Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
A Call to Members: Commemorating the End of the Great War
Please forgive this very belated call from a fellow Ricochet member. I intend to write, marking the centennial of the Armistice of 11/11/1918. However, I am well aware that most of the burden of that terrible war, on the Allied side, was borne, in the meat grinder of the Western Front, by citizens of the British Empire, and the French Third Republic. We are barely aware of the Russians, the Italians, and even Japan.
So, fellow Ricochetti, I invite, I encourage your postings this weekend. Have you a family story? Photographs of a visit to a battlefield? Images from the home front, or the aftermath? Will you attend ceremonies, as a matter of annual observance or as a special centennial event?
Peter Jackson, of the Lord of the Rings movie fame, has produced an apparent masterpiece, They Shall Not Grow Old, taking actual footage, colorizing and adding the voices of the men who lived it. Is anyone attending a screening?
I see that Canada has a plan for bells to ring 100 times at sunset on 11 November. Additionally, around the world, bells will toll at the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month, marking the end of hostilities. Might there be good audio-video of that?
I propose we mark posts with the tag “WWI Centennial” for easy reference.
Published in General
My grandfather – Fay Rayburn – and his twin brother Frank both served as ambulance drivers in WWI. Fay was awarded a Purple Heart.
I anticipate perhaps investigating more about him as we go through the effects of his only child – my Mom – in the coming weeks. She suffered the latest in an extensive series of falls this past week and it is obvious she won’t be able to live alone anymore. I know she has Fay’s medals, and I expect she has anything That belonged to Frank as well since she inherited all from Frank’s sole heir as well.
I cited a bit of poetry from one of the British war poets. We have poetry, music, art, books, and early films by those who were there, and then the films that have been made over time.
@garymcvey mentioned Oh, What a Lovely War!,Grand Illusion, Wings, Doughboys, All Quiet On the Western Front, The Blue Max. and holds Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, 1957 to be the best American movie about WWI.
@judgemental mentioned Sergeant York.
@percival recommended The Fighting 69th.
If that covers the film category, what of the other art forms?
I suppose in 1916 “fresh” could just mean “unexpected”
@ekosj has published “WWI – A Prelude.”
@johnrussell has published “The bells of London began to clash” — recounting the bells ringing out at the end of the Great War, and the air of celebration.
My maternal great-grandfather, Alma Jasper Morton, served in the infantry in WWI. His mother was a Caddo Indian. I don’t know much about his service, but you asked about stories about the aftermath of WWI as well. After the war, he married my great-grandmother and they started a family and a jitney business (sort of the Uber of the 1920s) and they were rather successful. They owned two jitneys. Then the Great Depression set in and they lost everything.
Jasper did what so many men did, he left my grandmother with their 8 children at home and “rode the rails” looking for work. One day, while jumping onto a train, he slipped and fell and a train wheel cut off his right hand from the left of his ring finger to above his wrist. He somehow survived but spent three months convalescing in a VA hospital in Alexandria, LA. My grandmother told me that when her father returned home from the hospital, he was essentially an embittered drunk who terrorized the family. He would get drunk and made the kids memorize and shout out his VA number upon command. My grandmother, now 88, recited his VA number to me as she was telling me this story just last week. I looked it up online and my grandmother’s memory of this number is dead-on accurate. Jasper died in 1954. My grandmother does not have fond memories of him.
This is one of the finest poems from WWI, by Alan Seeger who died at the Battle of the Somme at age 26. Who knows what other words he would have added to our literature. I have had this poem memorized since age 12. There is also, of course, In Flanders Fields by Lt. Col. John McCrae.
I Have a Rendezvous With Death by Alan Seeger
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear…
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
I spent a few afternoons with WWI vet back in the 70s. He was a distant relative of one of my high school friends. We drove 800 miles to Gonzales, TX to spend a couple of days cleaning out a large chicken shed in exchange for all the beer we could drink, and see the sights. My buddy’s favorite thing to do was to go visit AJ, have a beer, play dominoes, and listen to him tell stories. He claimed that at one point he was the only person who could talk to everyone in Gonzales because he spoke English, Spanish, German, Polish, and Czech. He volunteered for the Army and learned French when his unit was sent Over There. I asked him about how he learned French, and he said that he was a blacksmith, so when he had a little time, he’d go to a French village, find the blacksmith and volunteer to help. “They teach you for free, if you’re good help,” he said. Then he added, “It wasn’t free, after all.” The Army had a policy against fraternizing with the French, and he got busted a couple of times.
