Simply amazing. Thanks.
God bless that old man.
Military History Ping
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1867407/posts
More pictures
I’m a little over half this man’s age,and he looks better then I do !!!
Because the "other guy" was going to kill you if you didn't kill him.
Maybe someday the jihadis will feel that way about us. Maybe.
There can’t be more than a handful of living WW-I vets.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitten as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Dulce Et Decoum Est
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
My life isn't so bad after all.
A late credit card payment vs. this?
Now that’s a quagmire!
It’s become common in many quarters to say WWI was pointless and about nothing, but that’s not really true. The Kaiser’s Germany was seriously expansionist and (just on the western front) occupied virtually all of Belgium and much of northern France to within 30 miles of Paris. They weren’t planning on giving up that dominant position which they had reached via invasion. One can certainly debate whether people outside of France and Belgium had as much at stake, but to allow Germany to so dominate the continent certainly was not a trivial matter, contrary to what revisionists have said. It would have changed the whole course of history for the worse, unless perhaps one was a German militarist.
Same issues apply in different details on much of the eastern front.
One can argue that surrender/submission was preferable to the vast casualties, but it’s not reasonable (as so many do say) to claim that there was nothing of value at stake for the Allies.
As to whether the war ever should have broken out or exanded beyond Austro-Hungary punishing Serbia, that had a great deal to do with the Kaiser letting Austria have essentially a blank check to act without restraint, and Britain failing badly to indicate any bright line (sich as invasion of Belgium) that would bring them into the war. In the face of uncertainty, Germany gambled that the Brits would stay out; the Kaiser almost certainly would have been more restrained if he had known that the Brits would go to war and would actually raise a major army to fight on the continent. So there were some terrible miscalculations of diplomacy and strateg on both sides, but once Germany invaded Belgium and France the Allies had a LOT at stake, it wasn’t about nothing.
I am reflecting my grandfather’s views. He fought in the US 4th infantry division in France an didn’t think it had been worthless to take a stand against Germany’s invasion. Of course, the Brits, French and Germans experienced horrors and slaughters that few if any Americans endured, coming into the war in the last year.
Until a few years ago, there were two WWI vets at the local veterans’ home, one of whom still liked to dance with younger ladies (hard to find older ladies anyway). At that time the French were going around decorating all surviving foreign soldiers who’d fought in France in that war, and there was a ceremony here where ours got ‘em.
What remains mind-boggling to me is that the last of the Civil War veterans died tbe year after I was born.
Simply amazing. Thanks.
God bless that old man.