A Voice of Reason II

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WELLS, UNITED KINGDOM - NOVEMBER 09: Harry Pa...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The last British survivor of the World War I trenches, Harry Patch, has died at the age of 111.

Mr Patch was conscripted into the Army aged 18 and fought in the Battle of Passchendaele at Ypres in 1917 in which more than 70,000 British soldiers died.

Something he said a few years ago is worth repeating.

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, but still we send our lads to war. In Iraq, our young men are being killed and told to kill.

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