Posted on 11/10/2006 6:08:35 AM PST by Republicain
DRAGUIGNAN , France, Nov 10, 2006 (AFP) - Maurice Floquet, one of France's last five surviving servicemen from World War I, died overnight at the age of 111, one day before Armistice Day, the ministry of defense said.
Floquet, who enlisted in the infantry at the outbreak of the war in 1914 and was badly wounded the following year, died at the house in southern France where he was looked after by his two daughters.
He was the oldest of the surviving "poilus" -- as French veterans of the war are known.
On Saturday President Jacques Chirac is to lead the traditional ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris to mark the anniversary of the end of the Great War on November 11, 1918.
For the first time since 2003 the ceremony will be attended by a "poilu" -- Rene Riffaud, who at 107 is the youngest of the remaining four.
Last year Chirac promised that the last World War I veteran to die will receive a state funeral. Some 8.5 million French soldiers fought in the 1914-1918 conflict, of whom some 1.38 million died in action.
Floquet was born in December 1894 and joined up in September 1914. He fought in the first battles of the Somme and in September 1915 on the Marne front he received serious head wounds from a grenade.
Invalided out, he spent the end of the war working in an armaments factory. After the war he ran a garage until his retirement in 1952.
Eight British servicemen from the Great War are alive today, one of whom attended the 90th anniversary commemoration of the battle of the Somme in July. The Germans have no records.
Details of the state homage to the last "poilu" have yet to be decided. There are calls for him to be buried at the Invalides military hospice in Paris, at the battlefield memorial in Verdun, or in the Compiegne forest clearing where the armistice was signed.
I had a chance to visit Verdun back when I was stationed in Germany. I visited the Ossuary. Here's a picture of it:
The roadway into the battlefield area is lined by pylons, with helmets mounted on them. Towns on both sides of the war lost all of their men, sometimes on a single charge, over the top. It was a horrendous war. The tactics hadn't caught up with the technology.
Maybe there's a "gene" for valor.
It's called simply "The First World War: A Complete History," by Sir Martin Gilbert.
}:-)4
Maybe this one can...
Douaumont Ossuary, near Verdun
Yes, thanks to people like Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman or Charles de Gaulle, France and Germany are in peace now, and very close friends. And, I hope, Germans will never be our "ennemis héréditaires" like our grand-fathers used to think.
WWI was the stupidest and more useless war of Europe, but all the men who fought and suffered in the trenchs deserve our eternel respect, whatever their nationality.
A hats off and salute to our French allies of WW1.
"When I was a member of the German forces I worked together with many French comrades. Therefore I never gave much on the widespread "cheese eating surrender monkey" stammering here on FR. Most of them are the finest soldiers you can think of."
I spent much time with the French also, they are good soldiers.
You seem to be the guy to ask.
What happens to a nation when, instead of losing a million of it's young men, it loses a million of it's child bearing age females?
As far as I know, WWI's casualties (9 million dead, more than 20 million wounded in Europe) have been far more important than during the Civil War. It's not at all the same scale.
True, but it's the closest thing that we in the USA have experienced. 360,000 Union soldiers and about 260,000 Confederate soldiers died (estimates). French, British, and German deaths were all in the millions over an equivalent period of time (four years). There were something like 22,000 total casualties (killed, wounded, missing) on both sides on one day at Antietam in 1862. That's compared to that first day on the Somme in July 1916 when 20,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers DIED--along with God only knows how many Germans opposing them.
Not even Sherman's March to the Sea and the siege of Richmond caused the kind of complete and utter destruction that France and Belgium suffered along the Western Front. But it's the closest analogy that this continent has ever seen.
}:-)4
I've never heard of that actually occurring (though there are countless periods in history where a large fraction of the 15-30 year old males have been decimated). I'm sure it probably has at some point in history (there is no end to the number of evils this world has seen), but the closest thing that I can think of is the change in the number of abortions. With 1/4 of pregnancies ending in abortion we now see population stagnation and decline in much of Europe. Without massive immigration both the population of Europe and the US will decline.
This is a women in the military question.
A nation fights to protect it's women, but now we are intent on building a 50-50 military.
We have lost about 1 million men fighting for America so far, what if instead of young men, they had been young females or 50% young females.
In my mind, although it has never been done before, we can assume that a civilization that sends it's childbearing age women to die in it's wars has already doomed itself.
This question is only significant if we draft women. Since we don't, the only potential women to be lost in a potential war are the ~10% of the armed forces who are women--an insignificant number to affect the demographics for a nation of 300 million.
In the case that we do have to change the law to draft women, it would have to be a very significant war (I'm guessing with ~50 million US soldiers). In that case we have to ask ourselves whether it is more important to save our country or hurt our population growth in the future. I would choose the former.
The likeliness is fairly small that we will need excessive manpower in the future except for occupational forces. Nukes make it pretty unlikely that army's of world powers will line up and fight each other in significant numbers. I really don't think we need to revisit the women in the military issue again. I've served with women when I was in the Navy, and my sister was in the Army. For most jobs in the military it doesn't really matter if it is a man or a woman, IMHO. The biggest issue with women in the military is the same for any job anywhere--preferential treatment must not be given for mediocre work just because a worker is a woman. But this problem isn't solved by banning women from the military--it is solved by beating the PC-ness out of our leaders.
"The biggest issue with women in the military is the same for any job anywhere--preferential treatment must not be given for mediocre work just because a worker is a woman."
When someone says that it means they don't know anything about the topic.
Women are meeting a different standard, and if it wasn't necessary to do that, then women and men would be interchangeable as warriors.
Women are meeting a different standard, and if it wasn't necessary to do that, then women and men would be interchangeable as warriors.
Nice try. But I'm not going to go way off topic here. I'll let my experiences and observations determine my opinion, not some random posters view on how women are inferior personnel in the military.
Born the same year as my Grandpa, who also fought in WWI.
Grandpa passed at 95.
" I'll let my experiences and observations determine my opinion, not some random posters view on how women are inferior personnel in the military."
While my experiences and observations in the army reinforced what I had already learned over my lifetime and all the lifetimes of the species since the beginning of time.
I still learned much by reading books such as "Weak Link" by Brian Mitchell, or "The Kinder, Gentler Military" by Stephanie Guttman, or "Women in the Military" by Brian Mitchell, or even books such as "Ground Zero" by Linda Franke who's leftist defense of the feminist position actually reveals how harmful the idea is.
Noted.
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