In his last years, he became a national celebrity, memorialized in a poem written by Andrew Motion, then the poet laureate, and in a song fashioned from Mr. Patch’s own words about the fighting in the trenches that was recorded by the pop group Radiohead (“I’ve seen devils coming up from the ground/I’ve seen hell upon this earth.”) He met it all with the same modesty, saying that it was not he who should be honored but the men who fell at the battlefront, “the ones who didn’t come home.”

Image Pallbearers carried the coffin of Harry Patch from Wells Cathedral on Thursday in Wells, England. Credit... Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

At a time when a new generation of British soldiers has been sent into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffering casualties that have stirred growing public disquiet, Mr. Patch’s voice struck a deep chord. War, he said once, was “the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,” too often sent into combat as “cannon fodder” by politicians who should have settled their conflicts by dueling among themselves. “Too many died,” he said. “War isn’t worth one life.”

As for the carnage on the Western Front, on both sides, he said all who fought, whether British or German, should be mourned. “Irrespective of the uniforms we wore,” he told the BBC, “we were all victims.” When he attended remembrance services for the war dead, as he did in London last November on the 90th anniversary of the armistice that ended the war, he pressed the message home. “Remember the Germans,” he said.

At his funeral, televised live in Britain, it was these themes that shaped the service. Mr. Patch told officials that he did not want a state funeral, and not a military one, either, at least not one with rifle or artillery salutes. His coffin was draped with the Union Jack, and carried into the 13th-century Gothic cathedral by soldiers from The Rifles, the British Army unit whose regimental antecedent was the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, the unit that Mr. Patch fought for in Flanders. But no weapons, not even ceremonial ones, were allowed into the cathedral.

But the feature that would have been likely to please Mr. Patch more than any other was the presence, as honorary pallbearers, of two German soldiers in full dress uniform, part of a six-man contingent that also included soldiers from Belgium and France. A German diplomat, Eckhard Lübkemeier, offered a New Testament reading from Corinthians that spoke of Christ’s “message of reconciliation.”