When my sister and I were in our early thirties, my dad insisted we go with him and Mom to the fiftieth reunion of his Artillery group that had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and then gone on through Germany to wait at the river until the Russians met them there.
Once at the reunion, this very excited man came up to both my parents, introduced himself, spoke a bit about some of the interesting things that Battalion had done during the war.
Then he once again shook Dad’s hand and said, “Well I am off now to find Fred D. Do you remember him? Tall, handsome and always very much the ladies man, he was a hard person to forget.”
He then merrily ambled off, while my mom and my rather shrunken up 83 year old father cracked up. (My dad being the Fred D in question.)
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by W.B.Yeats.
I posted “Eliminating War,” as the Great War was hopefully proclaimed “the war to end all wars.”
Also “Quote of the Day: Remembrance.”
I recommend
My parents’ marrying represented the twining of two families’ strands, one (maternal) reaching back to British colonial times in Massachusetts, and the other (paternal) stemming from German immigrants to Boston in the 1880s. So each side had some experience with WWI.
My paternal grandmother told me of the fear in which they lived through that War, as accounts of “Hun” atrocities in Belgium, etc., appeared in the press: she recalled how those with German surnames, or who received letters from relatives back in the old country, or who were locally known to be able to read or speak German, feared reprisals.
My mother’s uncle lost most of his lungs to gas in the trenches, but survived with his disability. I remember as a child seeing him occasionally at family gatherings, a tall rail of a man with a pronounced stoop, elegantly dressed, but whose war-time injuries left him unemployable for life.
My dad was in the Army Air Corps and spent part of WWII in England, tracking Allied bomber raids over the Continent. At least one appeared to target the very area from which his (and my) ancestors had left for America decades earlier. He wondered if he still had relatives there. But after WWII, that was East Germany and none were ever heard from again.
Fr. Rutler’s Weekly Column
Pier 54 on the Hudson River is a short walk from our church. On display are pictures of the Titanic and the Lusitania, which is not encouraging for public relations. The Titanic was supposed to berth there, but instead the Carpathia arrived with surviving passengers. Seven years before, my grandmother had sailed on the Carpathia.
The sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat brought the United States into the Great War. Film footage shows passengers arriving at Pier 54 to embark on May 1, 1915. Of the 1,962 passengers and crew on the Lusitania’s manifest, 1,198 died. Toscanini had planned to be on board, but took an earlier ship after bad reviews of his performance of Carmen. Jerome Kern missed the ship when his alarm clock failed—otherwise, we’d not have “Ol’ Man River” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The dancer Isadora Duncan cancelled her ticket to save money, and the actress Ellen Terry …
One casualty of the Lusitania sinking was Father Basil Maturin, Catholic chaplain at Oxford University, returning from a lecture tour. He spurned a lifeboat and gave away his life jacket. That was reminiscent of Monsignor John Chadwick, later pastor of the Church of Saint Agnes here in Manhattan, who barely survived the sinking of the Maine which incited the Spanish-American War. The monsignor was hailed as a hero by the sailors he saved.
If his chauffeur had not taken a wrong turn on the streets of Sarajevo in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand might not have been assassinated, and the domino effect of national alliances would have not brought on the collapse of empires. At the Somme, more than one million troops were killed or wounded, and the war’s total casualties were 37.5 million dead or wounded. One year after the war, there was only one man between the ages of 18 and 30 for every 15 women. Each town and school in Britain has memorials to those lost. Both of my own grandmother’s brothers were killed in Ypres, and that was considered the norm. The United States lost 116,000 men with over 200,000 wounded. Europe has never really recovered. Military strategists were not prepared for modernized combat, and it has been said that the armies were lions led by donkeys. In a macabre way, the chief winners of that cultural suicide were Lenin and Hitler.
Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Armistice signaled by a bugle at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year. The poet Siegfried Sassoon, decorated for bravery, was latterly put in a psychiatric ward for begging an end to the killing. He became a Catholic and is buried near the grave of Monsignor Ronald Knox whom he admired. In tribute to one of his fallen comrades, he wrote:
I know that he is lost among the stars,
And may return no more but in their light.
I learned today that the bugle calls of the American and the British Commonwealth militaries, used to honor the dead, derive from the same old Dutch tune. They became used to honor the dead because the calls were composed to signal the end of the day. Every military post would hear their last call in the evening.
