Another reminder of time’s flight … The last British survivor of the World War I trenches, Harry Patch, passed away this week at 111. Henry Allingham, who served in the British Navy and the RAF in WWI, died last week at 113. “The sole British survivor of the war is former seaman Claude Choules, who is aged 108 and lives in Perth, Australia,” the BBC reports.
As of today, there are three verified World War I veterans in the world, including the American doughboy Frank Buckles.
This makes me feel old. When I was little, there were millions of veterans of the Great War, most of them entering the early years of their retirement. (Wikipedia estimates that more than 2 million World War II veterans currently survive in the U.S. alone.) People born in the 19th century were elderly, but not impossibly so.