The Great War’s dying legacy
BOSTON — They are more than 100 years old now, those very few, the rapidly dwindling veterans of that great calamity of the early 20th century known at the time as the Great War.
Last week Great Britain lost her last with the death of Harry Patch at 111. Patch saw action at one of the war’s greatest blood lettings: Passchendaele in Flanders. Only the week before Henry Allingham had died at 113. He was Britian’s oldest veteran, who saw action on land and sea and in the air.
The last French veteran of that conflict, Pierre Picault, died in 2008, as did Germany’s Erich Kastner and the Austro-Hungarian, Franz Kunstler, who fought on the Piave River against the Italians — a battle made famous by Ernest Hemingway in “Farewell to Arms.”
Perhaps because they were on the losing side, the Central Powers did not keep records of their veterans as did France and Britain. The Ottoman Empire’s last veteran of the Great War, Yakup Satar, also died last year.
Canada still has John Babcock, who is 109, and Australia has British-born Claude Choules, 108, who served in the Royal Navy. America still has Frank Buckles, 108, who drove an army ambulance in France. Buckles had the indignity of being captured by the Japanese in the following war when he worked for a shipping company in the Philippines. He spent years in a Japanese prison camp, and was lucky to survive.
In his history of “The World Crisis,” published in 1927, Winston Churchill gave Germany its due as a fighting power. “For four years Germany had fought and defied the five continents of the world by land and sea and air. The German armies upheld her tottering confederates, intervened in every theatre with success, stood everywhere on conquered territory, and inflicted on their enemies more than twice the bloodshed they suffered themselves … . Nearly 20 million men perished or shed their blood before the sword was wrested from that terrible hand. Surely, Germans, for history it is enough!”
But it was not enough. Germany had to have one more go in an even more terrible war before it would transmogrify into the peace-loving nation it is today. It would be Churchill’s finest hour, and it would consign the earlier conflict to be forever called simply World War I, with no pretensions to greatness.
Although World War II would eclipse the Great War in scope and deaths, in many ways World War I changed the world more profoundly in that it put an end to four great empires, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman.
World War II saw more horrors inflicted on civilians, with the mass bombing of cities and the Holocaust’s genocide perpetrated on Jews and other groups. But for soldiers on the front lines nothing before or since has surpassed the horrors of trench warfare in France and Flanders. Visit the war memorials in British towns and there are many more soldier deaths listed for 1914-1918 then there are for 1939- 1945.
World War I was the first air war, the first tank war, and the last war in which fleets sank each with naval gunfire — as they had in Elizabethan days — rather than with the help of carrier-borne aircraft.
World War I was the last poet’s war in which verse instead of prose set the literary tone. And what a tone it was, ripping the mask off any glory that war might have held, cynical, despairing and brutally pessimistic. The stalemate of trench warfare had a profound effect on the generation to come. Whereas Tom Brokow would dub the World War II veterans as “the greatest generation,” Gertrude Stein would label those who had fought in World War I as “the lost generation.”
Think of Siegfried Sassoon who wrote:
Do you remember the stretcher cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads-those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Patch and Allingham were among the last who could remember being, as Wilfred Owen wrote:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed
Through sludge…
Patch and Allingham knew firsthand that there was no glory in dying for your country, or as Owen put it, they understood, for what it was:
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro Patria mori.
Shortly before he died, Patch told a television interviewer that the Great War wasn’t worth a single life.
More on World War I:
The story you just read is accessible and free to all because thousands of listeners and readers contribute to our nonprofit newsroom. We go deep to bring you the human-centered international reporting that you know you can trust. To do this work and to do it well, we rely on the support of our listeners. If you appreciated our coverage this year, if there was a story that made you pause or a song that moved you, would you consider making a gift to sustain our work through 2024 and beyond?