Harry Patch was buried today. He was Britain’s last combat veteran of World War I. He died on July 25 at age 111. He was also the oldest man in Europe. Patch, who rarely talked about his war experiences, boasted that he hadn’t killed anyone in combat. “War isn’t worth one life,” Patch said, it is “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings.” In his autobiography The Last Fighting Tommy, Patch wrote that “politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.” In the last years of his life, Patch warned some young naval recruits that they shouldn’t join.
Harry Patch is a veteran that we can truly call a hero.
8:33 am on August 6, 2009
