(HOST) At Memorial Day services all over the country, aging veterans lead remembrance services. Teacher and historian Vic Henningsen reflects on the legacy of one group rapidly disappearing from their ranks.
(HENNINGSEN) In the last year, we’ve lost all but a handful of the remaining veterans of World War I. Come November, when we’ll celebrate the 90th anniversary of the armistice ending the so-called "Great War", it’s likely there’ll be no living veterans left. The last surviving German died in January; the last Turk in April. Lazare Ponticelli, who fought with the French Foreign Legion, died in March, aged 110 – the very last of the 8.4 million footsoldiers who defended France between 1914 and 1918. An American ambulance driver and a British infantryman are among the few still hanging on. They are, as the French said of Ponticelli, "the last of the last."
The youngest is 107, the oldest 111. Their great age obscures the fact that they were the very youngest of those caught up in one of the most devastating wars in world history. Most enlisted underage – Ponticelli was 16.
They volunteered to serve in an unspeakably dreadful conflict – the first example we have of industrial killing on a mass scale. Ernest Hemingway, who was wounded serving with the Italian Army, summed it up in his anti-war classic A Farewell to Arms:
"That was what you did," he wrote, "You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you."
Hemingway spoke for the anonymous masses of ordinary men in the ranks: men who had no grand aims; who in many cases didn’t understand why they were fighting others like themselves – men who wanted nothing more than to lay down their weapons and return to home and families.
Lazare Ponticelli agreed wholeheartedly. He asked for a simple funeral. If the country wanted a grand observation, he said, let it be a service in memory of all who fought. In the end, that’s what France did.
My own contact with World War I came largely through conversations with my wife’s grandfather. Roland Richardson was a fighter pilot — a "pursuit" pilot, as they were known then – in the 213th Aero Squadron. He was 20, but you wouldn’t know it from the photo on display at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. Standing next to his biplane, he looks all of twelve. But he fought; he killed; he watched friends die, falling in flames onto the fields of France.
"Why did you go?", I once asked. "Well, son," he responded, puffing on his pipe and looking out over the Canadian lake where we were fishing, "We just didn’t know any better. And the people who did never warned us."
"As a matter of fact," he said, his usually warm eyes hardening with the memory, "They were the ones who sent us."