Veterans parade for 90th anniversary of World War I

FOUR World War I veterans - the youngest of them 104 - have paraded in central London for the 90th anniversary of a conflict that killed around 10 million people and shaped the modern world.

Only 23 British veterans of the conflict are still alive.

Close to 1,000 people, including Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, watched as a bugler sounded the Last Post and a piper played a lament while the veterans, three of them in wheelchairs, remembered their fallen comrades.

Some 900,000 soldiers from the British Empire died and two million were wounded in what was described as the “war to end all wars.” Britain entered the war on August 4, 1914.

Royal Naval Air Service mechanic Henry Allingham, aged 108, who served in France and at the Battle of Jutland, stepped out of his wheelchair to lay his wreath at London’s Cenotaph memorial in Whitehall. When Britain declared war after the German invasion of Belgium, he said he had seen it as an adventure.

Military historian Gary Sheffield of King’s College London said the surviving veterans were the last living link to a world that vanished with the outbreak of war in August 1914.

“The First World War is really the dividing line between the modern world and what came before,” he said. “In 1914, the globe was dominated by hereditary European monarchies and empires like the Russian and Austro-Hungarian. The First World War shattered European domination of world affairs and the two great powers of the 20th century - the US and the USSR - came out of it.”