From CNN:

His death came a week after fellow British World War I veteran Henry Allingham died at the age of 113.

Patch was the last surviving soldier to have witnessed the horrors of trench warfare in the first World War

He fought and was seriously wounded in Ypres, Belgium, in 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, in which 70,000 of his fellow soldiers died -- including three of his close friends.

This story reminds me of my Irish grandfather (born 1904) telling me how he watched all the lads marching off to war full of enthusiam in the Fall of 1914. Everyone was shocked the following year when only a third of them came back.