Claude Choules

[bixaorellana]

Claude Choules, the last remaining World War I combat veteran, in his Royal Navy uniform during World War I.

He died on Thursday in Perth, Australia aged 110.

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/05/claude-choules-last-world-war-one-veteran-dies

[Deleted]

Yes, they said on the news that he had enlisted at age 14, lying about his age of course.

[onlymark]

In my lifetime all the WW1 veterans have died.
If you imagine WW2 having a combat veteran who was, say, sixteen, in 1945 (more than likely in the Navy again) the longest conceivably he'd live to is 2039.
Which of us would still be around then? I expect I will and a lot of us will. Sad to think that before I pop my clogs there will be no more first hand witnesses to the two wars.

[Deleted]

I'm not sure if he was really the last veteran, since we tend to only pay attention to "our" side. A few years ago, there were still some Turkish veterans alive.

[bixaorellana]

Well, "a few years ago" is a long time once you've passed the century mark. However, both Claude Choules and Frank Buckles made it to 110.

Frank Buckles was referred to as the last North American WWI veteran, but he was not a combat veteran. He died on February 27, 2011. John Babcock, Canada’s last World War I veteran, died February 19, 2010. He was not a combat veteran, either.

Florence Green is now considered to be the last living WWI veteran, again, not a combat veteran. She celebrated her 110th birthday on February 19 of this year.

There are no other verified veterans of The Great War, apparently.

Józef Kowalski of Poland is considered to be the oldest military veteran in the world.

Boy, February crops up in births and deaths over and over again in these aged vets!

[bixaorellana]

May 10, 2011 14:23:05 GMT bixaorellana said:

February crops up in births and deaths over and over again in these aged vets

Little did I know that statement would be borne out less than a year later.

R.I.P. Florence Green, February 9, 1901 – February 4, 2012

I found out about it just now, from this essay:

World War I Belongs to Literature Now

Reading last week about the death of Florence Green, Women's Royal Air Force member and last surviving veteran of the First World War, I thought of a sonorous passage by Borges:

In a stable lying almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and a gray beard, stretched on the ground amidst the animal odors, meekly seeks death like someone seeking sleep....In the kingdoms of England, the sound of the bells is already one of the customs of the afternoon, but the man, while still a boy, had seen the face of Woden, had seen holy dread and exultation, had seen the rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments, seen the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he would be dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of the pagan rites. The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.

We may well be astonished by space-filling acts which come to an end when someone dies, and yet something, or an infinite number of things, die in each death—unless there is a universal memory, as the theosophists have conjectured. There was a day in time when the last eyes to see Christ were closed forever. The battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die? What pathetic or frail form will the world lose? Perhaps the voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a horse in the vacant space at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk? ("The Witness," Anthony Kerrigan trans.)

The Great War now officially belongs to history, but it may be more accurate to say that it belongs to literature. Borges in "The Witness" is talking obliquely about the preservative power of writing; by naming that single horse he is hoping to save it from oblivion just as Helen—if she existed—was saved. And arguably no event in modern history has been more vividly recorded in literary memory than World War I. Through the books that bear witness to it, it's been seared into the cultural fossil record like a geological boundary.

Everyone who has contemplated the war, during and after, has testified to the watershed it represented. Virginia Woolf suggested that "human character" itself changed in the turbulent years preceding it; Philip Larkin wrote famously that it snuffed the "innocence" of the Edwardian era "without a word"; Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, argued that it birthed a kind of irony that has become inseparable from our perspective on all of history. Such irony is closely linked to trauma, to the way the inconceivable happens in casual proximity with the ordinary.

Due to the unprecedented scale, efficiency, and pointlessness of its slaughter, World War I has gained a reputation as the great anti-romantic war. (This in itself, if a writer's not careful, can invest the subject with a kind of romance.) Fussell notes that the horror of the trenches purged war literature of a whole Arthurian vocabulary of combat: "steed," "foe," "vanquish," "perish." Hemingway's battle-scarred Frederic Henry makes a similar point in A Farewell to Arms:

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity...Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Thus while the war generated its share of sentimental classics ("In Flanders fields the poppies blow..."), these now look to us like stale bits in the teeth of a sinister modern beast. The World War I of the imagination rests securely in the novels of Hemingway, Woolf, Ford, Hašek, and Remarque; in the memoir-novels of Robert Graves and E. E. Cummings; in the poetry of Thomas Hardy ("Channel Firing"), T. S. Eliot ("The Waste Land," "The Hollow Men," both portraits of cultural shell shock), and Wilfred Owen, who was gunned down on the Fonsomme Line a week before the armistice. Owen in particular has become the symbolic casualty of the war; his cruelly silenced voice ranged from the journalistic to the prophetic:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
Dulce et Decorum Est

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones.

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever mourns in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.
Insensibility

Because World War I was one of the single stupidest actions ever perpetrated by human beings, its disappearance from living memory unnerves me a little. It's as if the loss of that tangible link might condemn us to repeat it—again. (Please, readers: don't try anything funny with any passing archdukes.) At the same time, the literature it generated remains a powerful deterrent for willing readers. Owen and company lie in wait to stun us like the live ordnance still being recovered near Verdun.

