A memorial service is to be held to commemorate the sacrifice of soldiers in the First World War, prompted by the death of the last British man to have fought in the trenches.

Harry Patch, who died on Saturday aged 111, was the last surviving Tommy to have seen action on the Western Front. Paying tribute to Mr Patch’s valiance and longevity, Gordon Brown has announced that a special service will be held to honour the sacrifices of Mr Patch’s generation.

The service is likely to be at Westminster Abbey and it is understood that the Queen is expected to attend.

For most of his life Mr Patch had not talked about the horrors he had witnessed in the trenches and had refused even to tell his wife or children about what he had seen.

Times Archive 1917 A shattering blow

Never surely has an army been so hammered as the German Army is being hammered here

• Archive topic: Passchendaele

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It was only after his 100th birthday that Mr Patch began to speak with indignation of the friends he saw cut down in their prime and the conditions men lived in during the battle of Passchendaele, where more than 70,000 British soldiers died in 1917.

Born near Bath in 1898, Mr Patch carried with him to his dying day the image of a shell exploding on open ground and blowing three of his machinegun team to pieces. “Those chaps are always with me,” he said. “I can see that damned explosion now.”

The Queen joined those paying tribute to Mr Patch and his fallen comrades. “We will never forget the bravery and enormous sacrifice of his generation, which will continue to serve as an example to us all,” she said.

The Royal British Legion welcomed the plans for a memorial service, and Buckingham Palace said yesterday: “The Queen would wish to consider attending.”

The Prime Minister said: “I think it’s right that we as a nation have a national memorial service to remember the sacrifice and all the work that was done by those people who served our country during World War One and to remember what we owe to that generation — our freedom, our liberties, the fact that we are a democracy in the world.”

Mr Patch’s death came a week after that of another Great War veteran, Henry Allingham, aged 113. Of approximately five million British soldiers who fought in the First World War, Claude Choules, 108, is the last surviving British veteran of the conflict, which claimed the lives of nearly three quarters of a million British troops.

Mr Choules was in the Royal Navy and witnessed the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow in 1919. He now lives in Perth in Western Australia. “I’m the last man standing,” he said yesterday. “What an honour.”

A date has yet to be confirmed for the memorial service.

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