LONDON — Harry Patch, Britain’s last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation.
Patch, who died Saturday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as “mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood.”
“Anyone who tells you that in the trenches they weren’t scared, he’s a damned liar: You were scared all the time,” Patch was quoted as saying in a book, “The Last Fighting Tommy,” written with historian Richard van Emden.
The Fletcher House care home in Wells, southwestern England, said Patch “quietly slipped away” Saturday morning.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the whole country would mourn “the passing of a great man.”
“The noblest of all the generations has left us, but they will never be forgotten. We say today with still greater force, we will remember them,” Brown said.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense called Patch the last British military survivor of the 1914-18 war, although British-born Claude Choules of Australia, 108, is thought to have served in the Royal Navy during the conflict.
Patch did not speak about his war experiences until he was 100. Once he did, he was adamant that the slaughter he witnessed had not been justified.
“I met someone from the German side, and we both shared the same opinion: We fought, we finished and we were friends,” he said in 2007. “It wasn’t worth it.”