Complementing the literary war are thousands of other contemporary accounts—newspaper articles, letters, and the like; there must also be a handful of surviving centenarians who were too young to fight, but who can dimly remember soldiers on parade or battles fought on the edge of town. Otherwise, the war is dead. Green took it with her. As a connoisseur of ironies, Fussell might be pleased to learn that her departing memory was all innocence: "I met dozens of pilots and would go on dates," she recalled in 2008. "In many ways, I had the time of my life."

Postscript: I can't resist a personal footnote, which is really a footnote to a footnote. While working as an editor for Big Think in 2009, I came across the story of Corporal Frank Buckles, the last American survivor of World War I. At the time Buckles was still alive and residing in West Virginia, so along with my fellow staff I tried to arrange an interview with him. As a kid I'd been enthralled (and terrified) by All Quiet on the Western Front; it amazed me that someone who had witnessed that front could have lived to see Google and predator drones. I would gladly have trekked to West Virginia to talk with him for 10 minutes—not in order to ask any particular question, but just to make that seemingly impossible connection. Sadly, I had no luck. He was very old and, understandably, done talking. He died in 2011, followed shortly by former Royal Navy officer Claude Choules and, finally, Green. So much for my career as World War I correspondent; my sources now will always have to be books.

Austin Allen on February 13, 2012, 11:07 AM for Big Think

[rikita]

May 10, 2011 9:02:40 GMT onlyMark said:

In my lifetime all the WW1 veterans have died.
If you imagine WW2 having a combat veteran who was, say, sixteen, in 1945 (more than likely in the Navy again) the longest conceivably he'd live to is 2039.
Which of us would still be around then? I expect I will and a lot of us will. Sad to think that before I pop my clogs there will be no more first hand witnesses to the two wars.

isn't that kind of logical though? if you are born after world war II, then doesn't it make sense that those people who lived through it probably die before you?

[onlymark]

Now you're being logical.
Yes it is logical to think that, but to me it is somewhat saddening to think that before too long there will be no more first hand witnesses to two of the most major influences on world history.
That was all.

[rikita]

okay... yeah i suppose that is true...

[bixaorellana]

Did you read the essay, Rikita? It said at length what Mark expressed so succinctly.

I found the novel "Birdsong" very moving, in large part because the veteran's character and personality reminded me of my grandfather's. It helped me to understand how his experience in The Great War probably affected him forever.

[mickthecactus]

Birdsong is incredible.

[rikita]

well i just read over it quickly i must admit...

[hwinpp]

What I found completely illogical was when I asked my father about his father...

He told me my grandfather had been too old for WWI!

[bixaorellana]

As far as I can tell from skimming this, the maximum age for a soldier in Germany during WWI was 45.

In England, 1916:
The January Act conscripted only single men and widowers aged 18 to 41 and without dependants, but the May Act extended the call up to married men and at the end of the war married men of fifty were being conscripted into the army. Source

Others --
US: 18-45
Austria-Hungary: up to 50 by the end of the war
Britain: in April 1918, age range was 17-55. This extended to Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
Canada: 20-45
Source <-- click "cancel" when asked for authentication in order to read document

That's what I found that seemed to be officially correct. However, there are unauthenticated reports of soldiers much older, such as My wife's great great grandfather was killed on the 1st day of the battle of the Somme, 1st July 1916. He was 60 , born 1856.
Doesn't say what country. source

[hwinpp]

Yes, he was over 45 in 1914, unbelievable. He had 2 sons by a first wife who both died in WWI.

He re- married, my grandmother, and had a daughter and a son, my father. My father was born in 1934, his older sister 17 years before...

Difficult to get your head around these kinds of ages.

He died before I was born, of course.

[Deleted]

My grandfather was lucky in WW1 because he was made a POW rather quickly and spent most of the war as a farm labourer in Germany. He came back with a report that everything they say about the farmer's daughter is true.

When you think that so many others on both sides were dying in trenches in France and Belgium and Turkey, being gassed or blown up and run through with a bayonet, it was like being sent on a wonderful holiday for him.

[bixaorellana]

Sheesh, HW -- your grandfather had a hard life! Imagine losing first your wife, then two of your children, then wondering if you'd have to go to the war that took those sons.

Kerouac, that was lucky for your grandfather -- & for you, too, or you might not be here to tell us about it.

I wonder what it was like in that war, and presumably in WWII as well, for those Europeans who came from all those areas with historically fluid borders. They must have had family connections & even shared language with "the enemy".

[Deleted]

One of my great grandmothers was born nominally German, in the Alsatian town of Sarrebourg.

And when my grandmother got married and moved from the Vosges to my ancestral village of Batilly, it was still a border town, because it was right on the edge of annexed Alsace-Moselle. There was a big rail yard for such a tiny village, because the freight trains went through customs there.

I don't know what sort of border control there was on the roads, because my grandmother would still talk about the "troublemakers" from Vernéville just across the border who would come and disrupt the Saturday night dance. The other village was called Verneheim back then, and I don't think my grandmother ever accepted them as being really French, even after 60 years.

With the EU and most particularly the Schengen agreement, I think we have made much more progress in the last 20 years than in the century before.