Free Republic

World War I may have ended in 1918, but the violence it triggered in the Middle East still hasn't come to an end. Arbitrary borders drawn by self-interested imperial powers have left a legacy that the region has not been able to overcome. Damascus, year three of the civil war: The 4th Division of the Syrian army has entrenched itself on Kassioun Mountain, the place where Cain is said to have slain his brother Abel. United Nations ballistics experts say the poison gas projectiles that landed in the Damascus suburbs of Muadamiya and Ain Tarma in the morning hours of...

'A British PoW captured by the Germans in World War I was freed to see his dying mother - but went back to the prison camp after giving the Kaiser 'his word' he would return. Capt Robert Campbell, aged 29, was gravely injured and captured just weeks after Britain declared war on Germany in July, 1914. But after two years in Magdeburg Prisoner of War Camp, the British officer received word from home his mother Louise Campbell was close to death. He speculatively wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm II, begging to be allowed home to visit his mother one final time....

A British soldier was freed from a German POW camp during World War One to see his dying mother - and kept his promise to the Kaiser by returning, historians have discovered. Captain Robert Campbell, aged 29, was captured just weeks after Britain declared war on Germany in July, 1914. But after two years in Magdeburg Prisoner of War Camp the British officer received word from home his mother Louise Campbell was close to death. He speculatively wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm II begging to be allowed home to visit his mother one final time. Incredibly the German leader granted the...

Ten years ago, writer Richard Rubin set out to talk to every living American veteran of World War I he could find. It wasn't easy, but he tracked down dozens of centenarian vets, ages 101 to 113, collected their stories and put them in a new book called The Last of the Doughboys. He tells NPR's Melissa Block about the veterans he talked to, and the stories they shared. On how he found the veterans, after the Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion came up short"In 1998, the government of France had started awarding the...

This recollection was submitted to my Chocolate Chronicle--please submit your favorite chocolate recollections, especially if they may have Jewish connections. Dr. Marcus eats chocolate every day of his life and has reached the amazing age of 103. He remembers: 'I was the youngest of four children, the only boy. I had one Father and four Mothers. We owned one large Swiss chocolate bar. When World War I broke out in 1914, my Father showed us children the bar and said you can look at it, but you cannot eat it until the war is over, then each of you will...

Probably the most bracing aspect of Ira Katznelson's new history of the New Deal, Fear Itself, is his portrait of the marriage of progressive domestic policy and white supremacy. I knew the outlines of this stuff, but for a flaming commie like me, the extent of the embrace is hard to take: Far more enduring was the New Deal's intimate partnership with those in the South who preached white supremacy. For this whole period -- the last in American history when public racism was legitimate in speech and action -- southern representatives acted not on the fringes but as an...

Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Bob Morrison. President Obama’s choice of former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel for Sec. of Defense is a dangerous choice that telegraphs weakness toward Iran. In the Senate, Mr. Hagel compiled a worrisome record toward the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. It is Iran that backs Hezbollah in Lebanon. We haven’t heard much about the Cedar Revolution in that war-torn country. That’s because Hezbollah murdered the democratic leaders for reform. Iran is behind Hamas in Gaza. Hamas defeated the corrupt regime of Mahmoud Abbas in elections in Gaza that soon degenerated into civil war....

Franz Kafka is one of those authors whose name has become an adjective, as in Shakespearean or Faulknerian or this dictionary entry: Kafka-esque -- adj., referring to the nightmarish, surreal, illogical quality Franz Kafka evoked in works like "The Metamorphosis," "The Castle" and "The Trial." No wonder Franz Kafka was able to capture the maddeningly frustrating world of the modern bureaucrat so well. He was one. And a pretty good one, too: conscientious, adaptable, public-spirited and practical. At least to judge from the latest collection of his work, which is not a volume of short stories, but office memos...

Montenegro's Oct. 8, 1912, declaration of war on the Ottoman Turkish Empire and its Oct. 9 attack on neighboring Albania, an Ottoman protectorate, stunned Europe. Montenegro, a military midget, attacking Albania, another poor and backwater Balkan nowhere? Can a tiny statelet like Montenegro spark great havoc? When the spark strikes a powder keg of ethnic, sectarian and nationalist conflict, the tragic answer is yes. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First Balkan War (October 1912 to May 1913). It was the second in a series of three wars that led to the great and not...

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Who was the ONLY Member of the US House of Reps to vote NO on WW I and II? And Why?

The family of a Scots soldier sent home from World War I after three of his brothers were killed have been traced after a worldwide appeal. The story, similar to the plot of Tom Hanks' film Saving Private Ryan, was uncovered by Scottish archives chiefs, who were desperate to find out what became of Frank Cowie. Now they have discovered that after his reprieve, he became a dad and successful farmer. The amazing story emerged last year after confidential military documents were released by National Records of Scotland. Yesterday, it emerged that his youngest daughter, Judy Barrett, had been in...

Alice Carver is almost six months shy of her 100th birthday, and she figures now is a good time to shed a few belongings. "I've got a million cupboards in this house," she said. "I am halfway into my 99th year, and I'm getting rid of all kinds of things." Carver leaned back against the chair in a comfortable kitchen that has warmed many souls since the house was built in the early 1800s. Outside the many windows, the grass was greening up in the May fog, and where the lawn sloped to the Lincolnville Beach shore, a clutch of...

Washington (CNN) -- Frank Buckles, the last living U.S. World War I veteran, has died, a spokesman for his family said Sunday. He was 110.

Glenn Beck says Egypt unrest may be start of next world war. Glenn Beck has always had a flair for the dramatic, as anyone who has ever watched him or listened to him can tell you. After all, this is the man who, in early 2009, hosted an “apocalypse” show in order to highlight the impending economic apocalypse that the Obama administration was hellbent on wreaking on the US (to be fair, according to Beck, the US had been on that course for years). So now, it should be no surprise that Beck’s attention has turned to the biggest news...

Germany will make its last reparations payment for World War I on Oct. 3, settling its outstanding debt from the 1919 Versailles Treaty and quietly closing the final chapter of the conflict that shaped the 20th century. Oct. 3, the 20th anniversary of German unification, will also mark the completion of the final chapter of World War I with the end of reparations payments 92 years after the country's defeat. The German government will pay the last instalment of interest on foreign bonds it issued in 1924 and 1930 to raise cash to fulfil the enormous reparations demands the victorious...

Photographer to the Tsar: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-GorskiiThe photographs of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) offer a vivid portrait of a lost world--the Russian Empire on the eve of World War I and the coming revolution. His subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia's diverse population. In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii formulated an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire that won the support of Tsar Nicholas II. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he completed surveys...

I was doing a Family History Tour on those of my family that served in the Canadian Army in WW1. My Grand Father admitted that he was drunk when he enlisted when the war broke out, fishing, booze and being 22 had something to do with it. My Great Uncle Leo enlisted in the New Foundland Regiment a bit later but he was Canadian from PEI. New FoundLand was Empire, kind of curious about the process.

Here is raw video showing the desecration of British World War I graves at a cemetery in France. The graves were vandalized with bright pink paint used to paint Nazi Swastikas on 12 British graves, soldiers who were killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915 . . .