Britain buried Harry Patch today. He died July 25, aged 111, and was the last surviving British soldier of World War I.
The man with the quintessentially English name lived through the horrors of the trenches and a slaughter that defies comprehension. At least 8.5 million soldiers were killed during the 1914-1918 war, including some 900,000 from Britain and its empire.
“It was not worth it,” Patch said last year. “It was not worth one life, let alone all the millions.”
Drafted in 1916, Patch fought at the third battle of Ypres (called “Wipers” by the Brits), which began July 31, 1917, and ended three months later with the British having advanced only about five miles. Six hundred thousand Britons and Germans were either killed or wounded. Patch was among the injured: Two months into the battle, on Sept. 22, a shell exploded over his machine-gun position, killing his three fellow gunners and seriously wounding him.
Patch, pictured here last Nov. 11, Armistice Day, described his memories of the Western Front in his book, “The Last Fighting Tommy”: “Mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood. 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.”
Americans fail to appreciate the Great War’s importance. It was a true watershed in history, in which everything after was different from everything before. Its effects linger. We live in the world the war left behind.
There is no shortage of excellent histories of World War I. Just a few titles that come immediately to mind: “The Great War and Modern Memory,” by Paul Fussell; “The First World War,” by A.J.P. Taylor; “The Guns of August,” by Barbara Tuchman; “The Price of Glory,” by Alistair Horne; and “A Peace to End All Peace,” by David Fromkin.
And few other wars produced so much great literature, with Erich Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to All That” and Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” among the best known. Few writings resonate as deeply as the poetry the war inspired, however. One of the best and most powerful is Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est.” Owen was a British officer killed in action on Nov. 4, 1918, one week before the war ended.
In his poem, soldiers, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks,” are making their way from the front lines to the rear when they come under a gas attack. One fumbles with his gas mask, failing to put it on in time. He dies, “guttering, choking, drowning.” Owen ends:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
I don’t know if Harry Patch ever read Owen’s poem but I think he would have agreed with its conclusion. The tragedy of World War I, a tragedy that Patch talked about when he talked of the war, is that for millions of his fellow soldiers — British, French, German, Italian, Russian, Turk — there was nothing sweet and proper about dying for countries that had gone insane.