Harry Patch died last night aged 111.
He was the last surviving British soldier who fought in the trenches during the Great War.
Only one serviceman remains, an Englishman who served with the Royal Navy and now lives in Australia. All other members of the British force have now passed away. A handful from Canada and elsewhere live on but soon will join their comrades.
Patch served at Pilckem Ridge, near Ypres in 1917, the Battle of Paschendale, the battle that made the Flanders mud the living image of the war. Nearly half a million men from both sides fell into the mud during this tremendous, and possibly needless some say, fight. Patch was lucky, the three mates in his Lewis gun team were hit and killed by a chance shrapnel shell, (a shell that explodes in the air above the troops and discharges around a hundred bullet like rounds) while he himself received only a portion of the shell in his groin. While it was painful to remove it meant he survived the war.
Like many others who lived on he never forgot those comrades who fell.
Those living at that time, including the children born then, are now passing away. That generation, their ideals, their hopes, their understanding of life, is passing from us. In some ways it was better and in some their ideas were wrong. The fact remains that they endured a cataclysmic war that few today can begin to comprehend. This left it's effects with them till their dying day and has impressed itself unknowingly upon us also. Let us develop the good things and remove the bad, preferably without any major conflict such as that generation endured.
