The November 11 commemoration made me think of my French grandfather, Charles. He and his brother Pierre were both poilus, as World War I soldiers were called. (The word comes not from being unshaven but from proverbial expressions of courage.) Their parents, Charles and Félicie, must have been on tenterhooks, waiting for that terrible message.
Which never came. They survived the war. The brothers were married to two sisters, Marie and Suzanne. Suzanne had two other sisters, Louise, the eldest, and Brigitte. Within a week, Suzanne and Brigitte died of influenza, an avian-origin virus which unusually targeted people in their early twenties. I find it hard to imagine how their mother, Suzette, lived through that blow, having lost her husband Jean years before, and now two daughters within a week.
Pierre (for whom I am named, by the way) took his loss very hard, and for the remaining months of the war, did everything he could to get himself killed. But death eluded him, and eventually he remarried.
But death reigned supremely from 1914 to 1918. Combined deaths, military and civilian, plus influenza casualties, have estimates as high as 120 million worldwide (though hard numbers are difficult to come by).
The bell tolls on, but we no longer have hardly any survivors of that terrible time, and they would have had to be babies or little…
