It would be difficult to imagine Harry Patch as a young man and yet the very last of the World War I veterans, aged 111, was laid to rest last Thursday after a moving send-off at Wells Cathedral.
The Great War it was called; the "war to end all wars" they said. How wrong they were. Yet the cataclysm of those tremendous battles - Verdun, Marne, Passchendaele, still send shivers of horror down our spines as we remember those chilling lines from the doomed inspiration of the war poets.
In 1914 Harry Patch was just 16 and joined the army to defend "King and Country" by being despatched to some charnel house of mud and blood in Belgium. I wonder if the young people of today realise what a horrendous tragedy World War I was? Because of the film industry it is possible today to relive the experience without burning up too many grey cells trying to imagine it.
The World War I sequence in Legends of the Fall for instance conjures up such a final Armageddon that it is not difficult to understand how the young men who survived the wholesale slaughter were forever affected by it. I vividly remember at least two elderly gentlemen, veterans who suffered from shellshock, and even as a child I instinctively knew that these brave men had experienced something unspeakably horrible even though I could not understand it.
After watching Harry Patch's funeral service I listened to The Wound Dresser, a Walt Whitman poem set to music for baritone and orchestra by contemporary American composer John Adams.
Nothing conjures up the enormity of war as this powerful poem which recounts the experiences of a barber surgeon tending the wounded and dying "after the battle".
Those cemeteries in Belgium and France, endless seas of little white crosses, and some stars and crescents too, floating on undulating greensward look so neat and clean, don't they?
Yet there was nothing neat or clean about the kind of death these young men met in the trenches, ripped apart by machine gun fire or lacerated with barbed wire or choked with mustard gas in a slow agony that was irreversible.
Spilled guts and blood mixing with the mud as flares showed up the macabre battlefields in their full unspeakableness and reflected in the sightless blue eyes of a young man with the face of an angel; the Unknown Soldier perhaps, who may have known Harry Patch too and who unlike Harry did not live to a very ripe old age; mown down as he was before the age of 20. It was very difficult to keep back my tears; tears for Harry Patch and all those millions upon millions upon more millions, all somebody's son, husband, brother, lover, father, or friend who died, so needlessly, in all the wars that have dominated this ill-fated planet of ours with its mindless violence from the beginning of time and will continue to do so to the end of it.
As my dear friend and fellow artist Winston Hassall said when I discussed it with him: "This is the world we live in and it will never change." The constant presence of Death around us has given rise to all sorts of religions and sects, all of which promise some sort of continuance of life after death. There is no religion that states that death is final.
The existence of spirits is implicit in the most primitive of cults and beliefs, the difference between them all, after paring away the hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo, is that ritual has elevated some religions to a fine art.
At the end of the day the Great Unknown remains such whatever we do or say. Many of us practise all sorts of deprivations and mortifications and live our lives as dictated by the religious pundits as square pegs in round holes because we have been brought up to believe that this is the only way to gain salvation or whatever we believe to be salvation. But is it?
What is heaven? The Muslim promise to the jihad martyr is by far the most fantastical: 77 virgins ministering to your every need... and yet we Christians are not far off with the "many mansions".
Would not heaven mean the complete liberation from anything man-made whether good or bad? This is why the eastern concept of reincarnation level could make such sense, for in final nirvana there would be no need to worry about what to eat, what to wear, what to do or what to say, what to read and what to listen to, which is rather boring really; like being in a conscious coma.
Maybe the more privileged among us may sprout wings and strum a few languid glissandi on the harp but little else. Would we meet all those whom we knew and loved in this world? I wonder if when trying out aerobatics with the more daring angels in the great indigo void we might still experience a pang of yearning for the mud, filth, rough and tumble of this earth. Yes, I wonder.
kzt@onvol.net