Thoughts on Harry Patch

This year marks a century since the start of the First World War. In 2009, a gentleman named Harry Patch died. Harry was one of the last known British soldiers to have survived the war. He was 111 when he died. He only spoke about the war when he was 100. For more than three quarters of a century he avoided films and books on the subject. Hid from any reference to it whatsoever. He simply couldn’t go there.

I’ve thought a lot about Harry. He used his last decade of life to try and bring some context to the futility of war. To articulate why, in his words, “war is the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings". And why no political agenda can justify it. He said, “It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands. T’isn’t worth it … the First World War, if you boil it down, what was it? Nothing but a family row. That’s what caused it.” No other person can speak with the same authority on the subject. Harry was there. He saw it all. And try as he did, he was never able forget it.

Harry has made me think about how I have a son. He’s five now. I can take a long blink, open my eyes and he’ll be 15. Then 18. Followed by 20 and so on. That’s how it works. We all know this. All of the years ahead will pass by in a haze. Filled with life. All kinds of it. The mundane. The spectacular. The tough. But life nonetheless. A century ago, it could’ve been my boy at 18 called up by his country to serve in the war. Called up to fight to protect a government’s ideal. To defend. To kill. And the odds are that he would have been one of the casualties in a fight that was not his fight. As so many were. Young men. Boys really. Barely out of their teens. Each boy with their own history. The owners of a collection of unique experiences and memories. Gifted with life. Until it was gone. Taken. And the boys who made it back home haunted by a terror they couldn’t escape. A terror locked in their hearts and minds. Lives changed forever. Harry described a harrowing memory of his own:  “We came across a young lad from A Company. He was ripped open from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel and lying in a pool of blood. When we got to him, he said: 'Shoot me'. He was beyond human help and, before we could draw a revolver, he was dead. And the final word he uttered was 'Mother.' I remember that lad in particular. It's an image that has haunted me all my life, seared into my mind."

As much as I think of my son here, I think too of each of those mothers who sent their sons to do their duty for their country. Held their boys one last time. Flesh of their flesh. Waved goodbye. Pride and fear sitting uncomfortably together. Helpless. Vulnerable. One can only imagine their trauma. And the sense of their grief and loss. And anger. “All those young lives lost in a war which ended across a table. Where's the sense in that?” Harry asked. There is no sense in it. In any of it. Not to Harry. Not to a generation of soldiers and their families. Not to me looking in a whole century later.

I think of my boy now and as his mother, I cannot comprehend living in a time where the innocents are led to the slaughter in such a way. Except the sad truth is that I don’t have to imagine it. None of us do. We don’t have to go back 100 years. Or even 75 years to the Second World War,  67 years to start of the Cold War, 58 years to the Vietnam War or 24 years to the Gulf War... There's simply no need. War is being waged right now. This very second. Men and women are fighting under the tenets of freedom, religion, money and power. Killing each other. Families are still being torn apart. Mothers are still grieving the loss of their sons. We live in a world where at the absence of constructive dialogue, the default setting is still violence.

I can’t help but think that surely there can be another way? I’m no fanatical. I have no hippy tendencies. No pet goat. I’m a simple girl with simple ideologies. But even I have to ask…surely there’s an alternative to all the bloodshed? Just how united is the ‘United Nations’? What went on at Davos besides a whole lot of fine talk, fine food and wine and a flurry of selfies? As Harry says, “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder." Food for thought indeed Harry. As much as we’ve come a long way from 1914, have we really? Sometimes I'm not so sure...

Damascus, Syria - 2014

Paris, France - 1914