In Memoriam
Empty Trenches
The final survivors of the Western Front pass on.
Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, two of the three surviving British veterans of the First World War and the last two who saw action in the trenches of the Western front, died within a week of one another last month. Allingham was 113 and considered by some estimates the world’s oldest man. Patch was a spry 111. The last surviving British veteran of the war is Claude Choules, 108, who served in the Royal Navy and lives today in Australia. There are apparently no surviving German or French veterans; a 108-year-old American and a 109-year-old Canadian remain.
Men who live this long see a staggering sweep of history. In Britain, they saw the British Empire fall and then eventually decline into a country that seems eager to get on with the business of extinction. Given the changes in fortune and outlook that occur even in a normal-term life, we can only imagine the shifts in perspective Allingham and Patch must have experienced.
Both men were modest and unsentimental about their war service. Patch told of watching a young soldier’s last moments at Passchendaele, his body ripped apart, calling out “mother” as he died. In response to a question about whether the lives Britain had lost in the war — nearly one million, almost double its deaths in World War II — had been worth it, he answered, “It wasn’t worth one.” Allingham spoke of terrible sights at the Battle of the Somme that would never leave him. “I saw too many things I would like to forget, but I will never forget them, I can never forget them,” he said. Their reflections sounded oddly contemporary, similar to the skeptical views citizens of advanced nations often have towards war today.
British prime minister Gordon Brown appropriately paid tribute to both men, at one point describing theirs as “the noblest of all generations.” While Brown’s sentiment may have been emotionally sincere, it was almost certainly intellectually dishonest. For many, Allingham and Patch represented a generation that marched off to war mindlessly without protest, slaughtered in a senseless conflict which soon grew beyond the reach of anyone’s ability to stop it. Their generation embodied the old, death-shrugging ways of the Empire and the broader West of a century ago. That world has not only passed into extinction; many of its core assumptions have been rejected by the generations that followed.
Brown’s “noblest generation” implies an example worthy of emulation, but no one today wants to relive the deeds of the men in the trenches, as British agony over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan makes plain. Perhaps given the change in Western attitudes toward war since 1918, words like Brown’s are as much about assuaging the survivors’ guilt of a generation that hasn’t had to fight as they are about expressing appreciation for the deceased. Placing World War I combatants on a pedestal of nobility makes them exalted, ethereal characters. It makes their sacrifice something almost otherworldly, which helpfully excuses our own failure to do anything so brave.
Like many veterans, Allingham and Patch seemed eager to be regarded in more balanced, and more honest, terms. But war makes balance of any kind difficult to attain, and honesty is no easier to come by in our time than it was in theirs. The World War I generation’s capacity to sacrifice for their fellows, to endure hardship, and to confront horror with courage and grace does, it’s true, seem far superior to our own abilities. But later generations’ questioning of the merits of various wars, refusal to tolerate human costs once largely accepted, and willingness to challenge the nation-state’s demands on individual liberty, make their own claims.
We cannot lament the toll of the Great War, and then its even-worse sequel, without retaining some gratitude that such global cataclysms have not been repeated. There are many reasons for that, but modernist skepticism, so debilitating in other respects, must surely have played a role. The words of Allingham and Patch, late in their lives, remind us that doubt, too, has its virtues.
Martin Owens| 8.11.09 @ 6:56AM
If we keep faith with our ideals half as well as they did, maybe we'll amount to something yet.
Appleby| 8.11.09 @ 7:20AM
Theirs was a different world, and please God we have at least a core of men and women like them, who believe there is something worth dying for that is more important than Hannah Montana tickets or the newest Binkie.
In a few more years the current generation will be completely unable to understand any history that happened before they were born. They will not even believe it happened. This, I believe, is by design.
Ryan| 8.11.09 @ 8:23AM
Probably one of the worst results of the 20th century wars in Europe was the loss of Europe's future. With the Muslim population growing faster - many with extremist leanings - the face of Europe may radically change within three generations.
When WWI rolled around, Europe had only begun to recover from the plague. Now, they are suffering culturally.
Andrew B| 8.11.09 @ 8:39AM
Growing up, I lived next door to a WW1 vet, who had flown Sopwith Camels on the Western Front. My grandfather was also a vet, although his service had been in the US Navy in the North Sea. Veterans of World War One were almost everywhere, and the Memorial Day parade was filled with them.
The last Great War vet in my hometown was an old Marine named George. He marched (escorted by two pretty young girls) each year, still wearing his campaign hat at a jaunty angle. Finally, at age 102, he was practically begged to ride in a car instead of walk.
"Nah," he replied, "save that for the old guys."
That was his last parade, and he was greeted with thunderous waves of applause and a thousand waving flags.
They are all gone now, the Great War vets who filled my younger days. Too many of them slipped away before, like George, we could thank them properly. Let us resolve as a nation not to make the same mistake with our WW2 vets.
PolishKnight| 8.11.09 @ 10:15AM
Poles appreciate that WWI brought about Polish independence, but it also sowed the seeds for WWII and the Soviet occupation for a half a century afterward.
This brings to mind another war: The American Civil War. While noble and originally started due to slavery, it resulted in the mass killings of hundreds of thousands of men and the aftermath exacerbated racist tensions that exist to this day. But one of the most understated negative effects is the elimination of one of the most precious precedents set by the American Revolution: The right of a local population that feels it's rights are being violated to seek independence. The USA which had formerly been an example of heroic freedom fighters because, under Lincoln, a nation that put down rebellions.
