Halestrap’s future stretched farther ahead than he could possibly have imagined that November morning. Eighty-five years later to the day he would lead a service of remembrance at the Menin Gate at Ypres, rising from his wheelchair to recite lines from Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
First published in The Times on 21 September 1914, and intoned at countless Armistice Day services since, Binyon’s lines have become almost too familiar, but were given a new immediacy when spoken by a 105-year-old who by November 2003 was one of a handful of men still alive to have served in what, with good reason, is still sometimes called the Great War. Given the appallingly high casualty rates, few of those who fought on the Western Front had any realistic expectations of growing old or being wearied by age. Some who survived, however, attained very great ages indeed, achieving the rare distinction of having lived in three centuries.
Born on 8 September 1898, Arthur Halestrap could remember his parents receiving letters from relatives serving in the Boer War. He also remembered the death of Queen Victoria and the coronation of Edward VII. His father worked in Southampton for the White Star shipping line, and as a boy Halestrap had walked on the decks of the Titanic while it was in dock there. He had tried to enlist two months after the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, but at the age of sixteen was rejected as too young. He worked instead as a post office telegraphist, excellent training for someone who in September 1916 finally joined up as a signaller with the Royal Engineers.
It was not until January 1918 that Halestrap got to France, and his first experience of being shelled occurred when he was part of a convoy marching up to Brigade HQ in the dark. The horses that were pulling the wagon he was accompanying got stuck in the mud and panicked as the shells started falling, but to his surprise Halestrap did not really experience fear. His months of training had instilled in him a rigid discipline that ensured he got on with the job in hand whatever the circumstances, and he managed to get the wagon moving again across a landscape illuminated by Very lights and shell-bursts. He subsequently took part in the attack in which the British successfully breached the supposedly impregnable Hindenburg Line in September 1918. His job was to set up transmitter-receivers, which meant carrying cumbersome equipment up the line, then going over the top in order to erect radio masts in places that would not attract enemy fire. Although he was not always in the front line, he spent enough time in the trenches to become accustomed to lice, keeping his head down to avoid snipers, advancing under shellfire, and muttering apologies when obliged to walk across the battlefields’ litter of dead bodies.
In sum, his experiences, which may strike us today as extraordinary, were little different from those of millions of combatants. What made Halestrap unusual was that he was still alive to recall them all those years later. Like many combatants, he had survived a number of close encounters with the enemy. While he and a group of soldiers were taking pot shots at a low-flying German observation plane, the pilot responded in kind with a revolver. One bullet slammed into the table beside which Halestrap was standing, missing him by an inch. On another occasion a shell hit an old brewery where Halestrap and his fellow signallers had set up a radio station. Fortunately they had barricaded the windows with sandbags and were protected from the blast. Even when the Armistice had been declared, Halestrap, still in France, managed to outwit death. He caught Spanish flu, a global pandemic that between 1918 and 1919 killed more people than the war did: in Britain alone some 250,000 died. When Halestrap first showed symptoms, a senior officer reckoned that there would be little chance of him surviving the long and gruelling journey to a medical station and so decided to fill him up with rum, wrap him in a blanket and let him take his chances. Halestrap could remember nothing between being given the rum and waking up three days later apparently restored to health. In later years he made some thirty pilgrimages to the battlefields and cemeteries of France and Belgium in order to pay his respects to those who were less fortunate in their close encounters with death. He outlived both his wife and his two children and eventually died in his sleep, aged 105, on 1 April 2004.
Unusual as Halestrap’s story is, it is far from unique. Most of those whose experience of the Armistice I have described lived on into their nineties and beyond, becoming a select band who could recall for much later generations a war that scarred a century. The year Halestrap led the ceremony at the Menin Gate, it was reckoned that he was one of twenty-seven surviving British veterans of the First World War, the youngest of whom was 103. Thereafter the numbers steadily dwindled. Thirteen men (including Halestrap) and two women were interviewed for a two-part BBC television documentary, The Last Tommy, but seven of them had died by the time the programme was broadcast in 2005. A year later, the official count stood at nine, not all of whom had seen active service. Numbers were continually being readjusted – and not always downwards. There have been occasional discoveries of ‘new’ veterans, who had not previously identified themselves – though in Britain, apart from a man whose claim could not be verified because crucial documents were missing, none of these had seen action. Unlike their great-grandchildren’s generation, for many of whom celebrity at any price has become a major ambition, these veterans did not want fame or court publicity. They understood, however, that people were bound to be interested in them and they remained gracious when calls were made on their rapidly dwindling time and energy. Most of them were perfectly ordinary people who after the war continued to lead perfectly ordinary lives until longevity forced them into the limelight.
As increasing attention was drawn to this small group of men and women, it became clear that eventually it would soon diminish until only one member was left: the Last Veteran. To be the last of anything is an achievement of sorts, but on the whole it is a melancholy and potentially lonely one, as much about extinction as survival. It makes us think of the threatened species with whom we share the planet, as the writer J.R. Ackerley did in 1964. Ackerley suggested a parallel between a death in the animal kingdom and the death of a generation:
In 1914 a tragedy occurred, so shocking, so awe-inspiring, so poignant and so irreparable that if all mankind had put on sackcloth and ashes it would scarcely have seemed an adequate expression of their shame and repentance. Doubtless the First World War springs to your self-important minds. Let it spring off again. […] It was the death of a pigeon. She was female, and she died of old age on September 1, 1914, at one o’clock in the afternoon.
This solitary bird was in fact a passenger pigeon called Martha, living in Cincinnati Zoo, and the last of her once abundant species. One of the final great hunts of the passenger pigeon, which was killed for its meat, took place over five months with a casualty rate of some 50,000 every day. No wonder Ackerley saw a parallel between this mass slaughter and what had happened on the Western Front – particularly since he was writing in 1964 when the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war was being widely marked. He had himself been wounded in action on the Somme on 1 July 1916 and therefore became one of the 60,000 casualties suffered by the British that terrible day.
The chances were always that the Last Veteran would in some ways be no more distinctive of his kind than Martha was of hers. After leading a life for the most part no different from that of many of his contemporaries, he would nevertheless achieve the signal distinction of being the last Briton to have fought in the Great War. The significance of this did not escape politicians, and there were suggestions that this man, whoever he might turn out to be, should be given a state funeral. This was put before the House of Commons by a former leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith, on 18 April