I was reading today, about the last surviving veteran of the WWI trenches, the magnificently named Harry Patch, and I was thinking that this remarkable man, at 109, and having all those memories that no-one else living has, he must be feeling pretty lonely. And here’s the thing, he never spoke about the war until he reached a 100 years of age. He’s in a nursing home now and the light coming on in the room opposite his bedroom was what made him break his silence.
If I was half asleep – the light coming on was the flash of a bomb. That flash brought it all back. For eighty years I’ve never watched a war film, I never spoke of it, not to my wife. For six years, I’ve been here [in the nursing home]. Six years it’s been nothing but World War One.
Harsh.
War, he says, is a “calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings”.
It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it. No war is worth the loss of a couple of lives let alone thousands. T’isn’t worth it … the First World War, if you boil it down, what was it? Nothing but a family row. That’s what caused it.
Which reminded me of a little history lesson from Edmund Blackadder:
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