In Memoriam

When Harry Patch died last July, with him went the last living memory of a battle so terrible that even in the infamous annals of the Great War, it had no rival and the name of the tiny Belgian village over which it was fought, Passchendaele, will forever carry a dread reminder of the horror of human conflict. Most of the battle took place on reclaimed marshland, swampy even without rain. The area was only viable farmland thanks to a dense drainage system and after several years of fighting in the area, this was largely destroyed. Mud was a constant feature of the landscape and soldiers and horses often drowned in it. The battle lasted almost a month at the end of which the Allies had captured a mere five miles of territory at a cost of 140,000 combat deaths. Every two inches of ground had cost an Allied soldier’s life. The Germans recaptured their lost ground five months later. Some of the 12,000 Allied soldiers who fell at Passchendaele and the surrounding battlefields are buried at Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world.

A three kilometre pathway, formerly an old railway, leads from the cemetery to the Passchendaele Memorial Museum in Zonnebeke. The museum not only tells the story of Passchendaele with a treasury of battlefield discoveries but stands above a faithful recreation of a British bunker discovered in the town. Zonnebeke, like the village of Passchendaele, was utterly destroyed by constant shelling and became a wasteland of mud and craters where the only way to survive was in underground bunkers. The recreation gives a chilling impression of what life must have been like in these overcrowded, rat-infested warrens.

For Harry Patch, as for hundreds of thousands of other Allied servicemen who fought in the Ypres area, respite from this hell was to be found in the small town of Poperinge, some eight miles east of Ypres itself. Understandably, ‘Pop’ as the troops knew it – soon became a seriously wild, almost frontier, town. However, Harry was a deeply religious man and for him and many like him there was respite, too, from the rowdiness of the place.

On 11th December, 1915, two British Army chaplains, Philip Clayton – universally known as ‘Tubby’ – and Neville Talbot, opened Talbot House, an Every Man’s Club where all soldiers, regardless of their rank, were welcome. It was to be a home from home where soldiers could find physical, mental and spiritual relaxation. Over the next three years some half a million sought out this haven. Harry first visited Talbot House and its garden when he was 17 and finally when he was 106. Today, Talbot House is virtually as it was in 1917 and visitors can not only browse through the rooms but actually stay the night as some soldiers once did.

The atmosphere in the house itself is such that you expect at any moment to stumble upon a Tommy at every turn – in the Chaplain’s Room, much as he left it, in the games room, once the scene of so many last games of billiards, in the lovely chapel, up the steep and well-trodden attic stairs, in the simply furnished bedrooms; their clean, crisp white sheets nothing short of paradise after the unbelievable squalor of the trenches. Another delight, of course, was the dining room. The cuisine of the trenches left a little to be desired. "You were lucky if you got some bully beef and a biscuit," Harry Patch once said. "The biscuits were so hard we used to throw them away. "One day I looked through the metal aperture that we used to fire through, and two dogs were out there fighting over one of our biscuits," he said. "I thought to myself, ‘Well, I don’t know, there’s two animals out there fighting for their lives, and here we are, two highly civilised nations, and what are we fighting over?’"

The walls of every room sport pictures of soldiers relaxing in the garden, playing the piano, sitting quietly with pipe and book. But perhaps the most telling is a framed wartime map with the towns of Ypres, Poperinge and Passchendaele almost obliterated by the still-muddy fingers of Harry and his comrades tracing their fate.