Harry Patch, the “last fighting Tommy” to have survived the trenches of World War One, died on Saturday at the age of 111. For most of his life, he refused to speak of his horrific experiences. In recent years Mr. Patch became an outspoken critic of all wars.
Wisdom bought with blood
Last of 60 million ‘real’ combatants in the First World War is dead
By Gwynne Dyer, Winnipeg Free Press, July 28, 2009
Two years ago this month, there were 24 left. Now they are all gone, and there is nobody alive who fought in the First World War. Well, there is still Jack Babcock, who joined the Royal Canadian Regiment in 1917 but got no closer to the fighting than England, and American veteran Frank Buckles, who drove an ambulance in France as a 17-year-old in 1918. But the last real combatant, Harry Patch, who was wounded at the Battle of Passchensdaele in 1917, died on Saturday.
They’ve been going fast. Erich Kaestner, the last German veteran, died in January 2008. Tony Pierro, who fought with the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1918, died in February. Lazare Ponticelli, the last of the generation of French men who fought in the trenches, died in March. (One-third of French males who were between 13 and 30 in 1914 did not survive the war.)
The Last Fighting Tommy
by Harry Patch, Nov. 11, 2007
We were the PBI. That’s what we called ourselves. The poor bloody infantry. We didn’t know whether we’d be dead or alive the next day, the next hour or the next minute.
We weren’t heroes. We didn’t want to be there. We were scared. We all were, all the time. And any man who tells you he wasn’t is a damn liar.
Life in the trenches was dirty, lousy, unsanitary. The barrages that preceded battle were one long nightmare. And when you went over the top, it was just mud, mud and more mud. Mixed with blood. You struggled through it, with dead bodies all around you. Any one of them could have been me.
Yet 90 years on, I’m still here, now 109 years old. It’s incredible to think that of the millions who fought in the trenches in the First World War, I’m the only one left – the last Tommy.