[Elven6]

On the night of 22 September 1917, near Langemarck in Belgium, a German gun crew fired a shell in the general direction of the British lines. It hit three men serving with a Lewis gun team. None of their remains were ever found. Had it landed a few yards away, it would have removed, just as comprehensively, the body and life of No 29295, Private Henry John Patch, aged 19, of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. What – if anything – was left of him would have been buried in a Flanders field; and, in due course, into the limestone of the war memorial in Combe Down, Somerset, his name would have been chiselled, above that of his boyhood friend Charlie Wherrett, and beside that of his cousin, Fred. And that would have been that.


But Harry, although badly wounded, survived – to return home, fall in love, marry, have two sons, build a plumber's business, help create Bristol University's Wills Memorial Building, serve on the home front of a second war, raise pigs, chickens and cider apples, know family heart-ache, bury first one wife then another, and finally, to outlive every one of the nine million men who fought in the trenches of the First World War. He did not waste the opportunity such accidental celebrity brought. War may have spared him, but, in interview after interview, he did not spare war. Speaking in his Somerset burr, slowed by age to a thoughtful grandeur, he became the living witness for every Tommy who cursed the politicians for sending them to war; a spokesman for a betrayed generation. On Wednesday, his eyesight still good and mind clear, he will be 111. It has been, thanks to the capricious trajectory of that German shell 92 years ago, quite a life.

Happy birthday, Harry Patch: Last veteran of the trenches turns 111 - This Britain, UK - The Independent

Harry Patch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Happy Birthday! And of course, thank you!