Harry Patch (1898-2009), widely known as 'the Last Tommy', was the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches during the First World War. In 2007, two years before his death, he published his autobiography The Last Fighting Tommy. This paper explores the symbolic significance of 'the Last Tommy' by examining the text in relation to memories of the First World War. One major feature of the text is a strong sense of deja vu. Patch's prewar hometown in his recollection, for example, bears a striking resemblance to a rural village depicted in Siegfried Sassoon's autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928). The horror of mud that Patch experienced on the Western Front has been featured in many texts, from soldiers' letters and diaries to contemporary novels and films, all of which have contributed to the construction and reinforcement of the mythical memory of the war. Moreover, Patch's focus on animals in no man's land as political symbols and his sympathy towards his enemy are motifs common in many texts about the war. As a result of this complex dynamics of memory, Patch's autobiography transcends his personal recollection to present us with a grand collective narrative. In this universalisation of his personal memory lies the key to the symbolic meaning of 'the Last Tommy'. When Patch visited the cemetery of his fallen comrades in Belgium in 2007, he said: 'Any one of them could have been me'. This statement implies an interchangeability of his and his fallen comrades' identities. In this respect, Patch, the 'last' Tommy, also represents 'all' the Tommies. This exchangeable and ambiguous aspect of his identity seems to be the principal reason for the (con-)fusion of his and others' memories, which leads to the universalisation of his personal memory. Van Emden, the autobiography's coauthor, also contributes to this universalisation. The processes of interviewing, plotting and narrating by van Emden help to create a collective narrative of the WWI veterans. Moreover, readers regard Patch as 'our grandfather', whose recollections they are inclined to read as a typical story of their own grandfathers. The universality of Patch's memory is, in a sense, a projection of the reader's expectations and desires. Due to the complex negotiations between the holder, the editor and the recipients of memory, Patch's personal memory becomes such a universal collective narrative that it is almost possible to call it 'myth'. Patch actually became a mythical figure through a literary ritual. In 2008, Andrew Motion, the then poet laureate, wrote 'The Five Acts of Harry Patch', which he read to Patch at the Bishop's Palace in Wells. Prince Charles sent a video message to the ceremony in which he said of Patch: 'He epitomises the courage, the long sufferingness and the tenacity of his generation'. The symbolic voices of the poet laureate and the prince finally led the 'last' Tommy and what he epitomises- 'all' the Tommies and their generation-into the poetic and mythical realm. To thus canonise and mythologise Patch, in fact, means to lose the actuality of his traumatic war memories. But what contemporary British society expected of him was not so much to give 'testimony' about his 'true' war memories as to create a collective 'narrative' of/for 'all' the Tommies so that they would be remembered eternally. Canonised and mythologised along with 'all the Tommies', Harry Patch accomplished his mission as 'the Last Tommy'.

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