Last UK veteran of WWI trench battles dies at 111

[Dave Monroe]

Last UK veteran of WWI trench battles dies at 111

By ROBERT BARR (AP) – 1 day ago

LONDON — Harry Patch, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World
War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the
horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation.

Patch, who died Saturday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of
Passchendaele, which he remembered as "mud, mud and more mud mixed
together with blood." ...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hWde-t7zYV7atjRV2ETHGLQOm5BwD99LIET00

Cf. ...

"The mud of Flanders gathered into the curd-clumped, mildly jellied
textures of human shit, piled, duckboarded, trenched and shell-pocked
leagues of shit in all directions, not even the poor blackened stump
of a tree--as if that had been the worst part of the whole
Passchendaele horror, that absence of vertical interest ..." (GR, Pt.
I, p. 79-80)

"The stink of shit floods his nose, gathering him, surrounding.  It is
the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient. Mixed with the mud, and
the putrefaction of corpses ..." (GR, Pt. II, p. 231)

A-and see as well, e.g., ...

Fussell, Paul.  The Great War and Modern Memory.
   New York: Oxford UP, 1975.

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/?cp=24297&view=usa&ci=0195133323
http://books.google.com/books?id=D9iNQYfeKdwC