Harry Landis of Marion County, Missouri, died last week. Mr. Landis’s death was unremarkable except for the fact that he was one of the two surviving soldiers from the First World War. Mr. Landis was 108 years old and now the only survivor is a gentleman named Fred Buckles of West Virginia. Mr. Buckles was also born in the state of Missouri. You may recall that Woodrow Wilson, our President at the time, billed the First World War as the War to End All Wars. I believe old Woodrow was mistaken when he said that this was the end of wars.
The foregoing paragraph is written in the sparse style of the English language favored by Missourians. Missourians do not favor having fruit salad spread over their cheese sandwiches. Now if I had been fortunate enough to attend an eastern prep school followed by an Ivy League education, perhaps I could have gotten a job writing for Time Magazine. That magazine spreads fruit salad all over its entrées. The opening lines of the events of last week would probably read very much like this:

Death, as it must to all men, came last week to Harry Landis of Marion County, Missouri. Mr. Landis, 108 years old, was a doughboy in the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War. His death leaves Fred Buckles of West Virginia as the sole surviving member of our armed forces during the great conflict that took place in 1917 and in 1918.

Given a choice, I believe I like the sparse comments of the Missouri dialect of the English language. But at this point, reflections tend to take over. On one hand, Mr. Landis was only 23 years older than I am this afternoon. Those years could go by in a blink or two. Furthermore, I reflect on the fact that the soldiers of the Second World War are dying at a rate in excess of 1,000 per day. One day in the not-too-distant future, there will only be a few of us left. Mr. Landis’s death has caused me and other World War II soldiers to reflect on the fact that life does not go on into eternity. But I face that fact with a great deal of tranquility.
Perhaps that tranquility flows from the fact that death was a familiar circumstance all of my life. Between 1920 and 1924, my parents had lost three of their eight children. My eleven-and-a-half-year-old brother died from appendicitis and pneumonia. These were fatal ailments in 1924 but today they can be treated uniformly with great success. His name was Laurence and my mother had pinned her hopes of producing a Baptist preacher on him. The circumstances suggest that my sisters, Ruth and Martha, were stillborn. In those days, stillborn children were unmentioned in polite family conversations.
My three siblings were buried in a plot in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Kirkwood, Missouri. About every third week, my parents and I would go to that plot to plant flowers and cut grass to make things look better. As I helped plant the flowers, I kept thinking of how much enjoyment we would have shared had Laurence, Ruth, and Martha lived.
The Oak Hill Cemetery is separated from the busy boulevard called Big Bend. It was a tranquil place. I must say that, in retrospect, I enjoyed the visits to the gravesites of my siblings.
So I started life with a tranquil view of graveyards which, of course, are now called cemeteries. In my first overseas assignment, I was assigned on detached duty to fly cover for the British Eighth Army. There was an occasion when a Scottish soldier from the British Eighth had to be buried. Uniformly, the Brits do an excellent job of burying their dead. There was no brass band to play “The Last Post.” Instead, it was played on a battered trumpet by a young soldier. Because the service was for a Scottish soldier, the second tune, played by a young soldier with bagpipes, was “The Flowers of the Forest.” It is especially touching for those of us of Celtic ancestry, as are the Scots and the Irish.
Even today, I keep wondering about whether that soldier left a wife or a girl friend behind. I often think of what he could have accomplished had he stayed alive. At that ceremony, when tears formed in my eyes, a British sergeant held my arm and said, “Yank, at times like this we must all stay strong.” His accent was Scottish and he was doing the best he could to stay as strong as he had advised me to do. And so Mr. Landis’s death last week caused me to reflect on that moment.
Many years later, perhaps in 1980, my friend Ronald Carr and I were in Port Moresby, Papua, New Guinea. I had asked our host, John Solomon, to take us to an Australian cemetery. John was anxious to perform that service.
During World War II, his uncle, also named John Solomon, had attempted on two occasions to join the Australian Army. On both occasions, he was turned down. Clearly, he was rejected because he was a Jew. On the third attempt, John Solomon presented himself to the Australian Army as John Sullivan and was accepted. During 1944, John Sullivan, né Solomon, was killed in combat in Papua, New Guinea. His body was buried in this lovely graveyard under a white cross, which of course identified him as a Christian. For the better part of 40 years his family had tried to persuade the authorities that the man they had buried as John Sullivan was actually John Solomon. Two or three days before our arrival at the cemetery, the Australian authorities had accepted the plea of the Solomon family and had replaced the cross with the star of David. It was a pleasure for us to visit the refuse bin of the graveyard to see that the cross with the name John Sullivan was being discarded.
