“When the war ended, I don’t know if I was more relieved that we’d won or that I didn’t have to go back. Passchendaele was a disastrous battle – thousands and thousands of young lives were lost.
It makes me angry.
Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany’s only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107.
We’ve had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it’s a licence to go out and murder.
Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak?
All those lives lost for a war finished over a table.
Now what is the sense in that?”
Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier from the ‘War to End all Wars’, which was renamed World War One.
As we are told to ‘Remember the Dead’ – always remember that they died for you to have the freedom to remember them how ever you saw fit, or not at all. That’s how freedom works.
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