Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
JOAN The last World War
For those who returned, words to describe the true horror of the trenches were never easy to find – and today, there is no one alive who experienced them even to begin to try.
Harry Patch, the Great War’s “last fighting Tommy” died in 2009 and the 111-year-old took with him our final living thread to firsthand experience of that hell.
Yet although no serving veteran remains, there is one person still alive who comes closest to the painful truth.
Joan Parsons is believed to be Britain’s last First World War widow and, by proxy at least, lived and breathed it all through her late husband, Freddie.
Speaking on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele, where he courageously served, Joan describes for the very first time the trauma he faced.
Freddie was so pained by what he had seen that he rarely spoke of it. But he confessed the memories he had locked away to the woman who became his confidante. And most abiding of all were haunting images of the quagmire of Passchendaele – an offensive, thanks to weeks of driving rain, so infamous for the mud which drowned men, that it came to encapsulate the very worst of the Western Front.
“As his wife, I became a listener, and I felt that helped him,” Joan says. “I did not ask him, I let him come to me. It did worry him a lot, it was so real to him.
“He told me there were bodies lying in the trenches smothered in mud and they would have to tread on them. The trenches would be full of water and the bodies were floating. “The loss of life... he would say the screaming, it was awful.”
She repeats the words about the floating bodies as we sit in her nursing home in Shalford, Surrey.
At 96, her memory is gently fading from colour to sepia but she comes back to that image again and again. It is unsurprising. The killing fields of Passchendaele, the Third Battle of Ypres, in northern Belgium, dubbed the “Battle of Mud”, were horrific.
Joan was not married to Freddie when he fought as a 20-year-old gunner with the Royal Garrison Artillery. Twenty-five years his junior, she met him long after his return and they married in 1944.
Freddie had never married until then, living with his ageing mother. “He was a lonely man,” Joan recalls.
You cannot help but wonder if his trauma did not allow him to find happiness. Perhaps Joan was the first woman he felt he could share it with? The soldier, originally from Portsmouth, “was a gentle, sensitive man,” Joan says. Yet, like so many of his generation, he was brave as a lion.
He served from January 1916 until the end of the war in November 1918, taking part in the Somme as well as Passchendaele, which raged from July 31 to November 6, 1917.
Freddie was a gunner with the Royal Garrison Artillery. He always said he fired some of the first shells at the Third Battle of Ypres, in which about 325,000 Allied troops and 260,000 Germans died.
Trenches sloshed with feet of water, shell holes became lakes of mud and wounded men were reported as shedding their uniforms as the weight of the slime made it impossible to mov sand”, a “monster” w the mud suffocate duckboards. It is sa drowning here than
Joan describes th daele, they were no bodies but the cou in teams of eight to Freddie fired, even t not plough through they fell, they could
“He could not b were just alive with were eating the bod
But Freddie ador one time he stayed