The Last Post

The last veteran of World War One, Claude Choules, died this week at the grand old age of 111.  It’s very strange to feel that our last living link to the war has gone.  I was born 12 years after the end of the Second World War and, throughout all of my childhood, “The War” – there was only one – was always there.  (When I read Gone With The Wind many years later the constant references to “Before the war” struck a very familiar chord.)

The influence of Second World War was so persuasive that it was only by logical deduction I knew (this is as a kid, remember) that there must have been a first war for there to have been a second.  I came across my Grandfather’s medals in a long-unopened drawer and my mother reacted with a shuddering horror.  The first world war was a sort of “naughty” war, the one we didn’t speak about, so naturally, that was the one I was interested in!

Incidentally, my mother’s reaction was a classic case of distrusting remembered experience. By her account, my granddad, who together with a approximately 100,000 other Britons, volunteered as soon as war was declared, was stuck in a muddy trench for four years with no training, hardly any food, and no respite while idiotic generals blindly sent wave after wave of trusting Tommies off to die.  There wasn’t any point to the war which had been declared because of the incompetence, stupidity and sheer heartlessness of the upper classes.

That is, of course, a total myth.  The German Army of 1914 was very large, very well trained and very well equipped.  The German war aim was total domination of Europe.  The absolutely chilling plans, as detailed by the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg in September 1914, envisaged the whole of Europe as a puppet state.  Any neutral country would be allowed a figure-head of a leader but would be under German economic control.  France would be “Forced to her knees” which meant, with free access to the Channel ports, the Germans could “Impose their will on England”.

This was a very real threat.  The Germans could have won and for a long time it seemed very likely they would do just that.  They’d had a long time to prepare for the war, while Britain managed a huge Empire with a tiny army that was more akin to a police force. (Hitler could never understand how the British managed it.)  That tiny army had to expand (Hi, Granddad!) be equipped, meet, fight and defeat the enemy in France.  After all, the Germans had invaded France and Belgium and weren’t shifting unless forcibly removed.

In the end, Britain and the Allies won a stunning victory, but the human cost was frightful.  In the Depression of the Thirties, when the homes fit for heroes had failed to  materialize, “Before the war” was seen as a golden age.  What had the war been for?  No one was any better off as a result.  It had all been, so the myth ran, pointless…

But it wasn’t.  Thanks to men like Claude Choules, my granddad and thousands like them, we lived – freely – to fight another day.  Rest in peace.