Today was the funeral for 111 year old Henry Patch, the last survivor of the trenches. I find it extraordinarily moving that in talking about his war, the thing he was clearly proudest of was the fact that he had killed no one, despite being at Ypres in the midst of death, where men were dying horribly all round him
Patch boasted that he hadn’t killed anyone in combat, but he did shoot at the legs of a German soldier who had charged with a bayonet.
“He called out something to me in German, I don’t suppose it was complimentary, but for him the war was over,” he said.
“I’ve often wondered whether he realized that I gave him his life. He was no more than 15 yards away when I shot him. I couldn’t miss, not with a Webley service revolver, not at that range.”
At least 8.5 million soldiers are reckoned to have died in the war.
“Too many died,” Patch had said. “War isn’t worth one life.”
He was part of a British offensive which began on July 31, 1917, in the third battle of Ypres.It rained all but three days of the following month. Patch remembered the battlefield as “mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood.”
Recalling a time when he went “over the top” into no man’s land, Patch said: “All over the battlefield the wounded were lying down, English and German all asking for help. We weren’t like the Good Samaritan in the Bible, we were the robbers who passed and left them. You couldn’t help them.”