Last survivor re-lives the horrors of Passchendaele
You have to strain to hear Harry Patch. At 109 years old, the last surviving Tommy from the horrors of the trenches in the First World War is growing increasingly frail.
But his mind is every bit as sharp today as it was 90 years ago this week when, as a 19-year-old conscript, he was ordered over the top at the Third Battle of Ypres.
More than half a million men were killed or injured during five months of fighting over a few miles of quagmire.
The British commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, had launched his “Flanders Offensive” to relieve exhausted French troops in the south and stop the Germans deploying U-Boats from the Belgian ports.
But the objective soon shrank to the pointless task of taking the ruined Belgian village of Passchendaele.
With the help of The Mail on Sunday, Harry Patch returned for the first time to the spot where his unit waited with increasing anxiety, before being ordered to advance out of the comparative safety of the trenches, across a stream called the Steenbeek and into No Man’s Land.
He came to pay a deeply personal farewell to his three closest comrades – killed by a German shell – and to bear witness to the horrors of trench warfare for one last time.It was impossible not to be moved as Harry surveyed the landscape from his wheelchair, his eyes misting over at the painful memories of 1917.
Even though the land that was once part of the British front line is now the corner of a farmer’s field with the rebuilt Langemarck church in the background, Harry recognised it immediately.
“Yes, this is where it happened,” he said. “I can see it in my mind’s eye. I remember the cacophony of noise, so loud you couldn’t hear the man next to you speaking.
“Shells were whizzing over us towards the German lines just 750 yards away, and their machine-gun bullets were coming in the opposite direction. But what I remember most was the waiting, the anxiety, the fear.
“I have a memory of crossing that stream. It was flooded, with the trees on either side smashed to pieces. We crossed on pontoons because the bridge had been blown up.
“On the far side of the stream we stopped to await the order to advance. The bombardment to cover us took your breath away. The noise was ferocious. There was apprehension in everyone’s eyes and horror in a few.”
Endless torrential rain and an Allied barrage of more than four million shells that preceded the initial assault on July 31, 1917, turned the battlefield into a quagmire that would bog down the offensive.
Before Allied forces finally captured the town in November 1917, many soldiers were sucked under and drowned, and guns, tanks and horses also sank in the mud.
On the morning of August 16, Harry’s battalion of the 7th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry was given the task of launching an assault on the village of Langemarck.
“The ground we had to cover was just shell holes,” Harry recalled.
“There were bodies, both our own and German, from the first wave. It was sickening to see your own dead and wounded, some crying for stretcher-bearers, others semi-conscious and others beyond all hope.”