Harry Patch

Harry Patch

1898­–2009

Harry Patch, who has died at 111, was the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of World War I. In recent years, he used his status to inveigh against war, which he called “organized murder and nothing else.”

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As a teenager in the village of Combe Down, said the London Independent, Patch heard terrible stories about the Western front from his brother and declined to volunteer. “Instead, at the age of 17, he was conscripted.” A private in the 7th Battalion, Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, he found himself “in a waterlogged trench in what was to be known by the dread name of Passchendaele.” In four months in Flanders and France, Patch never killed a German, by his own account shooting only at their legs to wound them. He also never had clean clothes or a bath, and endured lice, cat-sized rats, and sheer terror. “Anyone who tells you he wasn’t scared,” he said, “he’s a damned liar.”

On Sept. 22, 1917, Patch was wounded in an explosion that killed three of his friends, said the London Daily Telegraph. “By the time he was fully fit again, the Armistice had been declared and he only wanted to forget.” A plumber in civilian life, Patch began talking about his experiences after his 100th birthday, at the request of historians. Although proud of his service, he hated everything the war stood for. “At the end, the peace was settled round a table, so why the hell couldn’t they do that at the start without losing millions of men?” he asked.

Patch’s death leaves Claude Choules, a 108-year-old former Royal Navy sailor, as Great Britain’s last World War I veteran. Two other WWI vets survive—one in the U.S. and the other in Canada.