Alsace Cemetery CO

EPA-EFE/FRANCOIS MORI / POOL MAXPPP OUT On Sunday, as with so many other people attending ceremonies and commemorations of the end of the First World War around the world, the writer attended a concert featuring the Johannesburg Symphony Choir, the Johannesburg Festival Orchestra, soloist Nicholas Nicholaides, and reader Richard Terry, conducted by Richard Cock. Such a moment helps focus on the impact that war had — and continues to have still — a century later. Four years before war engulfed the continent, virtually all of Europe’s royalty gathered in London for the state funeral of the British monarch, Edward VII, the eldest son of Queen Victoria. And well they should have, since so many of the royal families were closely related. British, German and Russian imperial families (and even the Danish royal one) were all cousins, and the upstart royal families of south-eastern Europe — in places like Romania, Greece, and Bulgaria — were all descended from the wide tapestry of the intertwined German princely houses as well. The final rituals of Edward VII’s last journey were, in a real way, like a large, extended family funeral.It was fitting, therefore, that historian Barbara Tuchman’s exploration of the first two months of the war’s outbreak in the summer of 1914, The Guns of August, began by describing Edward’s burial as a demonstration of just how unimaginable it was that a four-year catastrophe could follow soon thereafter and slaughter millions. (It is said President John F Kennedy was so startled by the details of the fatal misjudgements of the belligerents that Tuchman’s book served as a warning to him of the possibilities of misunderstandings between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War that...

In 1988, the family found a small pocket diary of our grandfather’s experiences, and a packet of letters he had written our grandmother during the war. This year, which is the 100th anniversary of the armistice signed ending World War I on Nov. 11, my sister Shanna and I decided to research where he went and visit those places in Europe. Shanna and her husband, Steve Grow, and I began our journey in August. Parel Parker was raised on a dairy farm. He was drafted Oct. 30, 1917 — little more than six months after the U.S. entered the war on April 6, 1917. His letters home tell of his reporting to Fort Lewis, Washington, then Camp Mills, Long Island, New York. From there, the soldiers were put on the USS Leviathan departing from Hoboken, New Jersey, on Dec. 15, 1917. They arrived in England on Christmas Day. In May 1918, he tells of his unit being shipped by train through Paris to the front, known as the Alsace-Lorraine area of France near the Swiss border. This area was a hotly contested area between the French and Germans. It was part of France, but the locals spoke German. Grandpa’s division was assigned to give support to the French in maintaining control of the sector. Paul Schmidt, in "Co. C, 127th Infantry, in the World War; A Story of the 32nd Division"says, “We were the first American troops to set foot on German soil in this sector, and the flag of the 127th Infantry was the first American flag to be unfurled on German territory.” Provided by Beverly Parker Bailey Beverly Parker Bailey at the village of Hagenbach along the French-German border. It was one of the places Beverly and her sister and brother-in-law visited this summer in retracing w...

In the end it took just four brief sentences to inform those on the front line that there really was to be an end to four and a half years of war.At breakfast time on a fine, cold and misty day, the latest instruction to the troops was one they received with an unprecedented sense, if not of joy then at least of intense relief.“Hostilities will cease at 11.00 today, November 11th,” the communique that pinged along the wires simply stated.“Troops will stand fast on the line reached at that hour, which will be reported by wire to Advanced GHQ.“Defensive precautions will be maintained. There will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy until the receipt of instructions from GHQ.”© SuppliedThe cartoon which appeared in the Aberdeen Daily Journal on November 12 1918.The news would not have come as a surprise in itself, because personal accounts collated by the Imperial War Museum show soldiers were aware the war was drawing to a close.But if evidence of a sweepstake within one unit that included guesses stretching out as far as the following Easter is to be believed, it may have arrived more swiftly than some dared hope.Sooner than hoped maybe, but those short hours between the signing itself and the time set by the Allied leaders for the end of the fighting must still have felt interminably long.For it was by no means just a question of waiting.The carnage continued as the clock ticked down at the expense of 10,944 casualties and some 2,738 deaths.George Ellison, a 40-year-old veteran from Leeds, was the last British soldier to pay the ultimate price on those battlefields, just four miles from where the first, John Parr, had fallen in 1914.Their graves face each other at a military cemetery near Mons, in Belgium.The silencing of the guns had been several months in the making, the wheels starting to move at speed in the August, when Germany’s military leaders accepted they could not win.Hope remained for some kind of honourable “peace without victory”,...