Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English soldier Harry Patch.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
Henry John Patch, dubbed in his later years "the Last Fighting Tommy", was an English supercentenarian, briefly the oldest man in Europe, and the last surviving combat soldier of the First World War from any country to have fought in the trenches. Patch was not the longest-surviving soldier of the First World War, but he was the fifth-longest-surviving veteran of any sort from the First World War, behind British veterans Claude Choules and Florence Green, Frank Buckles of the United States and John Babcock of Canada. At the time of his death, aged 111 years, 1 month, 1 week and 1 day, Patch was the third oldest man in the world, behind Walter Breuning and Jiroemon Kimura, the latter of whom would become the oldest verified man ever.
War is a calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings.
War is organized murder, and nothing else.
War is nothing but organized murder.
I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.
I met someone from the German side and we both shared the same opinion: we fought, we finished and we were friends... It wasn't worth it.