Great War

A Long Long Way By Sebastian Barry Viking, 292 pp., $24.95 Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry has long been preoccupied with the First World War. It reverberates, for instance, through his 1998 novel "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty" and his haunting play "The Steward of Christendom. " In these and other works, however, the Great War is a shadow. In Barry's latest novel, "A Long Long Way," it is the relentless, merciless present. Through the character of Willie Dunne, a young Irish soldier, Barry allows us not so much to imagine the war as to...

PORTLAND, Ore. — Paul Fussell, an acclaimed literary scholar who won a National Book Award in 1976 for ‘‘The Great War and Modern Memory," died Wednesday at age 88. His stepson Cole Behringer said Mr. Fussell died of natural causes in a long-term care facility in Medford, Ore. Behringer said his mother and stepfather moved to southern Oregon two years ago from Rochester, N.Y. In works published over a 50-year career, Mr. Fussell wrote...

World War I, previously known as the Great War, took place from July 28, 1914 until Nov. 11, 1918. Although it was mostly concentrated in Europe, it involved all of the world's great powers, many of which were spread all over the world. By the end of the war, four major world empires (German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman) were defeated and dismantled. The winning countries formed the League of Nations to try to prevent a recurrence of such a war, but the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles on the defeated countries eventually led to World War II. BBC: World War One...

Paul Fussell, an acclaimed literary scholar who won a National Book Award in 1976 for "The Great War and Modern Memory," died Wednesday morning at age 88. His stepson Cole Behringer said Fussell died of natural causes in a long-term care facility in Medford, Ore. Behringer said his mother and stepfather moved to southern Oregon two years ago from Rochester, N.Y. In works published over a 50-year career, Fussell wrote memoir, literary criticism,...

French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants France to commemorate all of its war dead on Armistice Day, previously reserved for remembering the soldiers who lost their lives during World War I. Sarkozy presided over the traditional ceremony on Friday, which marks 93 years since fighting in the Great War ended. He laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier under Paris' Arc de Triomphe and lit a flame, but strayed from convention by speaking of France's dead from all wars. He has proposed a law that will officially make Nov. 11 a day of remembrance for all fallen soldiers.

Paul Fussell, an acclaimed literary scholar who won a National Book Award in 1976 for "The Great War and Modern Memory," died Wednesday morning at age 88. His stepson Cole Behringer said Fussell died of natural causes in a long-term care facility in Medford, Ore. Behringer said his mother and stepfather moved to southern Oregon two years ago from Rochester, N.Y. In works published over a 50-year career, Fussell wrote memoir, literary criticism,...

PORTLAND, Ore. — Paul Fussell, an acclaimed literary scholar who won a National Book Award in 1976 for ‘‘The Great War and Modern Memory," died Wednesday at age 88. His stepson Cole Behringer said Mr. Fussell died of natural causes in a long-term care facility in Medford, Ore. Behringer said his mother and stepfather moved to southern Oregon two years ago from Rochester, N.Y. In works published over a 50-year career, Mr. Fussell wrote...

PARIS - Justin Tuveri, who fought for Italy during World War I and was one of the few remaining European veterans of the Great War, has died, officials said yesterday. He was 109. Mr. Tuveri, who spent most of his life in France, remained active despite his advanced age, pruning trees and cleaning out rain gutters at 90 and driving until age 98, according to the newspaper Le Monde. He died Oct. 5 at his home in the southern French resort town of St. Tropez, the mayor's office said.

THE FIRST World War, the "Great War" that ended 93 years ago today, saw the United States emerge as a global power. But the war's most lasting historical impact was its aftermath. Rather than use its battlefield success to win a critical peace in Europe, the United States turned inward. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge pushed the Senate to reject President Wilson's League of Nations. An insular America chose isolation from the world and failed to lead when Hitler and Mussolini rose to power.

THE MISSING OF THE SOMME By Geoff Dyer Vintage 160 pp., $14.95 Last February brought news of the death of a West Virginia man named Frank Buckles. At 110, Buckles was the last known surviving American veteran of World War I. When Geoff Dyer first published his elegantly slender World War I meditation, "The Missing of the Somme," in the United Kingdom in 1994 - three years before "Out of Sheer Rage," the writer's career-defining book about D.H. Lawrence - there were already very few veterans of the Great War left alive.

