Welmer

Henry Allingham, one of the last surviving veterans of the First World War, has died at the age of 113. He lived in three centuries, but above all was a man of the 20th century, perhaps one of the most painful eras the world has ever seen. Soon they will all be gone, and nothing but silent tombstones will remain. In truth, it is as though this has already happened; Allingham and his generation belonged to a time that one can only hear now in whispers in quiet places, and can only see as shadows on the lands they marched through as boys.

Their vitality was spent in war, and their ideals crushed in the failures of progress. What we have now may exist because of their sacrifice, but it came about as though by accident, and is nothing like what they imagined when they took up guns and went to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs. For that we should grieve even more than their passing. Ever is youthful idealism in vain.

My great grandfather, a veteran of the Great War, survived long enough to claim a place in my earliest memories. He was an ancient man in his 90s when I met him in the late 1970s. I was a little boy, younger even than my four-year-old son, and remember only an old, bald man with a cane and glasses, smoking a cigar and smiling at my little sister. He died shortly thereafter — partly from the lingering effects of a mustard gas attack.

I wonder whether the children born today will ever be able to imagine the lives of these men, so many of whom have been dead for almost a century and are now only nameless bones in mass graves filled with the victims of indiscriminate slaughter. I hope they will, and I hope that today’s parents have the presence of mind to teach them reverence for those who came and passed before them. But young parents today have a difficult task in front of them. Overcoming the irreverence and spiritually vacuous excesses of the preceding generation of philistines may be too much to ask, and in future years perhaps we will see children standing, confused, at the rows of headstones, wondering whether these legions of sacrificed men weren’t made from some different stuff.

I can only hope that they will, in time, come to know that the same passions that marched their forefathers into the the maelstrom burn in their own little hearts. And as a father, I can only hope that they will never face such tragedy and terror themselves.