Emerson Brooking | Remembering the Great War

Last month, 110-year-old Frank Buckles — our final surviving veteran of World War I — died peacefully in his sleep. His passing marks the end of an era and the fading of a conflict that is increasingly footnoted and ignored in American studies of history.

In some ways, this diminishment is inevitable. WWI began the better part of a century ago. Its causes are diverse and complicated. It offers no cosmic battle between the evils of fascism and the good of democracy, and it has no happy ending. Literature regrets it, video games ignore it and Tom Hanks hasn’t even done a miniseries about it.

Yet four million Americans fought in it, joining a staggering total of 65 million combatants who took up arms between 1914 and 1918. The extent of their sacrifice was unprecedented. And the significance of their struggle — one which profoundly changed both east and west — haunts us to this day.

WWI cost 16 million lives. As many Americans died in WWI as in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

But the Great War’s significance goes far beyond the American intervention and death toll. “The public often focuses only on the American side of the war and how it directly affected the U.S.,” History professor Peter Holquist said. “It forgets that WWI was a global conflict with global results.”

The war doubled the number of countries in Europe, destroying empires that had persisted for hundreds of years. It rocked the foundations of western imperialism, planting the seeds of future national movements from Arabia to India. Prolonged suffering of the Russian people led to the October Revolution of 1917 and eventual rise of the Soviet Union, while prolonged success of the Japanese military resulted in a fateful confrontation with the United States two decades later.

WWI’s punitive peace led directly to that second, more terrible conflict. A frustrated German people found their release in Nazism and Hitler, while heartbroken Italians found the same in Mussolini. Anti-semitism, made manifest on WWI’s eastern front, only entrenched deeper in years following. It has been suggested that WWI really ran through 1945, constituting a single world war.

For these reasons and countless others, Buckles spent the last years of his life fighting for a national WWI memorial to stand alongside our monuments to WWII, Korea and Vietnam. He believed passionately in the cause that brought him and his fellow soldiers to France in fall 1917, and was disturbed by ignorance of a conflict that has played such a critical part in American and world history.

While he did not live to see it finished, Buckles got his memorial. Yet the process Buckles set in motion should not end with the dedication of a marble monument. Instead, it requires a renewed interest in the war that Buckles fought and renewed appreciation for the sacrifices he and his comrades made.

They are members of a generation that can no longer speak for itself. We owe them nothing less.

Emerson Brooking is a College senior from Turnerville, Ga., and a former DP columnist. His email address is brooking@sas.upenn.edu.

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