Goodbye, Mr. Buckles

Last week brought the news that Frank Buckles, the last remaining US veteran of the First World War, died at his home in West Virginia. He was an ambulance driver while “over there” and was 110 years old when he died.

When I decided I wanted to write a romance novel set during this war, a few editors and agents told me it wasn’t historical enough. Anything set after 1900, they said, was considered “too modern” to appeal to readers of historical romance. Granted, there were airplanes and telephones and cars and the first-ever tanks, but none of that put the time period into the modern age for me, considering the kinds of airplanes, telephones, motorcars and tanks common back then. I was and still am fascinated and enamored of that era.

My patience paid off. Once we passed the new century mark, 1914 to 1918 began to seem more distantly past. This time when I sent out queries about my First World War stories, I received more polite rejections, and some minor interest in the setting, until receiving my first acceptance. These days I can point to several other authors who are also writing about this era.

I’m glad this time period, and in particular this war, hasn’t been forgotten. When my husband and I traveled to Belgium and Northern France for a research trip while I was writing my Great War series, we visited the Menin Gate at Ypres, Belgium. Every night at 8 p.m. local time they have a ceremony to remember those who fell while defending that land. It’s a sacred era, one they haven’t forgotten even through multiple decades and more war. Scores of people show up to hear the bugle play for the dead and for those men whose bodies were never found. Hundreds of names of the missing are etched on the walls of the gate, men who never had the chance to be given a proper burial. It’s incredibly moving to see young people honoring the sacrifices of those who gave everything for that territory.

I read there are only two other survivors, one in Britain and one in Australia. Soon there will be no WWI survivors left among us, and that war will be just one more in our long history of wars. Soon, too, we’ll be counting the survivors of the Second World War, another era Mr. Buckles survived. Incredibly, he was working as a civilian when the Japanese invaded the Philippines. He was taken prisoner and held for 38 months. I know a little about the conditions of military POWs during that time, since my father was a Navy sailor taken captive in the same region and held in various camps for just about the same length. Mr. Buckles, like my father, must certainly have possessed a strong will to survive.

There is something important about remembering what they fought for, each in their own war. It’s far easier to explain the Second World War than the First, but the ambiguity of the origins of the First World War, or any other, doesn’t make their sacrifice any less precious.

So good-bye, Mr. Buckles. We won’t forget.