Last First World War Combatant Dies

[Túrin Turambar]

Claude ‘Chuckles’ Choules, the last man to see guns fired in anger in the Great War, has died in Perth, aged 110. He joined the Royal Navy in 1916 at the age of 15 and was a witness to both the Battle of Jutland and the scuttling of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow. He subsequently emigrated to Australia, and he served in the Australian Navy during the Second World War.

Interestingly, he refused to participate in ANZAC Day or Armistice Day ceremonies on the basis that he opposed anything that appeared to glorify war. When he published his memoirs, The Last of the Last, at age 108, he became the world’s oldest first-time author.

I remember Eric Bogle’s famous line about ‘a whole generation butchered and damned’. That generation is now gone. It’s one of those little watersheds in history.

[Lalaith]

It is worth noting his passing, LordM. Thanks for posting this.

[vison]

Thanks, Lord_M.

What a life he had, one way or the other.

[Nin]

Thank you Lord M.

I remember in 2004, for the 90th anniversary of the start of the war, they interviewed the last German surviving soldier. He was from Alsace(?), so fought WWI for Germany and WWII for France... Sad lives.

In a teaching project for next year I am working on WWI, because it is one of those historic events, taught and named differently dpending from the country in which you work. In Germany, the trauma of WWI was totally overshadowed by WWII, whereas in France it was a long time vivid and is still called "The Great War". It's very interesting to see those differences and I hesitate to take students to Flandres to the places of the battlefields and the museums.

(My teaching project is bout different ways of seeing and teaching history in different countries and times - I'll certainly post more about it one day, also to see if some of you have history textbooks they could give or borrow me)

[Ghân-buri-Ghân]

Claude ‘Chuckles’ Choules, the last man to see guns fired in anger in the Great War, has died in Perth, aged 110. He joined the Royal Navy in 1916 at the age of 15 and was a witness to both the Battle of Jutland and the scuttling of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow. He subsequently emigrated to Australia, and he served in the Australian Navy during the Second World War.

Interestingly, he refused to participate in ANZAC Day or Armistice Day ceremonies on the basis that he opposed anything that appeared to glorify war. When he published his memoirs, The Last of the Last, at age 108, he became the world’s oldest first-time author.

I remember Eric Bogle’s famous line about ‘a whole generation butchered and damned’. That generation is now gone. It’s one of those little watersheds in history.

(My added bold.)

It is individuals such as Charles Choules who restore some of my faith in the decency of common humanity. It is a brave position to take, refusing to be complicit in memorial services, but without such peoples' examples, the charge of being "unpatriotic" (an insidious attack) is routinely levelled at those who refuse to indulge themselves in what is, to all intents and purposes, war glorification. I have noticed how Armistice Day memorials have been co-opted by those who push militarism, confusing the true message, that war is a terrible thing, with support for "our boys", even when "our boys" are engaged in ruthless wars of aggression.

The Great War was called the "war to end all wars". Sadly, memories are short, and with the passing of the last combatant we see the next generation of warmongers revelling in"just" conflicts, exta-judicial executions, targeted assassinations, etc etc. Once more, the propaganda machines spew forth their distortions to justify the killing of nominal enemies. The Great War, a war between competing Empires, was presented as Good against Evil, as all wars are. Evil is, of course, "them".

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, I've read. And ignorance is bliss...

[JewelSong]

Here are the lyrics (and link to a youtube video with recording by John McDermott) to the song by Eric Bogle, referenced above by Lord_M.

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fir o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that loyal heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

Did they beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fir o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And I can't help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fir o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpiwvQ7Q ... re=related

[Túrin Turambar]

Ooh, I like McDermott's version. Another one of my favourites is the Dropkick Murphys', with the fifes and drums in the chorus.

[JewelSong]

I have that one, too...but I love McDermott's voice!

