Posted on 07/25/2009 7:36:45 AM PDT by presidio9
Harry Patch, the last British army veteran of World War I, has died at 111, the nursing home where he lived said Saturday.
The Fletcher House care home in Wells, southwest England, said Patch died early Saturday.
"He just quietly slipped away at 9 a.m. this morning," said care home manager Andrew Larpent. "It was how he would have wanted it, without having to be moved to hospitals but here, peacefully with his friends and carers."
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the whole country would mourn "the passing of a great man."
"The noblest of all the generations has left us, but they will never be forgotten. We say today with still greater force, We Will Remember Them," Brown said.
Prince Charles said "nothing could give me greater pride" than paying tribute to Patch.
Patch had been the last surviving soldier from the British army to have served in the 1914-18 war. The only other surviving U.K.-based British veteran of the war, former airman Henry Allingham, died a week ago at age 113.
The Ministry of Defense called Patch "the last British survivor of the First World War," although 108-year-old Claude Choules of Australia is believed to have served in the Royal Navy during the conflict.
Born in southwest England in 1898, Patch was called up for military service in 1916 when he was working as a teenage apprentice plumber. After training he was sent to the trenches as a machine-gunner in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry.
A few weeks later,
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Awww...God bless this gentleman.
"And the old men still answer the call.
But year after year,
Their numbers get fewer
Someday no one will march there at all."
His Regiment, “ What took you so long mate? “
Just a week since Henry Allingham went too.
According to the Wikipedia list, there are now just 3 verified World War I veterans alive, including one American (Frank Buckles, born Feb. 1, 1901), one Canadian who lives in the US, and one British man who lives in Australia. Plus there is one Polish survivor of the Polish-Soviet war which began in 1919 before the Treaty of Versailles was signed, and one Englishman whose claims have not been verified (who was 15 when the war ended).
One brave soldier following his brother veteran into glory. May their names be enshrined in honored memory forever.
May Mr. Patch, and all the veterans of that terrible conflict, find peace in the bonds of eternity.
The last-known Union [Civil War] widow, Gertrude Janeway, died in Jan. 2003 in Tennessee. John Janeway joined the Union army in 1864 and was briefly a POW at Andersonville. The couple married in 1927, after waiting three years until Gertrude turned 18. John was 81.The last actual veterans of the Civil War died in the 1950s. It seems strange to think that WWI is now as remote to us as the Civil war was when I was a kid.The person thought to be the last-known Confederate widow, Alberta Martin, was born Dec, 4, 1906, and died at age 97 in Alabama on May 31, 2004. In 1927, at age 21, she married William Jasper Martin, then 81. Martin joined the Confederate army in May 1864. Upon her husband's death, she married his grandson from his first marriage. The publicity surrounding Alberta Martin's death prompted relatives of Maudie Celia Hopkins of Arkansas to reveal that the 89-year-old was in fact the last civil war widow. Hopkins married 86-year-old William Cantrell on Feb. 2, 1934, when she was 19. She did so to escape poverty, but kept quiet about the unusual marriage, “I thought people would gossip about it.” Cantrell, who served in the Virginia Infantry, supported her with his Confederate pension of “$25 every two or three months” until his death in 1937. Hopkins has outlived three other husbands.
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