Claude Choules, a Worcestershire man living in Perth, Australia, has died at the age of 110. This in itself would be a remarkable thing, but Choules’ great age is only preliminary to a greater distinction. In the words of his autobiography, Claude Choules was ‘The Last of the Last’– the last known man to see active service in World War One. He died in his sleep in a nursing home on Wednesday night.
Claude Choules’ story, like that of Harry Patch, the last of the British soldiers who fought on the Western Front to die, is part ordinary, part extraordinary. You can read an article about his death on the BBC website: and there is a good obituary of the man in the Sydney Morning Herald.
These deaths are, in one sense, historically insignificant. That sounds coldly objective, even cruel. Of course the lives of these men touched many others, and their families mourn them. And of course, in the profoundest sense, no life is insignificant: as John Donne once put it, “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved with mankind”.
Yet these were common men, common soldiers, like so many of the millions who died before November 11th, 1918. In many ways it is fitting that the last fighting men to die from the Great War were not men of rank or power. Claude Choules’ death reminds us of an event that is becoming ever more remote to us all: and while length of life alone does not demand remembrance, for those men who saw active service in the First World War, longevity is not a dry curiousity– it is a fortune, and an achievement.
Move Him Into The Sun 