LONDON - BritainÂ’s last survivor of the Western Front trenches of World War I, Harry Patch, celebrated his 108th birthday Saturday with memories of the mud and blood still in his thoughts. Patch marked the occasion with cream tea and strawberries at the retirement home in Wells, southwest England, where he lives.
Called up in 1917 at the age of 18 while he was working as an apprentice plumber in Bath, Patch was thrown into the 3rd Battle of Ypres, better known as Passchendaele. A total of 70,000 men were killed in three months of fighting, including three of Patch’s mates when a shell fell close to him, leaving him with a welcome “Blighty wound,” meaning he was shipped home and out of the war.
“It was mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood,” the former Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry private told journalists Saturday. “My remembrance day is on 22nd of September when I lost three mates.”
Patch said that after the war he met a former German soldier ”and we both shared the same opinion -- we fought, we finished and we were friends -- it wasn’t worth it.”
BritianÂ’s oldest Great War veteran is Henry Allingham, 110, who was a mechanic in the Royal Naval Air Service, flying patrols in the North Sea as a navigator and repairing aircraft and engines during the battles of the Somme and Ypres. |