"Lest We Forget Gallery"

Old Soldiers Never Die Too

The Last WW I Veterans Are Going West...

No one knows how many veterans of the Great War are still alive. In 1918 and 1919 they came home, their bodies and souls scratched and wounded. Today just a few of them are still alive. In a couple of years time all eyewitnesses of the First World War will be dead.

The majority of those who are still alive today were kid-soldiers. They joined the forces underage (below 18) and usually lied about their real age and sometimes also about their real name.

Below some very old soldiers who faded away in the 21st century.

German veteran Charles Kuentz died, 108 years old, on April 7, 2005. The picture on the right shows him as a young soldier. "From the time I landed in Belgium, a fortnight before my 19th birthday in June 1917.

I was wounded on October 23 that year, I never had a bath, never had a change of clothes. None of us was older than 21. We knew nothing of war. We alternated between four days and three nights in the trenches and then four days behind the lines to rest. You slept when you could. All the time you itched - we were covered in lice."

Kuentz gave about 40 interviews in the year before he died, but while he admitted to being a little tired, he also stressed that he had "a duty to bear witness" for future generations. "Pass on the memory of the Great War, because this tragedy must never be forgotten, otherwise it will happen again," he said.

Hermann Dörnemann (in the picture on the left with his daughter Rita) became 111 years old and was the oldest man in the world. He contracted pneumonia and died on Wednesday, 2nd February 2005, just three months before his 112th birthday.

Dörnemann was born in 1893 in Germany, in the city of Essen. While serving on the front in World War 1 he suffered a gunshot in his right upper arm. Therefore he was excused from military service in World War II. He worked as an electrical engineer for utility company RWE AG for 42 years.

He said that a little sweetened beer every day and the potato cooking water most people throw out were the secret of his longevity. He disapproved of any kind of sporting activities. The only exercise he ever believed in was "walking to the corner shop to buy beer and cigars".

Tom Kirk (in the picture on the right with his daughter June) died on Tuesday, 9th November 2004. He was 106 years old. In 1917 he was called up to join the Royal Navy, from studies at Newcastle Medical School. After just weeks of training he was named surgeon probationer and posted to HMS Lydiard until the end of the war, when he returned to complete his medical training.

In a newspaper interview just a few months before his death he told that the Lydiard spent several months escorting merchant ships across the channel, to and from France. During the winter of 1917, the destroyer also made expeditions to Norway, escorting convoys. "We had to look out for enemy submarines and also escorted the first batch of American soldiers from Southampton to Le Havre when the Americans joined the war. The Germans fired torpedoes at us a few times. Luckily, they never hit."

Marcel Caux (on the left) died on August 21 2004 in a nursing home in Sydney, Australia. He was 105 years old. He was 15 when he joined the army in 1915. He used a different name and he told the recruiting officer he was 18. He was wounded three times. He did not mention the war for 80 years and only in 1998 began speaking out against it, according to his son, Marcus Decaux. "Peace is very important, especially after this disastrous

war in Iraq we just had," he told reporters last year. He called upon the people to embrace peace and to despise war. "So many people have suffered because of war. It is better to have peace," he said.

Mr. Caux also said it was difficult for him to attend Remembrance Day and ANZAC Day ceremonies and to remember those he knew during World War I. "All the people I fought with are dead."

Arno Wagner (on the right) died in Germany on 22nd December 2004 at the age of 110. He was born on June 4th 1894. He apparently lost his lust for life after breaking his hip and not being able to return home to his appartment and his daughter Ingeborg.

Many people know him from a recent German television documentary about Verdun.

In this documentary the old veteran told how served as an artillery observer in balloons. He directed German gunfire and watched the French movements on the battlefields. He used a telegraph apparatus to send his observations to the German forces below. After 1945 he worked as an accountant in East Germany.

Emile Brichard (left) died on July 8th 2004. He was 104 years old. Brichard was the last living Belgian WWI veteran. In an interview with a Dutch newspaper a few days before his death he told how he worked in a field hospital as a nurse.

"One big drama it was. All day I was busy with corpses. Shot, lethally wounded, they came in. Very seldom one came out alive." Brichard himself came out healthy. He became a miner. In 1926 he took part in the Tour de France. He was married three times and outlived all his wifes. He could still read his newspaper without glasses.

The American Mike Mansfield (left) became an important and admired public servant. He was a son of Irish immigrants. In 1917, fourteen years old, he quit school and tried to enlist in the armed forces, but he was turned down. He then went to the Catholic church where he had been baptized, obtained a copy of his birth certificate, and forged it to show that he was born a few years earlier. With these papers he was accepted in the Navy and he crossed the Atlantic seven times before officers discovered he was underage and discharged him.

After the war he worked in copper mines, then took high school, then university, became a professor in Far Eastern history and went into politics.

He served 34 years in Congress, 24 of those in the Senate (Democrats). He presided over the Senate from 1961 to 1976, a time in America marked by strife over Vietnam, civil rights and White House scandals that brought down President Nixon. Later he was appointed ambassador to Japan. Michael Joseph Mansfield died on 5 October 2001. He was 98 years old.

More announcements of the death of WW 1 veterans can be found on the commendable Hellfire Corner website, on their newspage.

This article can be viewed in it's original format at 'Heritage of the Great War'