At an annual memorial ceremony—with representation from both the British government, military, and expat community and the U.S. Air Force, Mesa government, and civil organizations—23 RAF cadets were honored this Sunday morning, 11 November. The ceremony included a 21 gun salute, followed by “The Last Post” for the RAF cadets, then “Taps” for two Americans, who died in support of the training.
Please read @alfrench “Retire the Colors.”
Absolutely. Proud to state that the first time I became aware of @alfrench and his family story was in my post http://ricochet.com/522010/qotd-come-on-you-sons-of-bitches-do-you-want-to-live-forever/, which give a little more of the background to “Belleau Wood.”
The official observances in France, are under rain. Indeed, the rains were heavy enough to repeatedly interfere with the satellite TV transmission signal back to C-SPAN. You see that in the multi-national ceremony and in President Trump’s address at a war memorial for Americans. The rain, and the disruption, is so appropriate to the commemoration of a war in which men lived in muddy trenches, never really dry, for years. Feet, constantly wet, started disintegrating. It was called “trench foot” and is called “immersion foot syndrome.” [Emphasis added.]
A friend’s uncle got it fighting in Guadalcanal. He had problems the rest of his life.
@richardeaston points us to a great C-SPAN discussion of Sgt. Alvin York.
I posted a bit longer reflection on rain and mud in the trenches of World War I.
From an earlier post:
In 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, the British and French armies launched an enormous offensive. “The first day on the Somme was, in terms of casualties, also the worst day in the history of the British army, which suffered 57,470 casualties.” The dead and the maimed bought 6 miles of moonscape. In 1991, Mötorhead released its tenth album, 1916. The final song was a dirge for the young men who died in “the mud and the blood.” Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister growls/howls the dirge with spare orchestral backing.
My great-grandmother’s family was hit hard by the Great War, she was the 2nd eldest in a family of 13 children including 5 sons who all served in the war. This is a note her father received from a courtier of King George V:
Sir,
I have the honour to inform you that the King has heard with much interest that you have at the present moment five sons serving in the Army
I am commanded to express to you The King’s congratulations and to assure you that His Majesty much appreciates the spirit of patriotism which prompted this example, in one family, of loyalty and devotion to their Sovereign and Empire
I have the honour to be,
Sir,
Your obedient Servant
Keeper of the Privy Purse
The 5 brothers were, from eldest to youngest; Percy (1881), Raymond (1883), Reginald (1891), Archibald (1897), Joseph (1898).
Percy and Raymond were adventurers; they had volunteered for the Boer War, escaped a POW camp during that war, and each participated in other wars as well (Raymond fought in the Balkan Wars as the lone English volunteer in the Macedonian Legion and Percy was a war correspondent in the Russo-Japanese War who developed a way to transmit battle maps via Morse Code for the newspapers.) When war broke out, they signed up within hours of each other. Percy was enlisted with the 22nd Bn Royal Fusiliers, won the Distinguished Conduct Medal and earned a battlefield commission in 1916. The medal and promotion earned him some home leave and shortly after he returned he was killed on 11 Sep 1916 during a patrol near Hebuterne France. Raymond, due to his Balkan service, had a note attached to his signup papers “a very special case” as he was fluent in Bulgarian as well. He was soon sent down to the Salonika front as an intelligence officer. He was killed 13 Sep 1916 by shell fire on his way to a brigade HQ to interrogate prisoners.
Reginald was a cavalryman in the Canadian Army (my Great-grandmother had emigrated over in the early 1900’s and her brothers at various times lived there as well, war broke out while he was in Canada so he soon signed up as well. He was wounded multiple times (the first time was 20 Sep 1916 — turns out Sep 1916 was a bad month for the Fisher family from Kineton– and the final time in 1917, he would spend the rest of the war convalescing) and served in France and Palestine.
Archibald served with the Warwickshire Yeomanry and served in Palestine — was hospitalized multiple times but survived the war.
Joseph, the youngest to serve, signed up with the Warwickshire Yeomanry in 1914, but due to his age did not go overseas until 1916 as part of the South Staffordshire Regiment. He fought at the 3rd Battle of Ypres and then down in Italy for the remainder of the war, taking part in the Battle of the Piave and Vittorio Veneto.
Here are pictures of Reginald, Archibald, & Raymond.
Reginald
Archibald
Raymond