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May 11, 2006
Happy Birthday, Trooper Rex!
When Robley Rex was a young man, he got on a boat heading for France to fight in the War to End All Wars. It was a world unimagineably different from the one in which the veteran celebrated his 105th birthday this past week.
Mr. Rex represents living history, a connection with a cataclysmic conflict that destroyed an entire generation of men, ruined economies, and sowed the blood-soaked battlefields with the malignant seeds that would give rise to the poisonous ideologies of Stalinism and Nazism.
Now, almost 90 years after the guns fell silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, fewer than 25 veterans of that conflict remain amongst the living in the United States.
It's amazing how close we are to history -- and how rapidly our first-hand participants are leaving us.
Alistair Cooke -- the erudite chap hosting Masterpiece Theater on PBS in the '70s and '80s -- was fond of telling people who shook his hand that, "You've just shaken the hand that shook the hand that shook hands with Abraham Lincoln."
It seems that when the Brit was a young correspondent, he was introduced to Oliver Wendell Homes. Holmes, a Civil War officer in the Union Army before he was a Supreme Court Justice, shook the Great Emancipator's hand, a few years before he gripped the Englishman's hand in greeting.
My grandfather, who lived from 1896 to 1977, experienced tremendous social and technological changes, and was my living history lesson. A veteran of WWI, he talked often of his years in the cavalry before and after the War, but not of his combat in France.
I knew him only as an old man, crippled by arthritis and a damaged heart, but I prefer to remember him as a Doughboy, striding across fields with a grin on his face and his trusty Springfield slung over his shoulder.
More can be found on Mr. Rex via links on Solomonia's site.
Posted by Mike Lief at May 11, 2006 12:39 AM
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Comments
Great photo of your grandfather, like from a Time-Life book.
Posted by: Vermont Neighbor at May 14, 2006 12:09 PM