Following the death of Harry Patch, there is now just one British serviceman left alive who served in WW1 - Claude Choules - who stayed in Australia following WW1. He was born a few miles away from where I now live- the gloriously name Wyre Piddle - and joined the RN in 1916. He witnessed the internment of the Hochseeflotte in November 1918 when the remnants of the German fleet was forced to sail between lines of the greatest concentration of Dreadnoughts ever seen. The whole of the RN's Grand Fleet together with 9 US Dreadnoughts formed two parallel columns between which the Germans had to sail before their internement and final scuttling in Scapa Flow.
When he goes, that is it. No one left to march. My own Grandfather, who served throughout the First War (he arrived in France in Sept 1914 with the 6th Division) and, upon his death bed in the 1970s was transported back to those days, and millions and millions others have all gone.
It is now history.
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