by saluteandhonorphoto courtesy wikipedia.org
Harry Patch at age 109
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Unless you're in the military, over 90 years old, or really good at world history, trench soldier is not a word that's part of your usual vocabulary. Not like national guardsman or marine is familiar to most Americans today.
However, trench soldier is well-known to American and British citizens who lived through World War I, during which trench warfare was a standard method of battlefield strategy.
In honor of Britain's last trench soldier, crowds lined the streets of Wells, Somerset, to watch the funeral procession for Henry Patch, who died July 25 at 111 years old. The memorial was held at Wells Cathedral.
ABC reporter Maeva Bambuck said Patch "was a plumber who found himself in the light infantry at the beginning of the war, and later fought in some of the bloodiest trenches, including in the battle of Ypres. Patch defended his country until a piece of shrapnel lodged itself in his groin in 1917.'
Born in 1898, Henry John "Harry" Patch had celebrated his birthday June 17.
Patch's life was chronicled in the 2005 BBC TV program "The Last Fighting Tommy," which told the story of six of the WWI veterans still alive at the time. Excerpts were read during the memorial.
Three WWI veterans are still alive: 108-year-old Frank Buckles in Charlestown, W.Va.; 109-year-old Canadian John Babcock in Spokane, Wa., and 108-year-old Englishman Claude Choules living in Perth, Australia.
World War I started after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on June 28, 1914.
According to www.wikipedia. org, World War I is abbreviated as WW-I, WWI, or WW1, and is also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars. It was a global military conflict that embroiled most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance.
More than 70 million military personnel were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. The main combatants descended into a state of total war, pumping their entire scientific and industrial capabilities into the war effort. More than 15 million people were killed, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in history.
The immediate or proximate cause of war was the assassination on 28 June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist. Austria–Hungary's resulting demands against the Kingdom of Serbia activated a sequence of alliances. Within weeks the major European powers were at war; their global empires meant that the conflict soon spread worldwide.
By the war's end, four major imperial powers—the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires—had been militarily and politically defeated, with the last two ceasing to exist as autonomous entities. The revolutionized Soviet Union emerged from the Russian Empire, while the map of central Europe was completely redrawn into numerous smaller states.
The League of Nations was formed in the hope of preventing another such conflict. The European nationalism spawned by the war, the repercussions of Germany's defeat, and the Treaty of Versailles would eventually lead to the beginning of World War II in 1939.
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