From The Guardian UK
By Max Arthur

Of the millions who fought in the first world war, only a handful are still alive today - and all are now well over 100 years old. With the horror of the trenches about to slip from living memory, Max Arthur has tracked down and interviewed these last survivors of what Wilfred Owen called a ‘carnage incomparable’. Here, to mark next week’s Remembrance Day, we publish a selection of their stories.

Harry Patch
107 (born June 17 1898)
Private, Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry

On my 19th birthday in 1917, we were in the trenches at Passchendaele. We didn’t go into action, but I saw it all happen. Haig put a three-day barrage on the Germans, and thought, “Well, there can’t be much left of them.” I think it was the Yorkshires and Lancashires that went over. I watched them as they came out of their dugouts and the German machine guns just mowed them down. I doubt whether any of them reached the front line.

A couple of weeks after that, we moved to Pilckem Ridge. I can still see the bewilderment and fear on the men’s faces as we went over the top. We crawled, because if you stood up you’d be killed.

All over the battlefield the wounded were lying there, English and German, all crying for help. But we weren’t like the Good Samaritan in the Bible, we were the robbers who passed by and left them. You couldn’t stop to help them. I came across a Cornishman who was ripped from shoulder to waist with shrapnel, his stomach on the ground beside him. A bullet wound is clean - shrapnel tears you all to pieces. As I got to him he said, “Shoot me.” Before I could draw my revolver, he died. I was with him for the last 60 seconds of his life. He gasped one word - “Mother”.

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