Those themes were echoed in the tributes that poured forth for Mr. Patch on Saturday, including from Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.  “We will never forget the bravery and enormous sacrifice of his generation, which will continue to serve as an example to us all,” the queen said in a statement issued by Buckingham Palace.  Mr. Brown told reporters that he shared the grief “at the passing of a great man” and said: “The noblest of all generations has left us, but they will never be forgotten. We say today with still greater force, ‘We will remember them.’ ”  Just a week before Mr. Patch died, the only other living Briton who served on the Western Front, Henry Allingham, who at 113 was Britain ’s oldest man, died in a nursing home in Brighton. Mr. Allingham, who saw combat on land, at sea and in the air as a mechanic for the Royal Naval Air Service, was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as being the world's oldest man, according to available documentary records.  Mr. Allingham’s death led the Defense Ministry to describe Mr. Patch as “the last British survivor of the First World War.” That appeared not to take into account another British-born survivor, Claude Choules, 108, who served in the Royal Navy and lives in Australia.  In any case, Mr. Patch was unquestionably one of the last surviving veterans from a war in which nearly 70 million men on all sides were mobilized. An account of his death by The Associated Press said there were no French or German veterans of the war still living. The last living American veteran is Frank Woodruff Buckles of Charles Town, West Virginia, 108, who served in Britain and France during the war driving army ambulances and motorcycles.  In May 1917, Mr. Patch arrived in the frontline trenches and was almost immediately thrust into the fighting at Passchendaele, near the Belgian town of Ypres.  The battle was the brainchild of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who intended the Allied offensive to punch through the front lines to German-occupied ports on the Belgian coast. The offensive quickly bogged down in the morass created by torrential rain and artillery fire, and gained only a few miles of wasteland at the cost of nearly half a million Allied soldiers’ lives.  According to his 2007 memoir, “The Last Fighting Tommy,” Mr. Patch survived three months of fighting unscathed until a German shell exploded over the heads of his machine-gun crew on the night of Sept. 17, 1917, killing three of his closest friends and wounding Mr. Patch so severely that he was sent home.  Born on June 17, 1898, Mr. Patch left school at 15 to become an apprentice plumber but was conscripted for military service on his 18th birthday. After World War I, he returned to plumbing, raised a family and outlived three wives and two sons from his first marriage. But for 80 years, until the end of the 20th century, he avoided talking about his wartime experiences.  When he did reminisce, it was with a sense that war was pointless. At a remembrance ceremony in 2007, he said he felt humbled to be “representing an entire generation,” but he insisted that the occasion was not about him. “It is for the countless millions who did not come home,” he said. “They are the heroes. It is also important that we remember those who lost their lives on both sides.”  In an interview with Britain’s ITN television news channel shortly before he died, Mr. Patch was asked if the effort invested by the Allies in World War I was worth the lives that were lost.  “No, it wasn’t worth one,” he said.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Harry Patch, the Last of Britain’s Army Veterans of World War I, Is Dead at 111. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Patch was one of the last living links to what was called at the time “the war to end all wars.”