On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 08:21:11 -0500, Johnson, Tracy
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>18 hours and no one replied to your post either.
>
>Odd, the content of the post does not remember our* soldiers either, but
rather some other country's soldier.
>
>* Vis-a-vis the Las Vegas Sun.  Says a lot about certain media.
>
>BT
>
>
>Tracy Johnson
>MSI Schaevitz Sensors

Sorry Tracy,

my mistake as usual. The first part was from the Vegas Sun, the othe just a
story that I read.
The Vegas Sun was just naming the open offices, schools, locations and such.

Not many from WW I left. Only story of a survivor that I found.

Sorry about that.


Michael




>
>Michael Baier writes:
>>
>> So many happy warriors and chicken-hawks and nobody posts a message to
>> remember our soldiers.
>> That says alot about certain people.
>>
>>
>> VETERANS DAY CLOSINGS
>> LAS VEGAS SUN
>>
>> Veterans Day started as Armistice Day on Nov. 11, 1918, to
>> commemorate the
>> end of World War I. Nov. 11 was first proclaimed an annual holiday by
>> Congress in 1926. The name was changed to Veterans Day in
>> 1954 to honor all
>> war veterans.
>>
>> At 106, French veteran remembers life in World War I trenches
>>
>> MONTARGIS, France, (AFP) - The handshake is firm, the gaze is
>> clear and the
>> expression still alert. At 106, Ferdinand Gilson can never
>> get out of his
>> mind the six months he spent in the trenches of the Western Front.
>>
>> "I remember all that period -- well, nearly everything," said
>> Gilson, who
>> is one of only 15 surviving World War I veterans in France,
>> "I have a few
>> memory lapses."
>>
>> Most of what he remembers, he'd rather forget -- the mud, choking gas,
>> death, nauseous odors and hunger, but above all, the death of doomed
>> companions as young as he was at 19.
>>
>> "In the trenches, we ate at night so as not to see the worms
>> on the meat,"
>> he said in an interview. "The stench was intolerable. But
>> happily, there
>> was wine -- seven to nine liters a day for the strongest."
>>
>> Gilson planned Thursday to be at the national commemoration of the
>> armistice, remembering a conflict in which an estimated 900
>> French soldiers
>> died every day during the more than four years of the war.
>>
>> World War I marked the beginning of modern warfare. "It
>> caused losses that
>> no-one could imagine," said Jean-Jacques Becker, the
>> president of the Great
>> War history center at Peronne in the Somme Valley. "By the
>> end of 1914,
>> half the French army that existed at the start of the
>> conflict was out of
>> action."
>>
>> In total, the war resulted in nine million deaths and 20
>> million wounded.
>>
>> Gilson was fortunate to emerge alive and relatively sound in health --
>> although he nearly died the following year, a victim of the Spanish
>> influenza epidemic.
>>
>> After a few weeks in the trenches, the soldiers had nothing
>> more than a
>> shirt and a pair of ragged trousers.
>>
>> "The nights were terrible because of the bombardments. At
>> dawn we had to
>> collect the dead and the wounded. Sometimes, when they were seriously
>> injured, that became unbearable," Gilson said. "I had good
>> hearing, and I
>> could hear the shells coming. I yelled, 'they are after our arse,' and
>> everyone threw themselves onto the ground."
>>
>> Once, he jumped into a shell-hole for shelter, smelling the gas that
>> lingered at the bottom and then living through the first of
>> two attacks
>> with a gas "that drove you mad. I was ill, but there was no
>> way of getting
>> treatment in that hell."
>>
>> No matter what happened, Gilson wrote to his mother every day
>> in the fine
>> copperplate that people had in those days. That is why, he thinks, his
>> superiors picked him out to become an officer. In August
>> 1918, six months
>> after arriving in the front lines, he was sent to
>> Fontainebleau for officer
>> training, and it was there, blissfully far from the trenches,
>> that the news
>> of the armistice reached him.
>>
>> "The madness was over," he said. "We were immensely happy. It
>> is then that
>> I learned to dance the polka -- with an artilleryman."
>>
>> Gilson, who proudly fingered his medal of the Legion
>> d'Honneur, later set
>> up a punch and die factory, and met his wife Suzanne, 21
>> years his junior
>> with whom he still lives in a house next to the school here,
>> surrounded by
>> photographs and postcards.
>>
>> In 1940, he refused to work for the Nazi occupiers of France
>> -- "never,
>> even if I had to die for it" -- but today he does crossword puzzles in
>> German "to stop my brain going rusty."
>>
>> His wife recalled that during World War II, Gilson provided
>> refuge for four
>> allied airmen on the run and made false documents for about
>> 60 Frenchmen
>> seeking to avoid forced labor in Germany.
>>
>> Despite the crushing memories of the war, Gilson has an
>> optimistic view of
>> life, and especially about freedom of expression. "Today you
>> can speak out
>> without risking going to prison," he said.
>
>* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
>* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *