re: #37 HappyWarrior

What’s always struck me about the first world war is how many people could witness warfare and some would come out of it like Remarque and write perhaps the best anti-war novel ever and yet others like Hitler would come out of it with a thirst for more war. I’m not surprised that they still find bones. WWI feels more and more like a distant memory every day but I was actually thinking about it recently since a mother of my grandmother’s good friend is turning 99 today. She would have been only three weeks when the war began in late July of 1914. And my other set of grandparents were toddlers when the war started. We’ve sadly seen the last of the doughboys and others though. That generation was just as brave and admirable as the WWII one but they really don’t get enough talk.

My maternal grandfather (who I never knew) was a soldier in WWI and never recovered from it. He spent the rest of his life in and out of VA hospitals (leaving my grandmother w/6 kids to raise during the Depression), and the only proof I had he ever existed was a small 2x3 hooked wool rug he had made in a VA hospital that he gave to my g-mother. She never talked about him much, but I think he had severe PTSD, or shell-shock, as they called it then, and he drank to excess. He died in 1948; he’d been a mere boy when he enlisted, and they married very young when he got back to the US—he was 18, she was 16.