On the Edge of Memory

[rain_gryphon]

Asteroid Itokawa. That's not really how I'd imagined asteroids looking. That's an interesting-looking smooth patch at the back. It's a pity the little hopper robot didn't work.

*****

The last man of the 1914 BEF has died. "He was our last surviving link with a time that shimmers on the edge of our folk memory." It gives me an odd feeling to read that. I've talked with a great many WWI veterans in my life, and heard strange and marvellous stories. I spent hours talking to the lonely old man who had been in charge of drainage and tent placement for the American receiving camp at Cherbourg, and to a one-eyed German infantryman who'd been gassed with Lewisite, and still felt the effects. I suppose they're dead now as well.

When I was little, I knew a janitor (he worked next door to where a friend lived) who had been a pilot in the Czech air force during the Sudetenland crisis in '38. His squadron was stationed forward in their open cockpit biplanes (I'm guessing the Avia B-34), ready for war when the news came that Chamberlain was going to sacrifice Czechlovakia. He told me that as they flew their planes back into what was left of Czechoslovakia, the Messerschmidt pilots flew alongside and waved at them.

That image always stuck with me, for some reason. I wonder if they were waving to taunt them, or to assure them that it was nothing personal. I've always figured the latter. Wars generally start out much with much more restraint and chivalry than they finish with.

*****

Two Australians went on a vandalism spree so mighty that they may actually be sentenced to life in prison. They even tipped a bus over. This simultaneously fulfills all of my worst and best expectations of Australians.

*****

It's the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. I recall nothing of the day itself, but I have distant, half-formed memories of watching the funeral on TV with my mother.

Comments

[whitetail.livejournal.com]

I've heard that there are less than a dozen WWI veterans still alive now, from all sides involved. Time marches on, most relentlessly...

[xolo.livejournal.com]

They were common as dirt when I was little. They'd put on bits and pieces of their uniforms, and ride along in the back of the Voiture (a truck made up to look like a troop train) in parades, and shoot candy out of this yachting cannon. Sometimes the German guy would ride along with them.

I don't feel much older than I did then, and I suspect it was much the same for them as time moved onward.

[patch-bunny.livejournal.com]

My grandfather fought with the 79th Black Watch Regiment as part of Canada's contribution. Got wounded twice, the second time at the big Amiens offensive near the end of the war.

I became interested in the military after he passed away, so I never got the change to talk to him about it. I regret that. :( I am fortunate enough to have his medals.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I'd always thought the Black Watch were all Scotsmen.

[patch-bunny.livejournal.com]

If Iim remembering the name right (have to check on that), there was a Canadian branch with the same name. Don't know if they were associated with any British units.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

I was, oddly enough, pondering the question of WWI veterans just the other day... how many were left, that is.

I wish I'd gotten a chance to know one. I suppose we can take comfort in the fact that with this as a precident there will probably be WWII veterans around well into the 2030s to get accquanted with.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Mighty wikipedia comes through. They're claiming 101 left - more than a dozen, but so few, for all that were there. Oddly, one of our survivors was a balloonist.

You never actually talked to a WWI soldier? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_Veterans_of_the_First_World_War) ()

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

You never actually talked to a WWI soldier?

Nope. Not personally, anyway. I may have seen one at a talks at school... I have dim memories of *possibly* that, somewhere around 1983, but... I've never known one. My great grandfather was apparently a "doughboy", and his uniform jacket hung in my closet for a long time, but he died shortly before I was born.

Oddly enough I'd grown too large to wear that jacket at about age eleven.

I wonder if there are more surviving WWI airplanes then there are veterans. 101 probably makes it pretty close.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

They had very small people back then. That always strikes me when I look at Civil War uniforms. I suppose it's all just the difference that proper food and living conditions make. The Somali guy at work is tiny, and always looks lost among the huge Americans.

A lot of histories of WWI mention the impact on French morale of seeing the Americans up close, since our soldiers were apparently much larger and more impressive than theirs.