[Alatar]

I grew up thinking this was written by "The Fureys And Davy Arthur". Their version was a huge hit here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntt3wy-L8Ok

[Alatar]

And while we're in the mood:


The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, as sung by Liam Clancy

[Elentári]

Echoing Bogle's sentiments, I defy anyone to watch Attenborough's "Oh, What a Lovely War" without crying...it's an incredible piece of cinema.

[Túrin Turambar]

I grew up thinking this was written by "The Fureys And Davy Arthur". Their version was a huge hit here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntt3wy-L8Ok

That's another great one.

I suppose in all this I should post the song actually being sung by the guy who wrote it:

Eric Bogle version

[Ethelwynn]

Why is it so many beautiful songs come from death and tragedy? RIP, Claude Choules. What a life you had.

[Túrin Turambar]

The death of the last veteran of the War passed by almost unnoticed two months ago. As a seventeen-year-old, Florence Green of Norfolk became a stewardess in the RAF. She joined in September 1918, two months before the end of the war. She died this February, two weeks short of her 111th birthday.

Probably the most remarkable thing, to me, is that until December last year she was comfortably living with her 90-year-old daughter. She only moved into a nursing home at age 110.

It's also interesting that, to her, the war was a fun time - she was a teenage girl living away from home and working a full-time job, getting attention from men and enjoying a great deal of freedom that women a few years' older would not have had at her age. I also expect that she would have been too young for the boys in her immediate age group to have been scythed through like the generations before - they would not have been up for conscription until late 1918 or early 1919.

It makes an interesting contrast with the anger of some of the last surviving combat veterans. Britain's Harry Patch (d. 2009) is a good example. He was conscripted in 1916, aged 18, arrived in France in June 1917 and was wounded at Passchendaele that September. He refused to talk about his own experiences until 81 years later, in 1998. From wikipedia, in 2004:

"When the war ended, I don't know if I was more relieved that we'd won or that I didn't have to go back. Passchendaele was a disastrous battle – thousands and thousands of young lives were lost. It makes me angry. Earlier this year, I went back to Ypres to shake the hand of Herr Kuentz, Germany's only surviving veteran from the war. It was emotional. He is 107. We've had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it's a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn't speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?

[Primula Baggins]

Those are powerful words, Lord_M.

[axordil]

And applicable to the vast majority of wars.

[vison]

It was Nevil Shute who pointed out that for many men (and some women, obviously) The War was The Best Years of Their Lives.

He didn't say it as if it was a "good thing". Just a true thing.

Remember what they used to say? "What if they gave a war and nobody came"?

Maybe one day.

[Túrin Turambar]

To me, the ultimate tragedy is that the hard lessons of the First World War were learned by the majority of European statesmen, and led directly to the disastrous policy of Appeasement in the late 1930s. The idea of another world war was so abhorrent to them that they were willing to give Hitler whatever he wanted on the off-chance that it could be avoided. The few who opposed Appeasement, like Winston Churchill, were dismissed as warmongering cranks living in a pre-1914 world.

But it seems we all learned our lessons in the end. The differing attitudes of First and Second World War veterans is something I find very interesting. Despite being far more destructive, the Second World War didn’t seem to embitter the people who went through it in the same way that the First World War did. At least on the allied side – I know very little about the attitudes of Central Powers/Axis veterans.

[axordil]

WW I was, from an infantryman's point of view at least, as bad as war gets.

[vison]

WW I was, from an infantryman's point of view at least, as bad as war gets.

And absolutely pointless. And fought with modern weapons and old-fashioned stupidity.

The romantic patriotism, the "dulce et decorum est" sort of thing, all dead and ridiculous in the face of the savagery.

The ordinary infantrymen on both sides were from the "lower classes" and were underfed, undersized, uneducated cannon fodder treated with contempt from the getgo.

It was a war between "kings" if you follow me, there was no real reason for it. Whereas fighting the Nazis was obviously a good thing, when they finally got around to it.

Lord_M lent me " Europe's Last Summer", about the leadup to WWI. It's a good read.