I have just discovered Harry Patch (1898–2009), the last surviving British combat veteran of the World War I trenches (often called “the last fighting Tommy”)
He died at age 111.
From his 2007 autobiography The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, the Oldest Surviving Veteran of the Trenches (written with Richard van Emden) he is quoted as saying:
“I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.”
He expressed the same idea (or very close versions) in interviews and conversations in his later years, after he began speaking publicly about the war around age 100.
In a 2005 BBC Radio 4 Today programme interview Patch said:
“If two governments cannot agree, give them a rifle each and let them fight it out. Don’t waste 20,000 men. It isn’t worth it.”
This interview (in which he also discussed the futility of the war and meeting a German veteran) directly inspired Radiohead’s 2009 tribute song “Harry Patch (In Memory Of).”
In a post on Radiohead’s Dead Air Space blog, Yorke wrote that “the way he talked about war had a profound effect on me” and that it inspired the song, which the band recorded live in an abbey a few weeks before Patch’s death. Yorke hoped it would “do justice to his memory as the last survivor” and help ensure future generations do not forget “the true horror of war.”
He closed by quoting Patch:
“Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims.”
The lyrics to this song are quoted from Harry Patch.
I am the only one that got through
The others died wherever they fell
It was an ambush
They came up from all sides
Give your leaders each a gun
and then let them fight it out themselves
I've seen demons coming up from the ground
I've seen hell upon this earth
The next will be chemical
But they will never learn