August 7, 2009
Thousands Mourn Britain’s Oldest Warrior
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL
WELLS, England — To the strains of the “Last Post,” and in the presence of soldiers from armies that had fought as both friend and foe, the funeral was held here Thursday for Harry Patch, the last British survivor of World War I living in this country.
Born in June 1898, Mr. Patch died last month at the age of 111 at a nursing home in this southwestern cathedral city, where thousands of people lined the streets in densely-packed rows and applauded as his coffin passed by, draped in the red, white and blue Union flag.
Soldiers from Britain, Belgium, France and Germany marched alongside the coffin in a token of Mr. Patch’s increasing desire as he aged for reconciliation both with his own memories of the trenches and with his erstwhile enemies.
“Too many died,” he said, late in life, of the estimated 900,000 Britons killed in the conflict. “War isn’t worth one life.” He called war “the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,” Britain’s Press Association news agency said.
“Irrespective of the uniforms we wore,” he said, according to the BBC, “we were all victims.” His funeral came as British troops took record casualties alongside American, NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.
In a show of changed times, Daniel Eichhorn and Michael Schmidt, both lance corporals from the Germany Defense Ministry guard force, marched behind the casket in light gray dress uniform. A German diplomat, Eckhard Lübkemeier, offered a New Testament reading that spoke of Christ’s “message of reconciliation.” French and Belgian diplomats also spoke at the ceremony.
In drizzling rain outside the cathedral, around 2,500 people watched the service on a giant screen, applauding as the casket was driven away for private burial. “We feel very strongly that the children should remember the First and Second World Wars — what their grandparents lived through, what they did for us and what they made possible for us to do,” said Teresa Gilbey, a 37-year-old teacher.
Mr. Patch had been a machine-gunner, drafted into the British army in 1916 to fight in one of the bloodiest battles of the war at Passchendaele near the Belgian town of Ypres in 1917.
The cathedral bells pealed 111 times Thursday to mark the passing of his funeral cortège from the nursing home where he died on July 25. He was to be buried at a private ceremony later on Thursday after a formal service in the Cathedral Church of St. Andrew and Wells, built between 1175 and 1490 as a masterpiece of Gothic architecture.
Although managed by the British Ministry of Defense, the service was designed by Mr. Patch’s friends and supporters to minimize military aspects. Even ceremonial weapons were barred.
Just a week before Mr. Patch died, the only other living Briton who served on the Western Front, Henry Allingham, died at the age of 113, and Mr. Patch briefly became Britain’s oldest warrior. The Defense Ministry in London called him “the last British survivor of the First World War” although another British-born survivor, Claude Choules, 108, who served in the Royal Navy, lives in Australia.
The congregation in the cathedral joined in the hymn “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” A lone chorister sang the folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” whose lyrics were the antiwar anthem of a much later generation in the 1960s.
Mr. Patch fought for three months at Passchendaele until a German shell exploded over the heads of his machine-gun crew in September 1917, killing three of his closest friends. He was badly wounded and sent home.
After the war, Mr. Patch returned to his job as an apprentice plumber and, like many other survivors constrained by Britain’s “stiff upper lip” culture, avoided speaking publicly about the war for eight decades. He said he never killed anybody during the fighting, recalling how he shot a German soldier advancing on him but aimed for the hand and leg to avoid a fatal shot.
Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, said at the service, “We have lost our last living link to the fighting in the trenches of the West Front and a member of a generation that stood firm in the face of extraordinary adversity and unimaginable suffering,” according to an advance text of his remarks provided by the Defense Ministry. “But today above all else, we give thanks for the life of a brave and inspirational man whose message of reconciliation and peace has reached and touched so many.”
Mr. Patch’s reticence about the war changed in 2002 when he returned to Belgium for the first time since the conflict. In 2004, he met and shook hands with Charles Küntz, a former German soldier from the same era. In 2007, he published a memoir, “The Last Fighting Tommy,” using the nickname of British soldiers in World War I.
Along with two other of the oldest veterans, Mr. Allingham and William Stone, he laid a wreath last year in London at the memorial commemorating the armistice that ended what President Woodrow Wilson had called “a war to end all wars” on November 11, 1918.
The royal family was represented at the funeral by the Duchess of Cornwall, formerly Camilla Parker-Bowles, the second wife of Prince Charles.
John F. Burns reported from Wells, England, and Alan Cowell from London.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/world/europe/07funeral.html?_r=5&hp
