Thousands follow WWI Blog

Infern0

Banned
Thousands of people have been following the fate of a British soldier fighting in the trenches of World War I on a website publishing his letters home exactly 90 years after they were written.
Like William Henry Bonser ("Harry") Lamin's real family almost a century ago, the modern reader visiting wwar1.blogspot.com does not know when the next letter is coming, or whether the one they are reading is in fact his last.
Many are braced for the dreaded telegram from the army notifying relatives of a soldier's death.
"There are a lot of people saying how keen they are to follow him and are rooting for Harry," said Bill Lamin, the 59-year-old IT teacher who found his grandfather's letters when he was a boy and decided to turn them into a blog.
"They get hooked as if it is happening now. People are rooting for a guy who is in the thick of it," he told Reuters.
The most recent entries from Harry, who served with the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment, were on December 30, 1917, after he had moved from the battlefields of northern Europe to Italy.
He thanks his brother, Jack, for the box of biscuits he sent and wishes his sister Kate a happy Christmas and New Year.
Many of the letters are mundane and focus on his wife and child in England, but some offer a glimpse of the horrors of trench warfare that young men faced.
"We have had another terrible time this week," Harry wrote on June 11, 1917, when describing his part in the Battle of Messines Ridge.
"The men here say it was worst (sic) than the Somme advance last July. We lost a lot of men but we got where we were asked to take. It was awful I am alright got buried and knocked about but quite well now and hope to remain so.
"It is a rum job waiting for the time to come to go over the top without any rum too. The CO got killed and our captain, marvellous how we escaped."
In another entry from October the same year, details of British casualties are pencilled out, possibly by army censors seeking to maintain morale back home.
Lamin said the daily number of visitors to his site reached around 20,000 last week after several media reports appeared, although the daily total was normally lower.
"World War 1 has always been fascinating for people, the horrors of it," he said.
Dozens of people have written to the site to comment on Harry's experiences, including many from the United States.
One anonymous contributor wrote: "As a boy I was taught that war was glorious, I now know that it is exactly the opposite and will teach my children the same."
Lamin refused to give any clues as to Harry's fate, listing only his birth date as 1887.
 
I am not sure this really belongs attached to this thread but I think that it is a reminder of how few WW1 veterans remain and as such the resources (such as the one this thread is about) are worth keeping.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7199127.stm

France's oldest WWI veteran dies
One of the last two surviving French veterans of World War I has died at the age of 110. Louis de Cazenave, who fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, died in his sleep at his home in Brioude, central France, his son Louis said.
Mr de Cazenave's death leaves Lazare Ponticelli, also 110, as the last "poilu", or French WWI veteran.
Mr de Cazenave's son said he died as he would have wanted - peacefully in his sleep at home, surrounded by family.



War is something absurd, useless, that nothing can justify
Louis de Cazenave
speaking in a 2005 interview

President Nicolas Sarkozy sent condolences to Mr de Cazenave's family and paid tribute to all those killed in the war.
Adding his tribute, French Defence Minister Herve Morin said:
"De Cazenave departed with the discretion and simplicity that he had cultivated as a remedy against the fracas and horror of combat."
To the slaughter
The second-last of the poilus (English: hairy ones) - the affectionate name given since Napoleonic times to French footsoldiers - joined up in 1916 at the age of 19, midway through the war.


He was one of the 8.5 million young Frenchmen mobilised to fight the German occupation.
In April 1917, assigned to the Fifth Senegalese Rifles, he fought in one of the most disastrous French actions of the war, at the Chemin des Dames, during the Second Battle of the Aisne.
The chemin was an 18th Century road straddling a ridge.
The Germans took it in late 1914, and after two years of attritional warfare, the French commander-in-chief, Gen Robert Nivelle, recommended a massive assault against them.
But squabbling between Allied leaders lead to delays and leaks.
Forewarned, the Germans dug in so well that the creeping artillery barrage ahead of the French advance did little to dislodge them.
Across the battlefront the French lost 40,000 men on the first day.
Some reports say the advancing French bleated in mocking acknowledgement that they were lambs to the slaughter.
The last poilu
Mr de Cazenave's family say the experience, which led to French mutinies, left him a pacifist.



LIVING WORLD WAR I VETERANS
French soldier Lazare Ponticelli (pictured), 110
British pilot Henry Allingham, 111
Austro-Hungarian artilleryman Franz Kunstler, 107
A small number of other veterans are also still alive

During World War II he was briefly jailed by the pro-Nazi puppet regime under Marshal Petain, the general who relieved Nivelle after the debacle.
"War is something absurd, useless, that nothing can justify. Nothing," he told Le Monde newspaper in a 2005 interview.
In that interview, he described walking through fields of wounded soldiers calling for their mothers, begging to be finished off.
President Sarkozy said Mr de Cazenave's death was an occasion to reflect on the 1.4 million French soldiers who lost their lives, and the 4.5 million who were wounded, during World War I.
"This generation has only one remaining representative today," he added in his statement.
The last poilu , Lazare Ponticelli, has been told of Mr de Cazenave's death.
He is now one of a handful of known World War I veterans left in any of the warring nations.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7199127.stm
 
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