Armistice 90 years on: 'All those pals of mine should be here'

Of all the millions of men who made up the vast military machines fielded by Great Britain, Germany, France and the Empire in a war that ended 90 years ago yesterday, only four remain. Three were at the Cenotaph in Whitehall yesterday, to observe two minutes' silence for their fallen comrades.

The baby of the bunch was Bill Stone, born in Devon in September 1900, the tenth of 14 children, who was prevented by his father from joining the Royal Navy at the age of 15, but signed up on his 18th birthday. He was still in training when the the Great War ended but saw action during the invasion of Sicily in 1943, and stayed in the senior service until 1945.

Harry Patch, born in Combe Down, near Bath, in June 1898, followed his brothers into the plumbing trade, hoping the war would end before he was called up. His luck ran out in October 1916, and before he was 19, he was thrown into the slaughter of Passchendaele, and badly wounded by a shell that landed yards from him, killing three of his friends.

Related articles

• John Hutton: Values we defended in two World Wars are attacked in Afghanistan
• Leading article: A time to keep silence
• Hutton: 'We must fight Taliban to keep Britain safe'
• Search the news archive for more stories

Henry Allingham, born in Clapton, east London, in June 1896, was persuaded by his mother not to volunteer in 1914, but joined the Royal Navy a year later, after she had died, and was in the Battle of Jutland. At 112 he is now the oldest man in Europe. "All those pals of mine, they should be here," he said yesterday. "This is the least I can do for them."

The veterans laid wreaths at the Cenotaph, standing alongside some of the most highly decorated of today's servicemen. The veterans went on to 10 Downing Street to meet Gordon Brown, the new Secretary of State for Defence, John Hutton and the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup.

It was one of many ceremonies around the world marking the anniversary. Charles Choules, aged 107, the only other survivor of the five million men who served in British forces before Armistice Day, was in a ceremony in Australia, where he now lives. Sydney Lucas, who was conscripted into the Sherwood Foresters, died in Australia last week, aged 108.

Although the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is one of the most celebrated deadlines in history, President Nicolas Sarkozy managed to miss it by 10 minutes yesterday at a grandiose, sunlit and mostly extremely moving commemoration in Verdun in France, scene of some of the worst of the slaughter. M. Sarkozy, the French First Lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall arrived at the vast war cemetery and ossuary in eastern France seven minutes after a bugler was meant to mark the precise time of the anniversary. When all the dignitaries had reached their positions, the French Army bugler sent a haunting call to the end of battle into the bright skies over Lorraine, at 10 minutes after the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Lateness was, in one way or another, both the acknowledged and unacknowledged theme of yesterday's French national ceremony to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the war's end. After years of controversy, President Sarkozy became the first French head of state to say that the 600 French soldiers executed for "cowardice" or mutiny during the Great War should be "honoured" just as much as the other 1.3 million French soldiers who died in the conflict (including 150,000 at Verdun in 1916). "France will never forget its children who died for it," M. Sarkozy said. "I think also of those men of whom too much was asked, who were too exposed, who were sometimes sent to be massacred through mistakes by their commanders, of those men who, one day, no longer had the strength to fight."

Two years ago, Britain posthumously pardoned its 306 executed First World War soldiers. Despite suggestions that a similar French gesture was long overdue, President Sarkozy did not actually use the word "pardon" yesterday. Campaigners said it appeared that he hoped his generous words would suffice, without opening the legal and political Pandora's box of a formal pardon.

Lateness was also the theme in a more official way. The last French soldier to fight in the war, former French Foreign Legionnaire Lazare Ponticelli, died in March. Yester-day's French ceremony of national remembrance was the first to be held without a single poilu, or "hairy one", a fond nickname for a Great War infantryman.

Is it time to fold away memories of the war and consign it to history, as some French commentators have been suggesting? By moving the ceremony, at short notice, from its usual venue at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to a much larger site at Douaumont, near Verdun, President Sarkozy wanted to reply with a resounding non.

His speech dwelt on the living importance of the 1914-18 war as the conflict which shaped the 20th century and led, by way of another war, to attempts at European unity and global respect for human rights. But the choice of Verdun caused unexpected problems. Although French officials refused to discuss the lateness, they hinted that it was the unfamiliarity of the site and the "magnitude" of the event which had caused the timetable to slip.

There were also attempts in the British media to suggest that the choice of Verdun – and the presence of the Prince of Wales – was somehow insulting to the 800,000 British (and 950,000 British and Empire) soldiers who died in the war. The battle of Verdun was purely a Franco-German affair. Why not choose the Franco-British-German Somme?

This missed the point. This was the French commemoration of the end of the war, to which other countries had been invited. Britain had its own commemorations in Whitehall on Sunday and again yesterday. It was natural that, if the French ceremony was to be moved from Paris, it would be moved to Verdun which has long been the symbol of French sacrifice.

There were also suggestions that the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had snubbed the ceremony because M. Sarkozy had moved it to Verdun, a symbol of French victory. But German and French officials insisted there was simply a timetable problem. Chancellor Merkel's failure to attend does seem to have irked M. Sarkozy. He referred pointedly to a previous French president and chancellor, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, walking hand in hand at Verdun two decades ago.