Corny, perhaps, to our jaded modern ears, but those were stirring words to the people of both America and Europe in 1917, when the American Expeditionary Force under General "Black Jack" Pershing landed in France. Brought willy-nilly into World War One by the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat, the United States for the first time intervened in a European conflict.
The isolationism which had sidelined us during the first three years of the war had been overwhelmed by the deaths of American at the hands -- or torpedoes -- of the villainous "Huns." In the wash of patriotism that followed, our intervention was seen as a direct repayment for French assistance in winning our own independence from Britain, less than a century and a half earlier. As General Pershing stepped ashore and saluted the French Field Marshall who greeted him, his words were, "Lafayette, we have returned!"
My paternal grandfather was among those Yanks, the famous "Doughboys" with their khaki uniforms and flat helmets, who fought Kaiser Wilhelm's troops to a standstill and then slowly but steadily pushed back their line until the Armistice on November 11, 1918. Like many, he did not escape unscathed: a mortar shell, exploding near him, broke his leg in fourteen places and flung it up over his shoulder.
Amazingly for the time period, he did not lose the leg, although it healed an inch-and-a-half shorter than the other one. My father tells that, as he grew older and taller, he'd tease his father that he was getting taller than he was. In response, "Pop" Harbold would rock up onto his longer leg, fix his son with a mock glare, and growl, "Not yet, you're not."
What has put me in mind of "the Great War," as it was called -- the "war to end all wars," that signally failed in that ambition? The fact that this Friday, April 6, marks the 90th anniversary of our entry into that war. An article in USA Today, entitled "One of the last: WWI vet recalls the Great War," profiles Frank Buckles, now the ripe old age of 106. He is one of only four surviving members of the 4,734,991 Americans that served in World War One: less than one in a million now surviving.
The articles points out that that although the days of trench warfare and biplane dogfights are long gone, "the first industrialized war set the stage for all that came after. It marked the emergence of the United States as a superpower." Furthermore, the article states, the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ethnic cleansing, weapons of mass destruction -- the terrible chemical weapons that killed or maimed so many during WWI -- as well as globalization, U.S. foreign policy, and even women's rights and controversy over the treatment of surviving veterans, all have roots in World War I.
"If you want to understand the world of today," the article quotes Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, "you need to go all the way back to 1914." Yet World War One is largely a forgotten war, today. Veterans of World War Two, including my father, have justly received accolades as member of "the Greatest Generation," that stood against first Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, then fought the long Cold War against the Soviets. Even the veterans of Korea have received recognition.
Ironically, however, echoes of the now little-known WWI continue to resonate in today's world. While the conclusion of World War Two eventually knit the continent of Europe together, and made Japan a staunch ally, the victorious Allies in the First World War not only humiliated Germany into spawning the Nazis, but carved up the former Ottoman Empire into arbitrary nation-states which Yale historian Jay Winter is quoted as saying were "usually made in an afternoon after tea without much thought to ethnic balance or viability of these countries."
These capricious borders, as the article points out, remain to this day, and control the lives of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds in Iraq, and rival ethnic groups in Lebanon. The establishment of Israel can also be linked to the post-WWI Balfour Declaration. "Most of our headaches in the Middle East today are a hangover from the great military binge of 1914-18," notes Ferguson.
An ironic legacy indeed, for the war to end all wars.
Note: A reader wrote to me, after this was published, stating that
"I can find no reference to Gen. Pershing saying, "Lafayette, we have returned." I can find reference to, "Lafayette, we are here," being said at the grave of Marquis Lafayette."He did not indicate who said it. I accept the correction as given, since I was operating from memory in that instance (not personal memory, of course, memory of something I'd read). The point remains the same, in either case.
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