How many world conflicts could be resolved if only the peoples in those regions simply became independent and moved on?
Sean| 8.11.09 @ 10:39AM
My grandfather was also a WWI vet, as well as a veteran of the Russian Revolution and WWII. Fighting on the losing side in each war. He lived to an old age, but I wish he would have lived a little longer so I could have heard some of his stories while I was older.
Big Leo| 8.11.09 @ 1:08PM
Polish Knight-- I appreciate Polish, as well as Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Serb, Albanian independence and all the small nations that sprang from the twentieth century's breakup of the various empires, but wonder at the cost of it. My father was a German born in the Russian Empire. He fought against Germany in WW II as a new American immigrant. He often thought that perhaps the world was a better place when a few ponderous and not terribly efficient empires ran things. Certainly the tyrannies of Communism and Nazism would never have been, and if only WWI could have been avoided, WW II and the Holoucaust need never have happened. Remember that when the 'oppressed' Hungarians were polled on who they wanted for President after the fall of Communism, they chose Otto Hapsburg, the heir to the Austrian Imperial throne. Are twenty small nations necessarily more peaceful than three big empires?
The example of America is unfortunate. If the South had been allowed to secede, then New England would also be permitted to. And there goes Texas, California, and a third of whatever State has a grievance. Pretty soon America would have been a weak patchwork of quarreling states just like the Balkans. No, give me America, or whichever Empire with all its faults. Otherwise, we are all South Ossetia.
blackelkspeaks| 8.11.09 @ 1:14PM
As a Vietnam veteran, I can appreciate Mr. Patch's sentiments. But I can't agree with them. His Gandhi-like statement that war isn't worth "one life" doesn't wash in a world in the grip of outright evil. There is no way in hell I would stand idly by and watch some bastard maim and murder my wife and daughters without raining bloody hell on the perpetrator, to my dying breath. And make no mistake, it is this type of scenario, played out every day all over the world, since the beginning of time, that is at the root of all wars.
And this human depravity will never cease until the Second Coming of Christ.
Alan Brooks| 8.11.09 @ 1:17PM
that's what Southerners like Red don't get-- they are de facto balkanizers.
and ''a weak patchwork of quarreling states'' would be optimistic.
America has everything, is a great nation-- but possesses little decency; bad skools; plus there is precious little honesty in America: i.e. imaginary universal healthcare funded by nonexistent dollars.
''honesty is such a lonely word, everyone is so untrue"
Tony in Central PA| 8.11.09 @ 2:17PM
I think Appleby really nailed it as far as the loss of history in our culture. People are to some extent a product of their environments and our youth are certainly the most ignorant generation in history in relation to the amount of information they can access.
Michael| 8.11.09 @ 4:26PM
Note to Big Leo--Texas was already a part of the CSA and left with them. I believe North and South would have then grown and survived as seperate nations.
Alan Brooks| 8.11.09 @ 7:04PM
for how long would they have survived as separate nations? 90 years? until the Soviets invaded both when the Commies got the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s?
John II| 8.11.09 @ 9:51PM
My maternal grandfather, born in 1890, was a veteran of World War I. He died in 1979 (when I was 34). He was 51 when Pearl Harbor pulled the US into World War II and 55 when I was born. His year of WWI service (The Great War, as it's called in encyclopedias published before 1948 or so) was in France as an aircraft mechanic. He never saw action, but saw quite a few of the consequences of action close up. When he came home, he spent years and years running his own garage as a car service mechanic. He retired comfortably in the mid 1950s and lived another 25 years or so without much more than modest recollections of his WWI service and some bewilderment over the fuss about the colossally devastating and transforming experience of World War II.
I don't know what to think about my maternal grandfather, except that he was a good man without pretension who entered into an age of staggering violence and colossal pretension. I think perhaps most survivors of WWI and quite a few survivors of WWII were the same. I think too that America of the postmodern era (post-1945: the only era I know firsthand) lost something worth preserving.
Apache| 8.12.09 @ 3:37AM
What could be better than whites fighting among themselves?
Frankly, I think its great that whitey fought 2 "world wars" among themselves--slaughtering 10s of millions.
The result? Whiteys days of stealing land, and resources are waning--and will not live to see mid century.
Heck, without 2 "world wars" where whitey ripped himself apart, would whitey today be on the endangered species list due to "below replacement" birth rates?
About the only war I can think of that was on par with WW1 and WW2 is the Civil War--which left 600,000 dead honkys--LOL!
Too bad we can't have another war where whitey kills whitey in the tens of millions...
P.S. No, I am not a troll and yes I am expressing my true thoughts on the issue at hand (smile)
Rantly McTirade| 8.12.09 @ 2:39PM
So sad and pathetic-drunk and idle on the reservation, venting, in the middle of the night,
your rage at those who whipped your ancestors into submission.
Big Leo| 8.12.09 @ 3:30PM
MIchael says, "Note to Big Leo--Texas was already a part of the CSA and left with them.." Of course. And for how long would Texas have stayed a part of the Confederacy given its independent mindedness that we see even today? Not long.
kathy99| 8.13.09 @ 12:29AM
As much as I sometimes like to think that Texas would be better off as an independent nation, my father-in-law used to constantly tell me, "If we did that, Mexico would immediately send its army up here and take us back." I asked, "Do you really think so?" I wondered if Mexico was really that interested in us.
Well, they may not be soldiers, but they are coming up here anyway. My father-in-law (a WW II vet), knew what he was talking about.