Florence Green never saw the front line. Her war was spent serving food, not dodging bullets.
But Ms. Green, who has died at age 110, was the last known surviving veteran of World War I. She was serving with the Women's Royal Air Force as a waitress at an air base in eastern England when the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918.
It was not until 2010 that she was officially recognised as a veteran after a researcher found her service record in Britain's National Archives.
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Ms. Green died on Saturday at the Briar House Care Home in King's Lynn, eastern England, two weeks before her 111th birthday, said the home.
She was born Florence Beatrice Patterson in London on February 19, 1901, and joined the newly-formed Women's Royal Air Force in September 1918 at the age of 17.
The service trained women to work as mechanics, drivers and in other jobs to free men for front-line duty. Ms. Green went to work as a steward in the officers' mess, first at the Narborough airdrome and then at RAF Marham in eastern England, and was serving there when the war ended.
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Decades later, Ms. Green remembered her wartime service with affection.
“I met dozens of pilots and would go on dates,” she said in an interview in 2008. “I had the opportunity to go up in one of the planes but I was scared of flying. I would work every hour God sent. But I had dozens of friends on the base and we had a great deal of fun in our spare time. In many ways, I had the time of my life.”
After the war she stayed in the area, raising three children with her husband Walter Green.
World War I “the war to end all wars” killed about 20 million people in four years of fighting between the Allied powers including Britain, France and the United States and Germany and its allies.
The last known soldier to have fought in the brutal trench warfare that has become the enduring image of the conflict was Britain's Harry Patch, who died in 2009 aged 111. The last American veteran of the conflict was Frank Buckles of Charles Town, West Virginia, who drove ambulances in France for the U.S. Army. He died in February 2011.
The war's last known combatant, Royal Navy veteran Claude Choules, died in Australia in May.
There are no known French or German veterans of the war left alive.
Ms. Green's husband died in 1970. She is survived by two daughters, a son and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.