Again, Port Moresby is an out-of-the-way place but the Australians maintained that cemetery with meticulous care. Once again, the death of Private Landis caused this old soldier to reflect on funerals and graveyards.
About a half mile from the house in which I am now sitting is a small cemetery where approximately 20 soldiers from the American Revolution are buried. The headstones. which really are pieces of slate, have begun to flake. In the 39 years that I have lived in this house, I have seen that small cemetery and wondered about how those men could have prospered had they lived. I sometimes asked myself whether they even knew that the American forces had forced the British to retreat and that the United States, a new country, was born. The graves of those men are tended to by volunteers. I always feel indebted to those men for what they did to assure American freedom. They rest in a tranquil place at the intersection of Parsonage Hill Road and White Oak Ridge Road. I suspect that every old soldier who sees that tiny cemetery will depart with a series of reflections.
During the final years of my employment with AT&T in New York City, I found myself working at 195 Broadway, 140 West Street, and 5 World Trade Center. In the great bustling hustle of New York City, there is an island of calm. At lower Broadway and Vesey Street in lower Manhattan Island, there is a graveyard surrounding a church, which is known as St. Paul’s Chapel. It is an Episcopal church. The chapel and the cemetery occupy a full block on lower Broadway. If one knows where to look, inside that cemetery are wrought iron benches that provide a lovely spot for tranquility. When I worked at the three locations mentioned earlier, it was a very short walk to the St. Paul’s Chapel cemetery, where I could kill the better part of a lunch hour. I suppose that the last burial in that cemetery took place more than a hundred years ago. Sometimes I wondered if those people could miraculously come back in the 1970s when I sat in that cemetery, what they would think of the World Trade Center. And now that Harry Landis has passed on, if I were again in New York, I might repair to that graveyard and think about his career with the American Expeditionary Force in 1918.
As we close this essay on reflections and tranquility, two or three other thoughts appear appropriate. They are disparate thoughts. Gregorio Russo, an immigrant from a town south of Naples in Italy, was absent from his job for more than a week during which he attended the funeral of his father-in-law. Gregorio’s only comment, when he returned to work, was that his father-in-law had “gone out like a champ.” For all of us of the Second World War who may soon follow the fortunes of Harry Landis, it is hoped that the “greatest generation” will indeed go out like champs.
And as for Woodrow Wilson’s naïve belief that this was the war to end all wars, perhaps Eric Bogle, the Australian folk writer and singer, had an appropriate line. Bogle wrote that “countless white crosses in mute witness stand to man’s blind indifference to his fellow man.” And as for the war to end all wars, Bogle goes on to say that “It has happened again, again, again, and again.” I suspect that reading about the reflections of an old soldier is not necessarily inspiring stuff. On the other hand, the passing of Harry Landis is an event that should be marked by more than a shrug of the shoulders. It is the closing of an era and as such it might provide Time Magazine an occasion to construct some flowery prose that will not necessarily make the citizens of Marian County, Missouri very happy.
E. E. CARR
February 24, 2008
Essay 294
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Kevin’s commentary: Okay first off, 23 years is not ‘a blink or two.’ It is, in fact, the length of time that I’ve been alive!
Buckles, it turns out, passed away in 2011, leaving no more WW1 vets around. Thankfully we’ve still got a handful of WWII vets kicking around!
The thing that probably stood out most to me in this essay was the potential source of the phrase “stay strong” — it has been an extremely familiar set of words to me, as it has ended a great many of Pop’s communications to me over the years. My gmail inbox alone records a dozen of such conversations. In the letters over the years there have been a great many more. I wonder if this phrase was originally Pop’s, or if the brit introduced it to him. If Pop sees this I would very much like to know.
The Shepherd family also has had a stillborn child. His name was Galen Carr Shepherd and he was my older brother’s twin. Pop’s recollections of visiting his of visiting his siblings’ graves reminds me quite a lot of my own experiences.