Father Rutler: The Great War

Father George W. Rutler

Pier 54 on the Hudson River is a short walk from our church. On display are pictures of the Titanic and the Lusitania, which is not encouraging for public relations. The Titanic was supposed to berth there, but instead the Carpathia arrived with surviving passengers. Seven years before, my grandmother had sailed on the Carpathia.
 

The sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat brought the United States into the Great War. Film footage shows passengers arriving at Pier 54 to embark on May 1, 1915. Of the 1,962 passengers and crew on the Lusitania’s manifest, 1,198 died. Toscanini had planned to be on board, but took an earlier ship after bad reviews of his performance of Carmen. Jerome Kern missed the ship when his alarm clock failed—otherwise, we’d not have “Ol’ Man River” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” The dancer Isadora Duncan cancelled her ticket to save money, and the actress Ellen Terry backed off because of war jitters.
 

One casualty of the Lusitania sinking was Father Basil Maturin, Catholic chaplain at Oxford University, returning from a lecture tour. He spurned a lifeboat and gave away his life jacket. That was reminiscent of Monsignor John Chadwick, later pastor of the Church of Saint Agnes here in Manhattan, who barely survived the sinking of the Maine which incited the Spanish-American War. The monsignor was hailed as a hero by the sailors he saved.
 

If his chauffeur had not taken a wrong turn on the streets of Sarajevo in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand might not have been assassinated, and the domino effect of national alliances would have not brought on the collapse of empires. At the Somme, more than one million troops were killed or wounded, and the war’s total casualties were 37.5 million dead or wounded. One year after the war, there was only one man between the ages of 18 and 30 for every 15 women. Each town and school in Britain has memorials to those lost. Both of my own grandmother’s brothers were killed in Ypres, and that was considered the norm. The United States lost 116,000 men with over 200,000 wounded. Europe has never really recovered. Military strategists were not prepared for modernized combat, and it has been said that the armies were lions led by donkeys. In a macabre way, the chief winners of that cultural suicide were Lenin and Hitler.
 

Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Armistice signaled by a bugle at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year. The poet Siegfried Sassoon, decorated for bravery, was latterly put in a psychiatric ward for begging an end to the killing. He became a Catholic and is buried near the grave of Monsignor Ronald Knox whom he admired. In tribute to one of his fallen comrades, he wrote:

I know that he is lost among the stars, 
And may return no more but in their light.

Pozieres: Three Australian Soldiers Buried in Northern France on Centenary of Battle

The three soldiers were laid to rest alongside their mates.

Three unknown Australian soldiers who have been missing since 1916 have been buried on the centenary of the Battle of Pozieres.

The remains were discovered around the tiny French town of Pozieres over the past few years and, during a solemn military funeral at a Commonwealth cemetery, they were finally laid to rest alongside their mates.

"They deserve no less," Bob Taylor, a firefighter and military enthusiast from Manchester who found one of the men while walking through the old battlefields," said.

Read more at ABC News >>

WWI and the Second Fall of Man

From The Center for Vision & Values, Grove City College

By Paul G. Kengor

On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian-Serb student named Gavrilo Princip killed Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the duchess. It was the shot-heard-round-the-world, unleashing a series of events that by August 1914 embroiled Europe in war. That deadly summer unfolded 100 years ago, and the world truly was never the same.

Harry Patch, Last British Survivor of First World War Trenches, Dies

Harry Patch, the last British soldier to have served in the First World War trenches, has died at the age of 111.



From The Telegraph
By Sean Rayment

Mr Patch, who was known as the Last Fighting Tommy, was the last living soldier to have fought in bloody battle of Passchendaele, at Ypres, in 1917 in which more than 70,000 troops died.

The veteran's death follows that of Henry Allingham, also a veteran of the Great War who died on July 18 at the age of 113.

Mr Patch, who was a machine-gunner in the Duke of Cornwalls's Light Infantry, died on Saturday morning at Fletcher House care home in Somerset where he was living.

The Prince of Wales was among the first to pay tribute to Mr Patch, telling the BBC: "The Great War is a chapter in our history we must never forget, so many sacrifices were made, so many young lives lost. So today nothing could give me greater pride than paying tribute to Harry Patch from Somerset.

"Harry was involved in numerous bouts of heavy fighting on the front line but amazingly remained unscathed for a while. Tragically one night in September 1917 when in the morass in the Ypres Salient a German shrapnel shell burst over head badly wounding Harry and killing three of his closest friends.

"In spite of the comparatively short time that he served with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry Harry always cherished the extraordinary camaraderie that the appalling conditions engendered in the battalion and remained loyal to the end."

Chief Executive of Somerset Care, Andrew Larpent, said Mr Patch had been unwell for some time and had died peacefully in his bed.

He said: "His friends and his family have been here. He just quietly slipped away at 9am this morning. It was how he would have wanted it, without having to be moved to hospitals but here, peacefully with his friends and carers."

Mr Patch never revelled in the fact that he was one of the last survivors of a war which had claimed the lives of so many of his friends. "I don't like it," he once said when asked what it was like. "I sit there and think. And some nights I dream – of that first battle. I can't forget it."

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