WORLD WAR I Ended @11AM 0n 11/11/1918-"Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am the only one left." HARRY PATCH

 "Millions of men came to fight in this war and I find it incredible that I am the only one left." HARRY PATCH

Harry Patch was the last living veteran of World War I.

My astrophysicist friends tell me that the most amazing thing about living in this universe is TIME. According to them, physics state that this Blogger should be able to get up out of this room and travel back to 1731, without taxing himself.

But it does not work like that; even if a Time Machine is eventually fabricated, it will only go one way, time travel into the future. Mankind will not be able to go back in time because time  goes only in one direction-it is an arrow.

Which means every living witness to this moment in time, regardless of how young or how fit will eventually die; which means there will eventually be no living witness to any event.

Harry Patch was a plumber, an inarticulate plumber, yet by design or chance or fate he outlived them all, and eighty years after the end of the war he was forced, by a curious public to find his voice. By 2008, the 90th anniversary of World War I, he was the most articulate man ever against war.

" nearly a century later, World War I continues to exert a hold on the British imagination unmatched by any of the conflicts since, ...

The tremendous death toll is part of the reason why ....Britain and its imperial territories lost a staggering 900,000 troops, leaving almost no family untouched. Go to even the tiniest community in the British countryside and you'll find a monument in the parish church or on the village green commemorating the sacrifices of local young men who fell in the war."


"Henry John "Harry" Patch (17 June 1898 – 25 July 2009) — known as "the Last  Tommy" — was the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of the World War I.Patch was born in 1898; he  appears in the 1901 census as a two-year-old along with his stonemason father.

Patch had refused to discuss his war experiences, until 1998 ...... and the moment when he came face to face with a German soldier. He recalled Moses descending from Mount Sinai with God's commandment, 'thou shalt not kill', and couldn't kill the German. Instead, he shot him in the shoulder, which made him drop his rifle. But he carried on running towards Patch's Lewis Gun, so he then shot him above the knee, and in the ankle. Patch said, "I had about five seconds to make the decision. I brought him down, but I didn't kill him."

What intimidates this Blogger about history is the nature of it. The Kaiser was an immature piece of bluster, who wanted to be a war hero. If he had been a soldier, this Blogger doubts if he could have fought because he had a withered arm, which the Jungians say withered his spirit and worldview. His father,Frederick III was a legitimate war hero, from the Franco-Prussian war. He had seen war, lived it, and had men die in his arms. He hated war.

He was brilliant, adept, opened minded, gracious, fabulous, no withered arm, no withered heart. He becomes Kaiser, and one month later he is dead from cancer leaving his withered son on the throne.

This Blogger does not see that as a fluke, but as a part of the German tragedy.

In Turku, Finland this Blogger had a drink with a German sales person from Solingen; he was a complete German with dueling scars on his cheek.

He asked this Blogger, seriously, why God hated Germany so? He lamented that God hated Germany even before the Nazis. This Blogger  told him that was simple; the Germans had invented cocaine, and declared that God was dead.

Two years ago, a girl this Blogger had  dated in England sent me a birthday gift, a DVD, THE ELECTRIC EDWARDIANS (Great Britain from 1900-1913)."85. B&W.

"In the earliest years of the twentieth century, enterprising traveling showmen in the north of England hired pioneer filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon to shoot footage of local people going about their everyday activities. These films would be shown later at nearby fairgrounds, town halls and neighborhood theaters. Workers, school children, sports fans and seaside vacationers all flocked to see themselves miraculously captured on screen!

The astonishing discovery of the original Mitchell & Kenyon negatives in Blackburn, England — in a basement about to be demolished —has been described as film’s equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb. .. this treasure trove of extraordinary footage provides an unparalleled record of everyday life in the years before World War I.

Mesmerizing scenes of trolley cars and crowded streets, soccer matches, temperance parades, throngs of workers leaving the factory and a myriad of simple pleasures transport us to another — lost — world. The effect is as if H.G. Wells’ marvelous time machine had come to life."

It is an extraordinary film, the people look so happy. This Blogger knows they were poverty stricken and disease ridden but they all looked so HAPPY. There is one telling scene of  horse drawn traffic, stretching for miles. Everyone, every horse and wagon is in the queue; no one is pushing. They are moving, quietly, peaceful, serenely. All of it lost because of a bumbling war.

By the end of the film, you begin to grieve, for you know what they don't know , you know what will happened to all those young boys ten years later, all those workers laughing, all those proud men. They will all be butchered in the mud of Flanders.

On Christmas Eve, 1914 at Ypres, Belgium, on the battlefield, German and British troops began a spontaneous truce. They just stopped fighting, to honor Christmas. 

Their guns just stopped.

Then the Kaiser ordered the guns to start firing again; and Peace on Earth was lost for the rest of the century.

A German general once said of the British army,"they are lions led by donkeys." Harry Patch was a lion, led by the most obtuse Generals in recorded history.

World War II killed more people, but those battle deaths were caused by a clash of great Captains, great and brilliant War Lords, Rommel, Guderian, von Manstein, von Kesselring,Yamashita, Yamamoto, versus Montgomery,Alexander,MacArthur,Patton,Eisenhower,Zhukov, and Konev. 

The men facing death know they are dying because their Captains are great and evenly matched.

In World War I, the British started off with dumb generals, Sir John French and Lord Haig, and stayed with them, mistake, after mistake, after mistake. The British aristocracy was so ossified that they could not fire their own.  The One million dead Harry Patches is a direct result of the British class system It is the coddling of asinine elites that ruins empires.

Finally, this Blogger  spent three days at Salisbury Cathedral,in the garden there is a little plaque,dated 1916, remembering the beloved only son of the vicar, dead in Flanders.

With Harry Patch dead, the table is full.