Harry Patch, the last living survivor of WW1 to have fought in the trenches, died on 25 July 2009 and was 111 years old. He wrote a book, The Last Fighting Tommy, his life story. He kept his memories to himself, until the BBC approached him for the documentary *Veterans", where he realized he was among a fast dwindling number of men who still remembered the horrors of WW1. Patch was drafted into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry as a Lewis gunner in October 1916. He fought at the battle of Passchendaele (a particularly nasty battle where Britain lost 70,000 men) and was finally injured and sent home in 1917. He served as a fireman in WW2 in Bath during the Baedeker Raids. The Last Tommy is quite a story, and you can get it at Amazon.