From CNN:Harry Patch -- the last surviving British soldier from World War I -- died On July 25 at the age of 111.
Patch was the last surviving soldier to have witnessed the horrors of trench warfare in the first World War. He fought and was seriously wounded in Belgium, in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, in which 70,000 of his fellow soldiers died -- including three of his close friends.
His wife died in 1976, and their two sons also later died. Patch remarried in 1980, but he became a widower for the second time four years later.
Patch didn't speak about the war until he turned 100. "He tried to suppress the memories and to live as normal a life as possible; the culture of his time said that he was fortunate to have survived and that he should get on with his life."
Patch returned to Belgium in 2002, something he had said he would never do, and laid a wreath to his battalion. Two years later, he met and shook hands with a German artilleryman from the Western Front. Patch later laid a wreath at Langemark Cemetery for the German war dead.
References:
Last British Army WWI veteran dead at 111. CNN.
Harry Patch, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Image source: Wikipedia, Photo of Harry Patch, Jim Ross, GNU Free Documentation License.
