Past & Present

Taking as his cue the death of the last World War I combat veteran this week, Gwynne Dyer writes a well-done reflection on that war. Mr. Dyer believes the lessons of that war have sunk in deeper than I think they have.

It’s almost a century now since anybody but fascists and fools saw war as glorious. The government may tell us that our “glorious dead” have “fallen”, but we know that they were only teenagers, and that they died in agony and lost all the rest of their lives. Sometimes, we even worry about the fact that we have sent them to kill people for us.

But I applaud any discussion of this war. We devote almost too much attention to the second world war, and too little to the first.