World War I, previously known as the Great War, took place from July 28, 1914 until Nov. 11, 1918. Although it was mostly concentrated in Europe, it involved all of the world's great powers, many of which were spread all over the world. By the end of the war, four major world empires (German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman) were defeated and dismantled. The winning countries formed the League of Nations to try to prevent a recurrence of such a war, but the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles on the defeated countries eventually led to World War II. BBC: World War One...

French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants France to commemorate all of its war dead on Armistice Day, previously reserved for remembering the soldiers who lost their lives during World War I. Sarkozy presided over the traditional ceremony on Friday, which marks 93 years since fighting in the Great War ended. He laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier under Paris' Arc de Triomphe and lit a flame, but strayed from convention by speaking of France's dead from all wars. He has proposed a law that will officially make Nov. 11 a day of remembrance for all...

THE FIRST World War, the "Great War" that ended 93 years ago today, saw the United States emerge as a global power. But the war's most lasting historical impact was its aftermath. Rather than use its battlefield success to win a critical peace in Europe, the United States turned inward. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge pushed the Senate to reject President Wilson's League of Nations. An insular America chose isolation from the world and failed to lead when Hitler and Mussolini rose to power.

THE MISSING OF THE SOMME By Geoff Dyer Vintage 160 pp., $14.95 Last February brought news of the death of a West Virginia man named Frank Buckles. At 110, Buckles was the last known surviving American veteran of World War I. When Geoff Dyer first published his elegantly slender World War I meditation, "The Missing of the Somme," in the United Kingdom in 1994 - three years before "Out of Sheer Rage," the writer's career-defining book about D.H. Lawrence - there were already very few veterans of the Great War left alive.

LONDON - Harry Patch, Britain’s last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation. Mr. Patch, who died yesterday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as “mud, mud, and more mud mixed together with blood.’’ “Anyone who tells you that in the trenches they weren’t scared, he’s a damned liar: You were scared all the time,’’ Mr. Patch was quoted as saying in a book, “The...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last known living American-born veteran of World War I, was honored yesterday at the Liberty Memorial during Memorial Day weekend celebrations. "I had a feeling of longevity and that I might be among those who survived, but I didn't know I'd be the No. 1," the 107-year-old veteran said at a ceremony to unveil his portrait. His photograph was hung in the main hallway of the National World War I Museum, which he toured for the first time, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States presented him with a...

Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin Knopf, 349 pp., illustrated, $26.95 I remember the survivors of World War I the way my father remembers the veterans of the Civil War: frail men, enfeebled remnants of noble conflict, reminders of the certainties that made life easier to understand in an earlier time. Time was that the Civil War was easy to comprehend, but no more; the passing of the years has provided it with a complexity it didn't possess only a generation ago. The same is true with World War I. Indeed, it just got more complicated with the...

LONDON - Harry Patch, Britain’s last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation. Mr. Patch, who died yesterday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as “mud, mud, and more mud mixed together with blood.’’ “Anyone who tells you that in the trenches they weren’t scared, he’s a damned liar: You were scared all the time,’’ Mr. Patch was quoted as saying in a book, “The Last Fighting Tommy,’’ written...

TAMPA - Harry Richard Landis, who enlisted in the Army in 1918 and was one of only two known surviving US veterans of World War I, has died. He was 108. Mr. Landis, who lived in a Sun City Center nursing home, died Monday, according to Donna Riley, his caregiver for the past five years. He had recently been in the hospital with a fever and low blood pressure, she said. "He only took vitamins and eye drops, no other medication," Riley said yesterday. "He was 108 and a healthy man. That's why all of this was sudden and unexpected.

PARIS - Justin Tuveri, who fought for Italy during World War I and was one of the few remaining European veterans of the Great War, has died, officials said yesterday. He was 109. Mr. Tuveri, who spent most of his life in France, remained active despite his advanced age, pruning trees and cleaning out rain gutters at 90 and driving until age 98, according to the newspaper Le Monde. He died Oct. 5 at his home in the southern French resort town of St. Tropez, the mayor's office said.