Age could not weary them

LIKE thousands of other holidaymakers down the years, I was drawn to stop on the road outside Arras in northern France while heading for the Channel Tunnel a couple of months ago by the sight of a sea of graves beside the road.

Each tombstone was of the familiar rectangular design laid down by the British War Graves Commission, and edged with flowers.

But as I went to read the names — one always wonders if one’s own name will be there — I found that beyond the first few rows of dead Canadian soldiers from World War I, no names were inscribed.

Here lay 7,000 British soldiers, in the words at the bottom of each stone, ‘ known only to God’, their remains gathered up and buried.

Occasionally, the discovery of a brass badge denoted that they belonged to a particular regiment, and this fact duly registered on their graves. But no names.

The memory of that rainy day came back to me last night as I watched The Last Tommy, a series of interviews from 2003 with some of the 23 British soldiers of World War I then known still to be alive.

At the time of the interviews they were centenarians: as we approach Friday’s Remembrance Day, there are only four left.

Each of these old soldiers — all remarkably sprightly, as you’d need to be to survive to a hundred after the horrors and privations of spending your youth in the trenches — was very different.

One was a pacifist who denounced all wars, still scarred at finding a comrade torn to pieces by shrapnel in No Man’s Land, who begged him to finish his life. The man died before his wish could be carried out.

But the fact this poor soldier’s last word was to call ‘Mother!’ has convinced the old man that she was awaiting him on the other side and that ‘ death is not the end’.

Another valiant old gentleman still visits the battlefields every year — he’s been back 37 times over the years — eager to honour the dead of both sides. His own son was killed at the age of 20 in World War II and he justifies the sacrifices made as ‘ protecting our identity as English — or British’, adding: ‘Personally, I’m an Englishman’.

And a Scotsman from the Black Watch remembered a comrade, his replacement in the trenches after he himself had been wounded, whose family he visited to express his condolences.

The man’s sisters refused to allow him into the house: ‘ I’d cheated death by being wounded — but their brother was killed.’ A hundred times the number of Britons whose anonymous graves I saw that day in the war cemetery at Arras — 700,000 men — died in the so- called Great War. I can remember as a child that many of them were still around — some were pathetic figures, scratching a living on the streets selling matches and shoelaces.

SOME had fought in France, others in Mesopotamia (still a war zone where British soldiers face death, now known as Iraq). And now there are only four left — perhaps fewer.

The cliché is that those who die in our wars will always be remembered. Indeed, besides The Last Tommy, there’s a documentary next week on the 1916 Battle of the Somme, where 20,000 British soldiers were slaughtered in eight hours.

But will we really always remember?

MAKING fun of someone’s surname is pretty childish but I couldn’t resist the irony of an actor called Michael Feast, in Trial And Retribution, portraying a serial killer who starved his victims to death.

That said, Mr Feast has delivered a quite brilliant performance over the past two nights as Tom Franke, a seemingly harmless suburban greengrocer who snatched people off the street, imprisoned them without food and water, and gloatingly spied on them until they expired. When T & R’s familiar team of Chief Superintendent Michael Walker and Chief Inspector Roisin Connor entered Franke’s private morgue they were not only repelled by the smell, but the horror of what they’d seen had a psychological impact that appeared to diminish them both, physically and mentally.

David Hayman’s Walker seemed to age overnight, while Victoria Smurfit, as Connor, grew pale and listless.

Both went into court for Franke’s trial at the Old Bailey expecting that the battery of psychiatrists who’d examined the killer would win the argument that he should be tried not for murder, but manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility: as Walker put it, the jury would have to decide if he was bad or mad.

Franke’s double life, as greengrocer and cold-hearted murderer, was in the end overshadowed by his thespian powers — we were told, and could believe, that he was a pillar of his local amateur dramatic society.

In the witness box he presented a false but plausible picture of a religious maniac — though in the end, not plausible enough to convince the jury.

Retribution eventually triumphed over Trial, however, as the grandfather of one of the victims satisfied himself that justice was done, even as Franke was being handed a whole-life sentence by the judge.

This was a well-plotted, gripping murder story, and my only serious reservation concerned Miriam Heard’s Susan Harrington, whose husband, Mark, was kidnapped in Covent Garden while they were on their honeymoon.

Would anyone have been so naïve as to believe the killer’s story that he would take her to Mark, and hand herself over to Franke without telling the police, or even her own mother?

Today’s well- educated young women are just not like that, surely?