The War to End All Wars didn’t, of course – there are several going on right this minute. But Nov. 11, the date it ended in 1918, was treated as an anniversary of great significance for decades. America, which has prosecuted many wars since then, changed it from Armistice Day to Veterans Day in 1954. Jour de l’Armistice is still a national holiday in France, and Britain marks it as Remembrance Day with two minutes of silence at 11 a.m.
Harry Patch was an 18-year-old from near Bath when he was conscripted into the British army in 1916. By the early 2000s he was among the last surviving veterans of the conflict’s trench warfare, and he used the media attention to spread an anti-war message. War, he often said, “isn’t worth one life.”
Earlier this year [2004], I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany’s only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We’ve had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it’s a licence to go out and murder. 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?
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke said he wrote “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” after he heard the centenarian give a moving interview on the BBC. The lyrics, which include some near-quotes from Patch’s interview, are set to an orchestral string arrangement by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. The band released it as a charity single in 2009, days after Patch died at age 111.
