, every person who remembers the Second World War from the inside will be dead. The war will belong entirely to historians and filmmakers and novelists. It will be tidier. More comprehensible. Less human. We will be able to make it mean whatever we need it to mean, and there will be no one left to say, “Actually, it was not quite like that.”
Forgotten
Korea is called the Forgotten War, and it truly is forgotten. It exists in a strange historical pocket—after the moral clarity of the Second World War, before the moral complexity of Vietnam. British troops fought there as part of a UN force. Seven hundred British servicemen died. There were hard battles. The Gloucesters at the Imjin River were nearly destroyed, but it has somehow slipped out of our collective memory. It appears in Remembrance Day services as a sort of afterthought, mentioned in the list of conflicts but never centred, never given its own weight.
The Falklands I remember, though. I remember it vividly, which is odd because I was young and it was far away and it was over in ten weeks. But it was everywhere. In The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, when the teenage Adrian tells his father the Falklands have been invaded, his father leaps out of bed thinking they are off the coast of Scotland. When Adrian explains they are eight thousand miles away, his father gets back into bed and pulls the covers over his head. That was the joke, but it was also true. Nobody knew where they were. Nobody had thought about them in years.
The task force setting off from Portsmouth, the enormous grey ships, the aircraft carriers, the whole implausible Victorian idea of it, sending a fleet halfway around the world to reclaim some islands we had just discovered we still owned. This was 1982. We still had three channels on the television. The news came on at one o’clock, six o’clock, and ten o’clock, and that was it unless something big enough happened to warrant breaking in.
The Falklands was big enough. It broke in constantly.
I remember the names of things in a way I cannot quite account for. Exocet missiles. Sea Harriers. The Royal Marines. The Paras. The SAS were there too, though nobody talked about them much at the time, or showed them, or explained what they were doing. I remember the sinking of the Belgrano. I cannot remember the Sun’s “Gotcha” headline at the time (I was eight) but I know of it now, and even decades later it seems obscene, triumphal in a way that makes you queasy. Three hundred and twenty-three men had just died. Three hundred and twenty-three Argentinians. They did not matter in the same way. I remember the Sheffield and Sir Lancelot burning. I remember Goose Green and Tumbledown and names that sounded made up, like something from a children’s book about empire.
I had an older friend I played football with at the local pub. He joined the Royal Navy at 16. His father had been in the Parachute Regiment and had fought at Suez. The father came off the North Sea trawlers and always joked he joined the Paras for an easier life. My friend went to the Falklands. I cannot recall which ship he sailed on. I do remember him telling me the scariest thing was when the Argentinian planes came inbound. His post was in the weapons control room in the centre of the ship, down below. All the bulkhead doors and hatches locked down. No escape if the ship was hit or sank. Just sitting there in the dark, watching the radar, waiting, hoping the Exocet missed or the Sea Darts worked or the plane ran out of ammunition before it reached them.
He threw his medals away afterwards.
After the war ended, I had a poster on my bedroom wall celebrating the victory. It had all the ships involved, with graphics of each ship and its badge. I would throw darts at it, pretending they were Exocet missiles. I was a child. I was playing. I did not know what it meant to sit in the dark below the waterline waiting for the missile to hit. I did not know my friend had thrown his medals away. I have written about playing war and memory before, but the gap between the game and the reality never stops being obscene.
I remember it ending, and Thatcher on television, and the victory parade, and the feel-good fever dream that carried her to the 1983 election. And then I remember it vanishing. Not slowly, not gradually, but suddenly, as if someone had turned off a tap. One moment it was the only thing anyone talked about. The next it was gone, filed away, no longer relevant. The Falklands veterans came home and went back to their lives and we went back to ours and that was that.
