A war memorial outside Euston Station, London Photo: Photo: ell brown / flickr CC
Just Peace?
Michael Bartlet reflects that in matters of conscience ‘context is all’
The world’s last known combat veteran of the first world war died last year. He was aged 110. Claude Choules was born in Worcestershire, in March 1901, and lied about his age to join the Royal Navy at fifteen. He was a sailor on HMS Revenge. He witnessed the scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow in 1918 and saw the humiliation of Germany that planted the seeds of the rise of Nazism and that culminated in the second world war. In his nineties he refused to march in the annual Australian commemoration parades. He came to identify himself as a pacifist. As a child he will have met men and women who were alive in the early nineteenth century, at the time of the American civil war, and in extreme old age held great grandchildren in his arms that may live into the twenty-second.
