Nice piece by New York Times writer John F. Burns about the funeral of Harry Patch, who died at the age of 111 as the last living British soldier from World War I.

Mr. Patch survived “the fighting at Ypres [in Flanders] that was among the bloodiest in a war that took the lives of nearly 900,000 men from Britain and its colonies.”

At the funeral, Burns wrote:

A Belgian diplomat read an excerpt from Mr. Patch’s 2007 autobiography, “The Last Fighting Tommy,” in which he described an offensive during the battle at Passchendaele, the bloodiest chapter in the Ypres fighting, when he came across a fellow soldier “ripped from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel” during a British assault on German lines.

The episode reinforced in Mr. Patch, a devout Christian, the belief that there is a life after death. “When we got to him, he looked at us and said, ‘Shoot me,’ ” he recalled. “He was beyond all human help, and before we could draw a revolver he was dead. And the final word he uttered was ‘Mother!’ It wasn’t a cry of despair, it was a cry of surprise and joy.”

He added, “I’m positive that when he left this world, wherever he went, his mother was there, and from that day, I’ve always remembered that cry, and that death is not the end.”

Mr. Patch’s funeral also featured, Burns noted, traditional Anglican hymns and “a singing of Pete Seeger’s Vietnam-era antiwar ballad, ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,’ sung by a young woman from the cathedral choir.”

^{Oddly enough, the funeral service did not seem to include a reading of “In Flanders Fields,” the celebrated WWI poem by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, M.D., a Canadian surgeon who attended the wounded at Ypres for 17 days.}

Here’s the sad, lyrical opening stanza:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard  amid the guns below.

Harry Patch survived those guns, but he was, as John Burns wrote, “past his 100th birthday before he began speaking out about the horrors he endured as a machine gunner in Flanders.”

Perhaps he recalled the final stanza of “In Flanders Fields:”

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.