Aug 06
Video: Where have all the flowers gone? – Marlene Dietrich, Tribute to Harry Patch
6/8/09 Today is the day of Harry Patch’s funeral. For those of you who don’t live in the UK, Harry Patch died aged 111, the last veteran of World War 1. Although keeping silent about his wartime experiences for most of his life, in his last years he became a much loved figurehead. He would talk to school children and young people about the horrors that he and his contemporaries suffered. His was a powerful and moving anti-war message, simply because he was there. I think this particular version would have pleased him – this is the one he would have remembered, and why he asked for this song to be sung at his funeral. Sadly, how apt it still is after all these years.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
How easily one can convince oneself, of how wide ones knowledge of the world is and then suddenly, be stopped in our tracks. I must have heard Marlene Dietrich a million times but do you think I knew who HARRY PATCH was? I am sorry but I just didn`t. This is why I love this Newsletter. It made me search the net to find out just who he was, and what he had accomplished. I was amazed to read that he was the sole survivor of the first world war. My ‘non-involvement’ approach to any acts of aggression does tend to lead to an incomplete education. Some of those old men who survived through two World Wars, lived until they were over a hundred years old. I can now better understand the reason for the song, and yes sadly, it still remains appropriate for the time in which we live.
August 27th, 2009 at 3:17 am
I went down to Wells for Harry’s funeral on the 6th all the way from York. It was completely worth it. To have studied English Literature this past year at A-level (I’m 18), and to have read of the sheer horror these brave men went through, really make me appreciate just what was given up all those many years ago. This song really struck a chord with me though. It was sung by a young black girl (a chorister at Wells Cathedral) and I’m not ashamed to say that I shed a tear hearing this in person. It’s impossible to even try to consider understanding what they went through, but studying such angered and cynical poetry by the likes of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, or the incredible destruction of life documented by Harry Patch in his memoirs, almost helps me to believe it. Harry Patch was indeed an ordinary man living in extraordinary times. A plumber, a fireman, a father, a husband, a grandfather and a beloved friend with a unique sense of humour, he’s one soldier that was lucky enough never to be forgotten.
January 31st, 2010 at 7:59 pm
I had previously written a letter to this young man thanking him for his comment (already posted) Today, at least six months later he thanked me and apologised for the long time before he responded! An unsually conscientious man wouldn’t you say? Here are a couple of paragraphs from his letter:
Concerning the post I made to your blog, thank you for your kind words. I have always been passionate about the heritage of Great Britain – not always a particularly pretty or happy subject for Britons themselves with the First World War of course; which certainly contrasts with that song (‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’). For me, it shows the truly pathetic nature of war itself: counting down as so many young people lose their lives in a war of such conquest and inhumanity. The way in which lives were forgotten, only to be recorded in statistical analyses both disappoints and infuriates me. Whilst today, with a maximum of, say, nine or 10 soldiers dying in a very bad week, one can see the sheer uproar publicly and through the media. Yet back then, on – for the sake of example – the 1st July 1916 (Battle of the Somme), 60,000 young men die in disgusting, bloody battle and nobody bats an eyelid. Where is the hatred? The anger? The remorse? Nothing.
I’ve never been an overtly philosophical person myself, but one quote has always stood out for me regarding the Great War: “When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die” (Sartre). Again, Plato also concluded that “it is only the dead that have seen the end of war”. Hence the fickle nature of war and man combined.