Old Harry - a Story of Passchendaele

Words inscribed on the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne

Old Harry looked at me through his dark rheumy eyes as he flicked through the magazine on the table.

“Y’know”, he said in his raspy old voice as he paused at a page and pointed to a photo, “I was very surprised to see that picture...”  He hesitated before he went on “…that’s me there!”

The photo showed a group of seven soldiers wading through mud up to their knees. Six of them were man-handling a stretcher upon which, covered in an army blanket, lies a critically injured man. The caption to the photo said something like: ‘It takes six men, six hours to bring one wounded man out of the mud of Passchendaele’.

Old Harry’s finger was resting on the man closest to the camera; a moustachioed, stocky man with his tin helmet pulled down to just above his eyes. “That’s me,” he repeated “I remember seeing the photographer…”  His voice trailed off and perhaps I detected tears in his eyes and a quaver in his voice as the memories flooded back. “I remember seeing the photographer.” He repeated again but said no more.

 

Old Harry, centre, in the mud of Passchendaele, 1917

Harry and his wife Gwen had lived next door to us until about a year before.  They had originally been farming near Whangarei but had come down to Auckland in retirement with Mate, their old sheep dog. Harry walked rather stiff-legged and had a raspy gruff voice. Gwen told me that he had been gassed at Passchendaele in an attack that had killed his best mate and no doubt the stiffness in his walk was due either to a war injury or to arthritis exacerbated by the mud and wet of the Western Front. Harry, understandably, did not talk about those days. Both Harry and Gwen were devoted to their old sheep dog, Mate. Gwen would often send Mate, carrying a basket of beans or eggs in his mouth, around to our house. Mum, after taking the goods from the basket, would give Mate a treat, before he happily trotted back home, empty basket still in his mouth. We were all rather sad when Harry, Gwen and Mate moved away.

I was 14 when Harry had pointed to the photo. It had appeared in a special magazine published by the New Zealand Herald to mark the paper’s centenary in 1963. I’m not sure how old Harry was then, maybe in his mid-seventies.

A century has passed since this photo was taken. Each time I see it, and it has been in numerous publications and even on book covers, I think of old Harry, his gnarled finger pointing, saying “That’s me.” In 1963 I was too young to understand the full impact; the horrors that men like Harry went through. How they were unable to talk about it; how they knew that unless you had been present, there was no way you could ever understand the full impact of their horrific experiences and it was better to remain silent. It has only really been in recent years that we have begun to understand the full horror of what these men went through. I will never know whether the burning mustard gas of that attack in 1917, which had affected Harry’s voice, still troubled him when he spoke, but undoubtedly the memories would have haunted him.

We owe a lot to men like Harry; men who suffered in silence; men whose battlefield demons haunted them for the rest of their lives. I can still see him with that magazine, pointing to the picture. Perhaps it was a mixture of pride, but there was also an innate sadness as the memories flooded back, a mixture of emotions that I was then too young to perceive or understand. Unknowingly that photo was Harry’s claim to immortality.

This was the last time I saw Harry, but the memory of that kindly, haunted old soldier has always remained, deep within my sub-consciousness, triggered whenever I see that picture, and on the morning of each Anzac Day.  Requiescat in pace!

© Neil Rawlins  text & photography

Travel Books by the author available from Amazon