The Last of the Last

With the death of the Harry Richard Landis on February 6, Frank Buckles was the lone surviving American veteran of the First World War honored today by the U.S. Defense Department. The Chicago Sun Times reported:

The remaining U.S. veteran is Frank Buckles, 107, of Charles Town, W.Va., according the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. In addition, John Babcock of Spokane, Wash., 107, served in the Canadian army and is the last known Canadian veteran of the war.

Another World War I vet, Ohioan J. Russell Coffey, died in December at 109. The last known German World War I veteran, Erich Kaestner, died New Year’s Day at 107.

I have said many times that World War One is my favorite war, if one can have a favorite war that is. I suppose that I say that in honor of what those young men (and in few cases women) experienced and that so many of them recorded it, and that those men came from so many places geographically, socially and economically. It was a war that was entirely Catholic in the way that it destroyed a generation-- a war that one hopes we will never see again.

I can only wonder what it feels like to be the last of a generation and to be the one man with whose passing will mark the true end of an era. A long life is often celebrated in the culture in which I live and I salute the fortitude and the bravery that it takes to live such a life even as I look at such an effort as undesirable and a bit pointless at least for my self.