Thatcher had her next war a year later. The Miners’ Strike. This one was not eight thousand miles away. This one was in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire and Wales and Scotland. This one was not against the Argentinians. This one was against the working class. She called them the enemy within. Police on horseback charging picket lines. Communities ripped apart. Men who had worked underground their entire lives watching their pits close one by one. No victory parades for that war. No poppies. No two minutes of silence. Just defeat, and the slow dying of entire towns, and the lesson learned: this is what happens when you fight back. The Falklands gave her the political capital to wage war on her own people. The bodies were different but the principle was the same. Sacrifice the expendable to secure the interests of capital and empire.
Iraq and Afghanistan—we are still processing these, still arguing about them, still waiting to know whether they were necessary or disastrous or both. The veterans are still here, still dealing with what they saw, and we do not quite know what to do with them. We say “thank you for your service” because Americans do, and we dutifully mention 2009 in our Remembrance Day programmes, when 108 British troops died in our bloodiest year, but it does not carry the same sacred weight. It cannot. There is no clear narrative. There is no “the war to end all wars.” There is just oil and reconstruction contracts and private security firms and lads from Sunderland and Glasgow coming back in boxes or with PTSD while someone else got rich.
We send arms to Israel and lay wreaths at the Cenotaph on the same weekend. We talk about supporting our troops and then make them wait months for mental health treatment. The gap between the rhetoric and the reality is so vast you could lose an entire generation in it. The working class fights the wars. The middle class mourns them. The upper class profits from them. This has always been true, but we are supposed to pretend it is not, especially on Remembrance Day, especially during the two minutes of silence when we are all meant to be united in solemn reflection.
But Thomas Pearson was a farmer’s son from Deeping St Nicholas. Richard Christian was a labourer. My great-grandfather was a farm labourer who ended up in the Pioneer Corps. They did not profit from the wars they fought. Neither did my friend who sat in the weapons control room waiting for the Exocet, or the Falklands veterans who came home to unemployment and Thatcher’s Britain, or the Iraq veterans who came home to find the yellow ribbons had been taken down and nobody wanted to talk about it anymore.
The truth, uncomfortable as it is, is that Remembrance Day belongs to the World Wars. Everything else is an addendum. And perhaps even the World Wars, for all their sacred weight in our national mythology, were not quite what we have made them. They too were really about empire and capital and the working class dying for interests that were not their own. But that is not a thought we are encouraged to have during the two minutes of silence.
November
I do not know what we are actually doing on Remembrance Day anymore. We are remembering people we never knew, wars we never fought, in a world that has been utterly transformed. The farmers and factory workers who enlisted in 1914 would not recognise this country. The empire they fought for does not exist. The certainties they held (about duty, about England, about the natural order of things) have dissolved.
Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps remembrance is not about accurate historical reconstruction but about maintaining some connection to the idea that war costs something, that death matters, that we owe something to those who came before. Even if we are not sure what we owe them, or how to pay it.
The temporariness of the first Cenotaph was not naivety. It was hope. Hope that such remembrance would become unnecessary. That we would not need permanent memorials because there would be no more wars of that kind. The fact that it became permanent, that we are still standing in silence 106 years later, is not a triumph. It is an admission of failure.
We kept having wars. We kept needing to remember. And now the people who could tell us what we are remembering are leaving us, one by one, until soon there will be none left at all.
What will we do then? Will we stop? Will we continue? Will it matter?
I do not know. I suspect we will carry on because we do not know how to stop, because ritual becomes its own justification, because the silence is easier than the conversation we would have to have if we broke it.
On November 11th, I will stand still for two minutes. I will think about Florence Green, who I never knew existed until today. I will think about Thomas Pearson, 21 years old at Arras, his grave still there in France with his name carved in white portland stone. I will think about my great-grandfather, who died near Dieppe in the Pioneer Corps of a ruptured spleen, and I will not know how it happened, and that not-knowing will have to be enough. I will think about Richard Christian and his wife Kate and baby Kate, dead within eleven days of the Armistice, not from war but from flu, their deaths not quite fitting the narrative we prefer. I will think about the temporary structure that became permanent, the exceptional war that became routine, the memory that is becoming history.
Then the two minutes will end, and we will all go back to our lives, and nothing will have changed, and everything will have changed, and the last witnesses will be one year closer to silence.