Harry Patch was a soldier who dared to doubt. His death, at 111, severed the link with the Western Front and stilled the last authentic voice of horror. Mr Patch, who had watched his friends and enemies blown away, mourned both in even-handed measure. War, he said, was "organised murder and nothing else".
This autumn, a memorial service will be held at Westminster Abbey, at which the Queen and the greatest in the land will remember those whom Gordon Brown called "the noblest of all generations". Mr Patch will, rightly, be lauded as a hero. Yet none of the tributes to a man of courage has noted that he was an unusual icon. His view of warfare was so off-message, in terms of the official patriotic creed, as to verge on heresy. Almost a century after the First World War, government wisdom still says that democratic settlements are built on young men's sacrifice.
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