“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
“He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over, one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.’’
Those are the final paragraphs of the enduring World War I novel “All Quiet On The Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, a man who served in the German army in the war that was supposed to end all wars and lived the hell he described so vividly through the fictitious character of 19-year old Paul Baumer.
In a foreword to his classic account of the rough edges of war, Remarque explains that the novel “is neither an accusation, nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure for those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell you of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.’’
Veterans of the so-called Great War that ended on Nov. 11, 1918, after enormous expenditures of blood and treasure walk among us no more. In their absence, it is to works such as Remarque’s acclaimed novel that we turn for first-hand accounts — not of individual acts of heroism or bravery, but of the trying conditions in which the soldiers found themselves.
A couple of decades ago, before the ranks of World War I veterans became depleted, Phil Koritzky of Bangor, a member of the Bangor Chapter of Veterans of World War I, occasionally would ring me up after reading something in the paper that sparked memories of his participation in the war.
I well recall his passionate discourses on the futility of war in general and his vivid descriptions of two things in particular. One was the terrible barrage that took place just before the armistice went into effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month — a parting gesture by artillerymen determined to have the last shot in the war. The second was the eerie, stupefying quiet that descended so suddenly along the front at the appointed hour.
The possibility of becoming the last casualty of combat in the final minutes of the countdown to a cease-fire order in an armistice situation undoubtedly occurs to combatants in any war, Koritzky suggested. He referred me to the book “A Stillness Heard Round The World” by Stanley Weintraub which addresses the subject.
In it I found an account of the 104th Infantry Battalion of the 26th (Yankee) Division, a New England outfit that had moved into the Argonne Forest beyond Beaumont to make one final effort to straighten out the division line, even though all hands knew an armistice was imminent.
It quoted a poignant letter, written by a young lieutenant to the folks back home, describing the heartbreak of that final mission.
“I left the hospital Nov. 10th, reaching my outfit about 10 o’clock the next morning, the fatal one,” the letter read. “We were all talking, laughing and waiting for the gong to ring [to end the war] when orders came to go over the top. We thought it a joke — it was a grim one of Fate’s, for we jumped off at 25 minutes to 11 and advanced but very slowly, for we knew that there were many machine gun nests ahead of us.
“At 10:55 a shell fell among my men and I was told one wanted to see me. I hurried over and there lay my five best men. One fatally injured, hole near heart, two seriously injured and the other two badly hurt. I knelt beside the lad whose eyes had such a look of sorrow that my eyes filled with tears. A glance at my watch, 11:05 . . . and when I looked back he had gone. I can honestly tell you I cried, and so did the rest.”
A lot of that goes around in time of war, on the home front as well as on the front lines of battle. On this Veterans Day weekend, when American troops are in harm’s way in far-off Afghanistan, Iraq and the world’s other hot spots, here’s to the veterans of all wars this country has fought in the past 235 years. May we never forget their sacrifices made in the cause of freedom.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. His e-mail address is maineolddawg@gmail.com.