The Last Laugh

A bullet wound is clean. Shrapnel will tear you all to pieces. He was laying there in a pool of blood. As we got to him, he said, ‘Shoot me.’ He was beyond all human aid. Before we could pull out the revolver to shoot him, he died. I was with him in the last seconds of his life.

-- Harry Patch, aged 109, on an incident at Passchendaele. Patch, who didn't speak about the war until he was 100 years old, says war is the "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings".