17

The Last of the Last

AND SO: Frank Buckles.

People are fond of saying that truth is stranger than fiction; every once in a while, you’ll hear someone remark of a particular real-live human being that if he or she hadn’t existed, someone would have had to invent them. Neither of these clichés can touch Frank Buckles. No one could have invented him; “strange” does not approach the truth that was his 110 years and twenty-six days on this earth. I will just tell what I know.

Of all the men and women in this book, perhaps the only one you may have heard of before opening its covers is Frank Buckles. For the last three years of his life, which concluded on February 27, 2011, he was the only surviving veteran of the American Expeditionary Forces of the First World War. Back around the turn of the new century, he was appointed national commander of the awkwardly named Veterans of World War I of the USA. For much of his term, he was the organization’s only member, too. I asked him about that once; he chuckled and said it didn’t bother him at all.

If you perform that weird exercise I described a while back and subtract 110 years, Frank Buckles’s ultimate age, from 1901, the year in which he was born, you get 1791, the year the Bill of Rights was ratified. Pretty impressive, I suppose; but that’s not the real story here. It’s not even, really, that Frank Buckles was the last of the last of the doughboys, or the last surviving Army veteran of that war anywhere in the world, or, if you take into account every last human being with even the faintest claim to such status, the third-last World War I veteran to leave the planet. More than any person I’ve ever met or expect to, Frank Buckles’s consciousness embraced the entirety of American history; and more than any other person I’ve ever met or expect to, he personally experienced the entirety of the twentieth century.

He was born exactly one month after the mathematical commencement of that century, on February 1, 1901, not all that far from what was then the geographical center of his country, in Harrison County, Missouri, near the town of Bethany. When I first visited him, on August 30, 2003—and every time thereafter—he was living on an old farm outside Charles Town, West Virginia. Charles Town is not what you think of when you think of West Virginia; there are no mountains or hollers there, and no coal. A lot of sheep, though. And round, verdant hills. And people who commute to work in Washington, D.C., just about ninety minutes away. About fifteen minutes away is Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Back in 1859, when both were still part of Virginia, John Brown was tried and hanged in Charles Town for what he had done at Harpers Ferry—or, more accurately, for what he had tried to start at Harpers Ferry.

Ninety-five years later, Frank Buckles had come there for another, more obscure historical reason: Two centuries earlier, his earliest American Buckles ancestor—“Robert Buckles,” he told me, “who was born May the fifteenth, seventeen hundred and two”—moved to the area from an English Quaker settlement in Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River just north of Philadelphia. At that settlement, his great-great-great-great-grandson told me, “he married Ann Brown, whose grandfather was one of the original members of William Penn’s colony. And with his family and fifteen others, they came down to this area in 1732. Robert Buckles, according to the history of that time period, and his will, had 2,090 acres of land . . . near Shepherdstown.” Shepherdstown was about ten miles away from where we then sat; about a hundred miles away, in a different direction but also in 1732, George Washington was born.

Frank Buckles was a genealogist; he cared about family, and lineage. After he died, I discovered, plucking around records online, that he had filed at least six different applications for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, each one for a different ancestor, all of them successful. “My grandmother,” he told me, early in our first meeting, “my father’s mother, whose name was Harriet Caroline Ripsom, R-I-P-S-O-M, said that her great grandfather, Mathias Riebsomeer—Holland Dutch—was killed at the Battle of Oriskany. And his name is up on the monument. On the Bicentennial, I went up to Oriskany to attend the ceremony. And Nelson Rockefeller”—then vice president of the United States—“gave the address. After it was over, I complimented Rockefeller on giving the address, and he said it was one of his favorite stories when he was a boy. So he knew it without looking at his cuff.” The story is this: On August 6, 1777, a band of Continental soldiers and Indians under the command of General Nicholas Herkimer, hurrying to the aid of the besieged Fort Stanwix (now Rome, New York), were attacked by a larger band of Loyalist troops and other Indians outside what is now the town of Oriskany, about seven miles from the fort. The Continentals took the worst of it, losing three times as many men as the Loyalists, among them General Herkimer.

Mr. Buckles spent a good bit of time during our first visit telling me, in great detail, about his forebears. And I was reminded, as he talked, of the many autobiographies I have read of Americans of note—from Benjamin Franklin to Ulysses S. Grant and beyond—that begin with detailed accounts of their lineage, not to make any kind of point, I think, but rather to put themselves in some form of context. And that, I believe, is what Frank Buckles was doing for me that afternoon in August, 2003. There was history to his tale, and he wanted to make sure I had all of it.

He began and ended his life on farms. The last of these, three hundred or so acres outside Charles Town, was called Gap View: rolling meadows, lovely vistas, solid stone house built before all those ancestors fought for independence. The first—well, I don’t even know if it had a name. He just described it as “my father’s farm, north of Bethany, in Harrison County, Missouri.”

“What were your parents’ names?” I asked him.

“James Clark Buckles and Theresa Keown Buckles. K-E-O-W-N. Scotch-Irish.” They were married September 14, 1881, in Illinois; “They soon after that came to Missouri,” he explained, “because my mother’s family had already moved there from Illinois . . . My father was born November the twentieth, 1857, in Jersey County, Illinois. My mother was born in the next county, Madison County . . . on April the twenty-fourth, Easter Sunday, 1859.” Eventually they had five children. “Three boys, and two girls.” Roy was the eldest, born in 1882; then Grace in 1884, Gladys in 1886, and, after a long break, Ashman in June, 1899. Twenty months later, Theresa Buckles, a few months short of forty-two years old, gave birth to another son. She and her forty-three-year-old husband named the baby Wood. No middle name, just: Wood Buckles.

In January, 1904, four-year-old Ashman died of scarlet fever. Wood, who was not yet three, got the fever, too, but did not die of it. He lived most of his youth, he told me, effectively as an only child. “The elder brother,” he said, speaking of Roy, “left home from high school. Why, his son told me, was because he wanted to play in the band, and his father didn’t want him to. I can understand that, because my father was a farmer, and you don’t want the boy spending his evenings with the—as a musical student.”

“Because he wouldn’t be able to get up for farm work the next day?” I asked.

He laughed. “Probably.” He said he had no idea what instrument his brother had played, but music ran in the family. “My father, when he was at Illinois State, played the flute,” he told me. “And his five sisters all played some musical instrument . . . and his brothers both had musical instruments. And they, in their home, my grandfather would have assembled the eight members of the family and have his own concert.”

He had pictures of various relations framed and displayed on a shelf in a curio cabinet that stood in a little sitting room filled with artifacts from his long life and books that dealt with the things he had lived through. That was where we sat and talked that day, and every time I came to visit him after that, he in a large red wingback armchair, facing his side yard, the sun illuminating his features as it set, though it never seemed to irritate him any. He was somewhat on the shorter side, in part because of a stoop, with white hair, a high forehead, and sharp features—sharp in the way FDR looked sharp, which is to say he always looked to be entirely alert, and interested, and thinking about something. He greeted me that first time in a cream-colored linen suit and bright blue-checked dress shirt, open at the neck; he hadn’t been interviewed all that much up to that point, and I suppose he wanted to make a good first impression. It was important to him, I would learn, to look good—not for anything as petty as vanity, but for his own dignity, and that of the occasion, whatever it might be.

Almost as significant to him as dignity was luck; he had a lot of it, he would have told you, going back to his birth, an unexpected baby to parents already in their forties. The illness that took his brother Ashman had spared him. His father, having lost one son to music and another to the fever, gave up farming for a while, sparing young Wood those kinds of chores for a good part of his childhood. As the baby of the family, fifteen years younger than his next surviving sibling, he was indulged a bit, too, allowed to pursue his interests. And his interests then all seemed tied closely to the future, what would much later be dubbed the Next Big Thing. When I asked him what the earliest historical memory he had was, he said, “Well, of course, at that age, a young age, I wasn’t particularly interested in history. I do remember the first automobile . . . I would have been less than four years old.” It was in Bethany, the county seat; the car, the only one in town (and possibly the county), belonged to a Mr. Roleke, he recalled, a businessman who had a park in town named for him. “He needed some repair,” Mr. Buckles recalled, and had to bring it into a shop in town. So he hooked it up to “a team of horses, and drove throughout the town, so that people would be accustomed—horses would be accustomed. The big problem with automobiles when they first came out was for the horses to adjust. They were afraid of automobiles . . . that would be about 1904 or 1905.” I guess it’s the kind of sight you don’t forget, even after ninety-nine years.

Inventors were the great celebrities and heroes when Wood Buckles was a child; Thomas Edison was revered as a new kind of George Washington. It was a time when so many new inventions came along, one closely following the last, that there was scarcely time to grasp their magnitude, if it could even be grasped at all: the telephone; the electric light; the phonograph; the automobile; the airplane; broadcasting. I can barely envision a time before cell phones and the Internet, and I was a fully grown adult before I first encountered either; imagine how different the world of Wood Buckles’s childhood was from the one his parents had grown up in, back in the 1860s.

That new world was just coming into focus when Wood saw that car being pulled around by horses, but it grabbed hold of him at that moment—or, I should say, he grabbed hold of it, and clutched it tightly ever after. He seems to have had a remarkable presence of mind from a very young age, coupled with a drive to seek out the kind of new that would prove important, and the ability to recognize it when he found it. “Do you remember the first time you saw an airplane?” I asked him at one point.

He smiled. “I sure do!” he said, interlacing his fingers and sitting up straight; we had been talking for nearly four hours by then, and his posture was holding up better than mine. “It would be . . . when I was about seven or eight years old. And my mother, when we moved from the farm, every summer took a vacation, visited some of her relatives. We were in Decatur, Illinois . . . Lincoln Beachey with his biplane was coming into Decatur and going to exhibit at the racetrack. He was going to fly around the racetrack, and somebody—it wasn’t Barney Oldfield, but it was somebody of importance—was going to race around with the car, and he was going to beat the biplane. Well, we boys figured out the baseball park is next to it . . . So we went to the baseball park, climbed over the fence, and walked right over there to Lincoln Beachey. And it was close—well, you could touch his biplane . . . That would be about 1908.” Beachey, a pioneer aviator, was killed while flying a stunt over the Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915; he was a daring pilot who raced trains as well as automobiles, flew loops and even upside down. Among his many fans was said to be Orville Wright. Frank Buckles would have seen Beachey fly just a few years after the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk.

From the start, Wood Buckles was what we now call an early adopter. He was the first person in his family to cotton to the automobile. “I started driving when I was twelve years old,” he told me. “The reason for that, they had been bothering my father, coming to my father with automobiles, trying to get my father to buy an automobile. And finally, the agent said, ‘Well, Mr. Buckles, I’ll just trade you this new automobile for the steers that are over in that lot there.’ Well, he says ‘Oh.’” He smiled. “He knew that he couldn’t say that it was too expensive. So he bought the automobile. [The agent] brought it out. My father said, ‘This is the biggest harvesting season, busy season—I just don’t have time for it now. But—you can teach the boy.’ So, until my father had time to spare, I drove the automobile.” And he was happy to do so. The car, he recalled, was a Ford, and had an electric starter. “And that was unusual,” he told me. “A Grand Davis starter, almost as big as the motor. And the batteries were on the running board.” He learned how to make batteries himself; this before his house even had electricity.

A year or so after he learned to drive, he developed a fascination with another nascent technology. “I read about Marconi,” he explained. “He was only forty years old at the time.” There were stories of David Sarnoff and the Titanic, and Lee De Forest, visions of a day not too far off when voices would fly through the air for hundreds of miles—maybe even across an ocean. Wood Buckles was captivated. “I took every magazine—well, there weren’t many of them—anything that had to do with wireless,” he recalled. “And somewhere I saw an advertisement for a company in New York that produced and sold these machines . . . Well, it had to be about 1914, I suppose.”

“So you sent away for it?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “And I’d be going to the post office every day to find out.” He chuckled.

“What did it look like?”

“It’s an oak base. About, not very long, eighteen inches long. And the green coil. The tuner on top. And the key . . . and a little buzzer. So you could work that, a buzzer. And that part of it never worked. And I’m not too sure whether that one was any advantage over the one I already had.”

“You had already made one yourself before you sent away?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, sure,” he replied. “I took a . . . a medium-sized oatmeal container, and, let’s see, varnished it over first. And then wound it with wire, copper wire. And the terminals at the beginning and the end. And then with a, a little adjustment key that you moved it back and forth on that drive. So that would—the total sound of the wires, including the lead-in, would finally bring it over to whatever was on the transmitter. And one of the transmissions that we used to get was from Arlington.”

“Arlington, Virginia?”

“Yeah.”

“You used to get that out in Missouri?”

He nodded. “We got that in Missouri.”

That wasn’t just luck. He’d gotten some pretty extraordinary help from his father; another dividend of being an indulged youngest child. And growing up on a farm. In those days, you see, a radio set—and they were still crystal sets, no tubes yet—needed an extremely large aerial to pick up anything at all. The magazines suggested they run as high as fifty feet off the ground. “There was a problem getting sticks that were long enough,” he explained, ninety years later. “So my father arranged to get over to the river and had somebody cut two trees, fifty-five feet long, and trim them down. And we went over on a wagon, with the wagon seat in front, and then he took that and extended it—two wheels in the back and two wheels up the front, where the seat was. And that wagon was fifty feet, fifty-five feet long.” Then his father—who was already in his midfifties by then—sank the two poles five feet into the ground, spaced 225 feet apart, and then somehow ran six wires back and forth between the two poles, spaced out two feet apart, starting all the way up at the top. That’s what you had to do to make a good antenna back then.

“Where else did you pick up from?” I asked him.

“That was about the only one,” he said. “Nobody else was sending out.” “That” was the United States Naval Observatory, and they made exactly two transmissions every day: a time signal, one at precisely 11:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, the other at precisely 11:00 a.m. “You could set your time by it,” Frank Buckles said. A little dry by today’s standards, but terribly exciting in 1913, seven years before the first commercial radio broadcast. Especially to a twelve-year-old boy. The only damper, he told me, was that “I had no one to talk to about it.”

A couple of years later, another person in town, a jeweler, finally got a set. Wood Buckles showed him how to use it. By then, he himself had a newer model, that kit he had sent away for; he would often listen to it well past the point where a schoolboy should have gone to sleep. “My parents were very nice about that,” he said fondly. “Let me stay up late and do that thing.” One day, a traveling photographer stopped by the farm and made a portrait of young Wood sitting at his wireless set, headphones on. He’d even donned a necktie for the occasion. Both the photo and the wireless set were on display in that sunroom the next time I visited. The latter was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

Like many things, the birth of radio looks nothing but romantic at this distance. To Wood Buckles, it was mysterious, exotic. People were talking about it; maybe not in his particular corner of Missouri, but out there, in the world. Someday, he believed, it would bring that world, and everything in it, to him. And someday, he believed just as fervently, he would be out there, in that very world, a part of things that people in little corners like his would hear about on the wireless.

Soon enough.

In 1916—“for reasons I don’t know, because parents didn’t always confide in the children, and children . . . sometimes didn’t ask too many questions”—Wood Buckles’s father, James Clark Buckles, decided to move the family to Dewey County, Oklahoma, in the western part of that state. (Mr. Buckles later told me: “I know from some of his associates that he was expecting an oil strike.”) He had already bought some land in Dewey County, and decided to send some draft horses on ahead to sell there—the price they fetched would have been much higher in western Oklahoma than in Vernon County, Missouri, where the family was then living and farming—in order to help prepare their arrival. James Buckles had planned to send a hired man to do it, for twenty dollars and round-trip fare; but his son, Wood, fifteen years old, sensed an opportunity for adventure. “So I talked to him allowing me to make the trip,” he recalled. “I made the trip alone with the horses. It took four days to get to western Oklahoma.” His parents would follow, eventually; for a while, though, he was on his own, in the small town of Oakwood.

He loved it. “I lived at the hotel,” he told me, “worked at a bank, and went to school.”

And after that, I imagine, it was just a matter of time. Wood Buckles wasn’t going to go back to living with his parents again, and doing farm chores; not for long, anyway. Something, sooner or later, was going to lure him away again. Something bigger.

“It was April the sixth, 1917,” he said, setting the scene. “We declared war. And naturally, the posters appeared on the post office, and the newspapers were full of it, full of the news. So I was quite aware of it. And I had been aware of the World War since it started in August, nineteen hundred and fourteen.”

“You had been reading the news accounts?” I asked.

“I don’t think that was unusual then,” he said. “People around the country were quite well-informed about what’s going on in the world.” Years later he would add that he had known from its inception that the war was “an important event”: “The world was interested,” he told me. “I was interested.” He wanted to be a part of it; waited for his chance.

“Well, the summer vacation came,” he continued. “And a rancher nearby in this place—Oakwood, Oklahoma—his son, about my age, invited me to stay with him for the Kansas State Fair, in Wichita. I went up to Wichita, and while there, went to the Marine recruiting station. The Marine sergeant was very nice to me, but he says, ‘You’re too young.’ I gave my age as eighteen. So he says, ‘You have to be twenty-one.’ Well, I went then out to Larned, Kansas.” He had an aunt and uncle living there; they owned a bank nearby. He spent some time visiting with them and his ninety-two-year-old grandmother, Harriet, who took the occasion to tell him, for the first time, about her great-grandfather, Mathias Riebsomeer, killed at Oriskany in 1777.

A reminder like that of the potential price of military service might make some people less likely to enlist; not Wood Buckles. As soon as he was back in Wichita, Mr. Buckles told me, he returned to that recruiting station. This time, there was a different sergeant on duty. “He very graciously gave me the examination, which I passed with no question,” he recalled. “But he says, ‘You’re just not heavy enough.’ So then I tried the Navy, and the Navy gave me an excuse. Said I was, flatfooted.” In retrospect, he understood that they had known all along he was underage—if you see pictures of him from that time, there’s no mistaking it; he looked about twelve years old—and were making excuses that would either spare him some hurt feelings, or them some paperwork. Or both.

“Well,” he continued, “what am I going to do? I’m going to get in someplace. So, I went to Oklahoma City, tried the Marine Corps, the Navy, with no success. Then—I decided, well, I’ll try the Army, then. And there the sergeants wouldn’t—they had to get permission from the captain. The captain interviewed me, and asked about a birth certificate. I explained that in Missouri, where I was born, there were no—they had no public record of births, and that it was in the family Bible.”

“Is that true?” I asked.

“Yes,” he assured me. “And I told him, ‘I’m not going to bring the family Bible down here.’” He smiled. “OK. They accepted me.” Years later, he would add: “If I hadn’t have made it in Oklahoma City, I would have gone to St. Louis.” And from there, wherever he had to.

“After the recruiting station,” he continued, “I went with thirteen men out to Fort Logan, Colorado. Those of us who were qualified . . . they wouldn’t at that time accept married men, you had to be a certain age, and quite, quite strict about it. Well, that was the Regular Army. My serial number by the way, 15577 . . . that’s the Regular Army. An older sergeant told me that if I wanted to get to France in a hurry to go into the Ambulance Corps. Because the French are just, are asking for ambulance service. So he said to go that way.”

“When was this?” I asked. “What month?”

“I was sworn in on the thirteenth of August, in Fort Logan, Colorado.” The whole process—being turned away, going elsewhere, trying and trying again until he found someone who would enlist him—took nearly two months. As badly as the AEF needed men, at least some recruiters remained reluctant to sign up boys who still had baby fat on them.

The story goes that, when he gave that captain in Oklahoma City his full name—Wood Buckles—the captain informed him no one could enlist who didn’t have a middle name. Perhaps this was one last gambit to turn him away—I personally know of several men who entered the Army in 1917 without a middle name—but whether or not the captain was doing a bit of fudging himself, Wood went ahead and changed his name right there and then to Frank Woodruff Buckles. It wasn’t too radical an amendment; he’d been named for his uncle, Frank Woodruff, anyway.

“How did your parents feel about you going off to join the Army?” I asked him.

“Well,” he replied, “the first they knew about it, I was on the way to Bordeaux. I sent a postcard, that I was in the Army, on the way to Bordeaux.”

“Did your grandmother know, when you were staying with her in Kansas?”

“She knew. She told me that she approved of it.”

I asked again about his parents: “When they got that postcard, and they found out you had already enlisted . . . did you hear back from them?”

“No,” he said.

“They were upset.”

“I don’t know.” Years later, he told me that his father would have known there’d be no point in trying to talk his son out of enlisting, or anything else. “We weren’t that kind of people,” he explained. “We made a decision and that was it.”

“Why were you in such a hurry to enlist and see action?” I asked.

“Well, why not?” he said, and smiled. “I knew all about the war, had for several years.”

“Why did you think America was getting into the war?”

“Well, I don’t know. It might have been influenced by the year previous, when General Pershing was down in Mexico chasing Pancho Villa. I knew all about that. I knew the position of our Army—very small. And of course, now, you’re thinking about patriotism, well . . . I didn’t know anybody whose . . . family hadn’t lived in this country for maybe a century or two. So, we just—we didn’t talk about those things.”

“But I mean,” I said, “did you join up because you wanted adventure, or did you believe strongly in the cause? Or both?”

“Oh, well,” he said, and shook his head, silently, for a moment. “I wanted action, of course.”

For a while, it certainly seemed like Frank Buckles had chosen wisely in following that older sergeant’s advice about joining the Ambulance Corps. He was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, and placed in the First Fort Riley Casual Detachment. In army parlance, a casual detachment was a discrete group of men, separated from a larger unit, that could be sent out on its own, or even attached to another unit, for specific duties or assignments. In the case of the First Fort Riley Casual Detachment, there were 102 men in all. Mr. Buckles had a group picture of them, one of those old, oblong photographs you associate with that war, framed and hanging in his sitting room.

The training was exciting from the start; “at Fort Riley,” he told me, “there were officers there from France and from Britain, who had you build trenches, similar to the trenches in Europe.” Once that was done, they got into more serious matters. “The training that we had there was ‘trench retrieval,’ they called it,” he explained. “A man was lying here, and they’d teach you how to go crawl up to him, take off your belt—you’d want to use [that], you didn’t have anything else—put it over his arm, and turn a certain way, and you could put him right on your back, he’d come up.” He mimicked some of the actions as he described them. “It was a very tricky thing, I knew. But I could do it. And I probably weighed 125 pounds.” He added: “But men weren’t so big then, too . . . Well, we were soon well-trained, and they made up the unit; the top-ranking officer in that group was going to go overseas with me, with the sergeant.”

They rode the train from Fort Riley to Hoboken, and sailed from there. “On the Carpathia,” he specified. “His Majesty’s Ship the Carpathia, which rescued the Titanic, the survivors of the Titanic, on the fifteenth of April, 1912. And which I knew all about from reading the newspapers and listening to the stories.” It was winter; he remembered that specifically, he told me, because from Hoboken they’d sailed up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, arriving just a few weeks after that city experienced a terrible disaster: In the busy port, the French freighter Mont-Blanc, loaded with munitions, collided with another ship, caught fire, and exploded. “Exploded” doesn’t really do it justice, though; it was the biggest manmade blast in history to that point, destroying every structure in a vast area and causing a tsunami that did even more damage. Some two thousand people were killed, with many times that number injured; more Nova Scotians died that morning in Halifax than on the battlefield during the entire war. Bodies kept turning up for years afterward. Even though he wasn’t there at the time, Frank Buckles never forgot the date. “December the sixth, 1917,” he recalled. The devastation was still fresh when he came through, weeks later. “There were great woods in there, cedar trees, and all you would see is the stumps,” he said.

From there, the Carpathia, which was also carrying a unit of Marines, sailed off to Europe—though not to Bordeaux. “Our unit was stopped in Winchester, England,” he explained. “And the Marines went on to France. And as a unit I don’t know what happened to them.”

At first, England was exciting to Frank Buckles; it was certainly a long way from Missouri and Oklahoma. “The first day that I had a case to go down to Winchester,” he told me, “I saw the statue of King Alfred the Great. It says: ‘Died in Nine Hundred and One.’ I said, ‘My gosh, that’s a thousand years before I was born!’ And I saw men on the streets with long robes and a hat, almost like a bishop’s hat . . . they were soldiers of the Crimea. The Crimea was 1853. That impressed me. And then, of course, the history of the place—the museum, and the cathedral. And you go in the cathedral, and there’s a [seat] next to Jane Austen.” Or her body, anyway. It’s buried under the aisle.

Even more than the history of the place—how ancient it all was, compared to America—he was struck by how grave everybody seemed in England. “All the men,” he recalled, “well, not all the men, but all the officers, all the officers in uniform would have the black band. It meant that a member of the family [had been killed in the war]. And women—all in somber black. Some of them even looked dead, with veils, black veils.”

Somber as England was at times, young Private Buckles seems to have had a fine time there. “First I drove a motorcycle,” he recalled. “As the dispatch—you know, they didn’t use the telephones then, just sent a boy on a motorcycle or a bicycle. Then I drove a car. And mostly, in that car, I was driving distinguished people around . . . And then, some of the time [I drove] an ambulance.” Years later, he clarified: “I didn’t care for the darn thing; but I enjoyed the motorcycle and sidecar.”

As he had been back in Missouri, Frank Buckles was somewhat indulged in England, perhaps because of his youth. He managed to get away with a degree of cheekiness (if not quite insubordination) toward British officers, and even got chummy with a certain aristocratic one-armed lieutenant general who terrified most of the other soldiers. He might well have been happy to spend the entire war in England, but for one thing: The war wasn’t in England. It was in France. And he had signed up to be in the war, not simply nearer to it.

Unfortunately, it didn’t appear as if the First Fort Riley Casual Detachment was going to get to leave Winchester anytime soon, so Private Buckles decided he was going to have to detach himself from the detachment. “I let any person who had any influence at all know that I wanted to go on to France,” he told me. “I contacted one of the field clerks and told him that I wanted to see the colonel.” Colonel Jones, the top-ranking American officer in the area, was particularly indulgent of him—privately, he found the young private’s antics entertaining, especially when they flummoxed the British—but this wish he could not grant. “Colonel Jones said he’d like to go to France, too,” Mr. Buckles recalled, eighty-five years later. “But he said, ‘When the Army tells me I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to do it.’”

Perhaps that should have put the matter to rest, but it didn’t. Private Buckles kept scheming; at one point, seeing lots of other doughboys stop at Winchester briefly en route to France, he developed a plan and pitched it to three would-be collaborators. “When there were a sufficient number to fill up a craft for transportation across to France, they would march down to the railway station, always at night,” he explained. “And I’d watch them. So . . . I explained to these folks what happened, when they come to a certain place, and nothing in between, when they are marching along there, what we’ll do is just merge right into them. Go on the train, and these lads are just not sharp enough to check everybody. We’ll be on the boat, and we’ll be over in France.”

“Wouldn’t that have meant going AWOL from your unit in Winchester?” I asked him.

“Well the way I was calculating,” he said, “we got in France, we’d stay there. But what happened was, I had somebody I had to take down to, I think Plymouth, England, or some distance, and I couldn’t get back in time. So here I left these poor fellows, three of them, without their leader.”

“So they went to France and you didn’t.”

“They went to France. And they came back.”

“They sent them back?”

“Under patrol.”

“Because they had gone AWOL,” I said.

“And they had a trial,” he recalled. He went and sat in on it, in the company of a major; fortunately, the three were only given work detail. And Frank Buckles kept scheming to get across.

And then one day, after he’d been in Winchester for about six months, he said, “finally came an order, here’s a unit going through, and I believe it was an airplane unit. And it left this officer in Winchester, and they had to send him on to France. And I didn’t know why—it didn’t matter to me, I wanted to get over.” The Army needed a volunteer to escort the officer across. It got one very quickly.

It soon became apparent to the volunteer why such an escort was needed. The officer—Mr. Buckles always referred to him as “Lieutenant Nick”—was a bit eccentric. After boarding ship with the lieutenant in Southampton, Private Buckles was told by a deck hand that they wouldn’t be departing for several hours, so he went back ashore to do some shopping; when he returned, he recalled, the lieutenant “wanted me to write a letter to President Wilson and General Pershing asking my pardon for going off the ship that day. So I knew there was something wrong with that guy.” Fortunately, he added, “I was in charge. I realized that because I had the orders.” When I asked him why he had been put in charge instead of the officer, he replied: “Because the guy was nuts.”

The orders were to bring the lieutenant to Paris. Once there, they waited for further orders. Private Buckles didn’t mind; he was in France at last. He stayed at a hotel near headquarters, visited the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, ate well. Finally, after a week or so (“You know,” he explained, “the Army used to work awfully slow”), new orders came through: Bordeaux. “And the same thing worked over there,” he recalled. “Stayed at a small hotel . . .” He and Lieutenant Nick worked out a routine: “If I wanted money, all I would have to do is ask him for it. I’d ask him for twenty francs or whatever it was, and go down below and get a bottle of cognac. Bring up a little flask. Feed it to him until he’s about ready to pass out, and make sure he had his boots off—he sleeps in his clothes, but I felt the poor guy should have his boots [off].” He chuckled.

It was in Bordeaux that Private Buckles first learned what, exactly, his charge’s role in the war was supposed to be: dentist. A week later, the two of them were ordered on to the port of Bassens, a few miles away. “He was sent there to set up a business and I was to be his assistant,” Mr. Buckles explained. “I don’t know how they figured I was a dental assistant.”

In Bassens, another routine quickly took shape. “A patient would come in—he handled his business very well,” he told me. “But soon as the patient left, he’d sit up in a chair, in the dental chair, and I’d light a cigarette for him. And sometimes he’d go, he had a little washroom—I never was in it, just a tiny little place, and he’d go in there a few minutes and come out feeling fine.” He smiled knowingly. “Among other things, he had a trunk full of quarts of ethyl alcohol . . . and you mixed ethyl alcohol with water and you could really get a high. Oh, my. And you don’t have a headache afterwards.” Private Buckles didn’t partake; “I wasn’t very strong on ethyl alcohol,” he said. “But a lot of my friends enjoyed it.”

That interesting work environment lasted for about a month. Then, one day, an American colonel came to the office, accompanied by a lieutenant, who promptly took Private Buckles aside and advised him: “Get the hell out of here quick. Don’t let the colonel see you, because he’ll raise hell with you.” The party, apparently, was over. “So I beat it out,” he said; later, “I found out what happened. That morning, or that night, the lieutenant had walked on his hands and knees, and walked into the major’s office, major’s room, barking like a dog.” It would seem ethyl alcohol does produce some sort of hangover, after all.

And that was the end of Lieutenant Nick. “So,” Frank Buckles added, smiling, “I went back to my usual occupation—motor crew.” The Army sent him to Saint-André-de-Cubzac, about ten miles from Bassens. “What would you do in the motor pool there?” I asked him.

“Nothing much,” he said. “Drive a car, a motorcycle. Drive a Ford ambulance. Not much.”

“Not much” is hardly the first phrase that comes to mind when you think about what ambulance drivers do in wartime; but, like Bassens and Bordeaux, Saint-André-de-Cubzac wasn’t at the front. Or near it. The front, in fact, was hundreds of miles away. Still, Mr. Buckles said, there was no mistaking the fact that you were in a country that was at war, and had been for a long time. In France, he recalled, everybody seemed to be wearing black. But that was only the most obvious indicator; there were hundreds, thousands, of only slightly more subtle ones. For instance, he explained, “there were no lights at night. And it wasn’t because they were afraid of an air attack. It wasn’t that at all. It was because they were saving the lights.”

Even so, four years of devastating warfare hadn’t managed to rob the French of everything. Sometimes, he recalled, “in the village there would be a group of French soldiers . . . They were leaving, and they sang the ‘Marseillaise.’ Well, I made some inquiries, to find out: What’s the purpose of this? They were called up, going back to the front.” He paused and nodded respectfully, still a bit awed, nearly a century later, by such a display. “And that was a surprise to me,” he continued after a moment. “Not that they were going to be called back, because they had to go, [but that they were] approaching it in the right manner.”

The sight only made him more eager to get to the front, but time did not indulge him as others had. November 11, 1918, found him still in Saint-André-de-Cubzac. The celebration there, as he later remembered it, was subdued: “It didn’t seem to me quite as joyous as some of the people say,” he told me in 2006. Perhaps, though, that was just a projection; a few years earlier, when I’d asked him how he’d felt at the war’s end, he’d answered: “Well, very disappointed, of course. I felt like I hadn’t been anyplace. I didn’t get to the front . . . That’s what I felt I went over there for.”

Just because he never got to fight the Germans, though, doesn’t mean he didn’t get to see them up close. Because he did, in fact—much closer, even, than many of the men who, right up until 11:00 a.m. that morning, had been trying to kill them. And though he didn’t realize as much at the time, the experience he did end up having actually suited him much better.

For a few weeks after the armistice, nothing changed for Frank Buckles. He was still in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, still shuttling the sick and wounded around in a Ford ambulance. But then, for some reason, he was sent to the village of Saint-Sulpice-de-Cognac, seventy or so miles to the north, and given a new assignment. “I was attached to a POW company,” he recalled. “Prisoner-of-war company . . . Our principal job was taking the prisoners back to Germany.” And it was at the prison camp that Frank Buckles finally got his first look at the dreaded Hun. It was not what he expected.

“They were behind barbed wire,” he recalled, “but they had an orchestra that they had formed. They made their own instruments and so forth. And on the outside of it we put up some lumber and made some seats, and the Americans would sit outside and listen to them . . .

“I wish I had a camera,” he said. “Or I wish I could have sketched it . . . An American soldier would take a group, of maybe twenty, out on the different assignments. And this was an assignment up in the nearby woods, and they had their equipment with them. And here the [American] soldier has a side[arm], a gun. But this day, it must have been a payday or something with the soldier, because—now, the French peasants, all they have to do to start a café is just [get] a table, a chair, and a bottle. So wherever they are, if there is a soldier there with any money in his pocket, he has access to a café. And here it came time to quit, and the picture that I saw was, coming along, here were soldiers, all in formation, a German soldier with . . . the American’s sidearm, and an older German smoking his pipe and pushing a wheelbarrow with [the American] soldier in it. That was something.”

I’ll say. “So the Americans and the Germans after the war—there wasn’t a lot of animosity between them?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “None whatsoever. One evening—my reason for going into the German barracks I don’t know, it was some communication, I guess. Like I told you, we didn’t have telephones, so we moved the information around by letter. And in there—I don’t have the vaguest idea [anymore] what the argument was about, but there was a young German, maybe about my age, and he and I got into an argument. And it looked like it was going to be pretty serious. Well, just then, two big older Germans stepped up. One of them pinned the other fellow’s arms behind his back; the other one pinned mine. And they started talking to us, and telling us what would happen, that we’d all get in trouble if we had any fisticuffs in there. They made us shake hands.” Just a few weeks earlier, they would have been obligated to try to kill each other.

Eventually, orders came down for Private—now Private First Class —Buckles to escort 650 German prisoners back to Germany, by train. “The first town we came into in Germany,” he recalled, “they had the train stop there, and what they had—the equivalent of Red Cross, or whatever it was, to receive them. So the prisoners all lined up with their cups to get some coffee”—a mischievous grin spread across his lips—“and I did too. I was the only escort who would; I was always ahead, I never missed a thing.” He smiled. “So I lined up with them. So when it came to me, they gave me the coffee. I just stood there [before] an old gentleman with a beard, and I said, Danke schön, das Kaffee ist sehr gut. With that, he reached behind the counter, gave me a slice of potato bread. And I said, Danke schön, das Brot ist sehr gut. Well, I got a piece of baloney in addition to that. See, that’s where early I learned the advantage of foreign language.” He laughed.

The prisoners were confined to boxcars at the rear of the train, while the guards rode in a coach close to the locomotive; but after one stop, PFC Buckles, having dallied a bit too long, arrived back at the station just in time to see his coach roll by. “I couldn’t catch up,” he explained. “So Germans sitting in the boxcars [rolled up], the doors open, and the Germans signaled to me—I was running, trying to catch up, and he reached down and grabbed me and brought me aboard. So I stayed in their car the rest of the way.” Again: the old enemy was clearly no longer a danger; but, he soon learned, the old allies just might be. “While I was in this [boxcar],” he told me, “I don’t know how long—it was some time before we stopped the cars again—but in the distance was a French guard with French prisoners. And he took a potshot at the car.” Five or six years later, Frank Buckles was down in Brazil when he made the acquaintance of a photographer. “And the man was a German, and he had an American accent,” he told me. “He spoke English with an American accent. And I asked him where he picked that up. He said he was a prisoner during the war, and he’d perfected his English. So I asked him about, if anything unusual happened.” Why yes, the man said: After the armistice, he was being transported back to Germany in a boxcar, with an American guard onboard, when a French soldier in the distance had taken a potshot at the car.

The German prisoners were very fond of their captor, apparently, and he of them. I’m not sure what he had to barter—perhaps nothing more than chocolate and cigarettes; he couldn’t remember—but he came home with plenty of souvenirs, including a gray uniform cap, “a knife which had Von Hindenburg’s silhouette on the side of it,” and even a Gott Mit Uns belt buckle, the most prized German souvenir of all. After the war, at the YMCA in Oklahoma City, another veteran offered him twenty-five dollars for it. He really could have used the cash right then; but when I visited him at Gap View Farm nearly nine decades later, it was still there, on a shelf in that curio cabinet, along with the cap and knife.

The Army sent him home the following fall, formally discharged him with the rank of corporal on November 13, 1919, at Camp Pike, Arkansas.

He was eighteen years old.

While Frank Buckles was guarding German prisoners, the leaders of the victorious Allied nations were gathering in Paris to formalize the peace. Or so they said. What they really did was redraw the maps of much of the world, divvy up fallen empires, appropriate certain choice properties, spin others off into brand-new countries, and, most of all, punish and humiliate Germany. Severely. It lost all of its overseas possessions. Big chunks of its home territory were lopped off and given to France and Belgium and several new nations, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Lithuania. Germany was forced to shrink its military to the point where it would be, effectively, a ceremonial entity. It was ordered to pay pretty much the entire cost of the war, an amount equivalent to nearly half a trillion of today’s dollars. (They made the final payment in October, 2010.) And it and its allies—the bloc known during the war as the Central Powers—were awarded complete responsibility “for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.” A nice little flourish, that. The victorious Allies alone worked out the details of the treaty; Germany was given three weeks to read and sign it.

In Paris, the other Allies rejected the first thirteen of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, an idealistic plan for establishing and maintaining global peace, allowing only the creation of a “League of Nations” that would safeguard borders and settle international disputes. Back home, an increasingly isolationist United States Congress rejected both the peace treaty and the League of Nations. (The United States would sign its own individual peace treaty with the Central Powers in 1921.) Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up and deported hundreds of foreign-born men and women, many of whom had done nothing more than speak out in favor of anarchism, communism, or some other leftist ideal—or, in some cases, merely keep company with those who did—and the country soon found itself caught up in its first Red Scare. In 1921, Congress passed a temporary immigration-restriction act; three years later, it passed a new one that tightened the restrictions even further—limiting immigration from eastern and southern Europe to a tiny fraction of what it had been, while greatly favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe—and made them permanent. President Calvin Coolidge, who would later display an execrable callousness toward impecunious veterans, eagerly signed it into law. The golden age of immigration was dead.

Frank Buckles would have read about all of this in the newspaper, but for a while, at least, most of it must have seemed as much of an abstraction to him as had the European war before April 6, 1917. From Camp Pike he went back to Oklahoma, $139.50 of discharge pay in his pocket; he visited with his parents for a bit, and enrolled at Hill’s Business College in Oklahoma City to study shorthand and typing, skills he figured would be valuable for whatever course he might embark upon next. One day, he heard that General Pershing was to be speaking at the city’s Hotel Skirvin. Oddly, he told me, he was unable to convince any of the veterans he knew at the college to go along, so he went alone. And in uniform. “I don’t remember seeing any military men,” he said. “There may have been earlier in the evening. But when I came along, the sergeant followed me and said the general requests me to come back. He said, ‘He would like to talk to you.’ So General Pershing asked a number of questions . . . He asked where I served . . . and also he asked where I was born. Of course, I told him, ‘North of Bethany, in Harrison County, Missouri.’ He said, ‘Just forty-two miles as the crow flies from Linn County, where I was born.’” It was a story Frank Buckles would repeat many times in the years to come; he always told it exactly the same way. He was, he declared, “very impressed” with the general.

After a few months at the college—during which time he was also working 4:00 p.m. to midnight at the post office, for sixty cents an hour—he felt stuck. “I was not progressing too well,” he explained. He was also coming to understand, he said, that “I had to get out of that atmosphere of association, associating only with Army men . . . nobody wanted to talk to me. Nobody knew my story.” Veterans, he realized, were “the only people I knew.” He was also sick of the heat. He thought about heading up to Montreal and getting work at the seaport, but a fellow he knew recommended Toronto, instead, so that’s where he went. “Well,” he recalled, “I hadn’t the vaguest idea as to how to get a job. I didn’t know you could look in the newspaper for want ad jobs. They didn’t tell me that in the school. [!] But the nice Irish couple at the place I roomed would cut out the items from the newspaper and paste them on a board for me to answer. I rented a typewriter, for three dollars a month, for a month. Started answering the advertisements. One of them was from the White Star Line. When I saw the flags on there . . . I said, ‘That’s the job I want.’ And I was going to get that job.” And he did. It was in the line’s freight soliciting department; he made sixty-five dollars a month. He got a second job working nights across the street, at the Great Northwestern Telegraph Company, looking up old accounts for thirty-five cents an hour. Later he left to work for an automobile dealership in town, at the salary of twenty-five dollars a week. “It wasn’t very long until I had money enough,” he said, “I went to the best tailor in Toronto, on Yonge Street, and had a suit of clothes made.” That was the second lesson he learned, after the utility of knowing foreign languages: It pays to look sharp. Or, as he put it: “I recognized that the important thing was the appearance.”

In those days, cold weather more or less killed automobile sales in Canada, so in the winter of 1921, Frank Buckles took his new suit and savings—“forty-nine dollars and a half”—and boarded a train for New York. He arrived at Grand Central Terminal, walked over to the YMCA on West Fifty-seventh Street, and took a room, a share, for five dollars a week. He found a job at an advertising agency down by Union Square, then quickly found another one in the bond soliciting department of Bankers Trust Company, on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. “It was a prestigious bank,” he told me. “It was formed in nineteen hundred and three. And they were rather particular about their clientele. You had to have some money to belong there. And most of the bond salesmen, I even remember their names, practically all of them, right from Seward Prosser, the president of the bank, on down.” One of them, a sixtysomething senior vice president named Wyckoff, befriended the young bond salesman; Mr. Wyckoff, the scion of an old Knickerbocker family, shared tales of old New York with him. “Well, he said that when he was a boy, about ten years old, he used to play over there”—that is, across the street, where the big library, the one with the lions out front, is now—“because it was the city reservoir.” From time to time, he recalled, “we went down to the Murray Hill Hotel, which at that time was the aristocratic hotel. And we were treated nicely of course, and had one of those nice ten-course dinners.”

Frank Buckles had always been very fortunate in his associations, but in New York they ascended to a new stratum. He was living at the Hotel Elite, on West Fifty-seventh Street across from the Y, and going to a gymnasium, where he met a couple of men who took it upon themselves to help him get integrated into the life of New York. They advised him, among other things, to join a National Guard unit, so he did: the 7th New York, an old outfit sometimes called the “Silk Stocking Regiment” because of the affluence and prominence of its members. (In 1861, it is said, they marched off to the Civil War carrying lunches from Delmonico’s, the finest restaurant in the city.) Their armory, opened in 1880 and occupying an entire city block on the Upper East Side, was constructed and furnished entirely with private funds; the members wanted the likes of Louis Comfort Tiffany and Stanford White to be able to work on the project, and a government budget just wasn’t going to cut it.

The regiment, Frank Buckles said, was primarily a social organization in those days, with a few military trappings. “Once a week we had a meeting,” he recalled. “I was the secretary of my company.” Occasionally they would drill, though even that was a social event. “After each drill,” he said, “we’d go up to the mess room on the fourth floor and have a beer . . . even though this was Prohibition.” There was a brewery in the neighborhood owned by a colonel in the regiment, a fellow named Jacob Ruppert; “he made sure that we had plenty of beer,” Mr. Buckles explained. Colonel Ruppert also owned a professional baseball club, and was just then in the process of building it a new ballpark across the river, in the Bronx.

Every day, walking to and from work, he would pass by an automobile dealership on Fifty-seventh Street at Eighth Avenue. “On the main floor, the big windows in there, that’s where his showroom was,” he told me in 2006, noting that the owner was always there each morning. “When I came back in the evening, very likely he’d be in there. I don’t know how he spent all of his time there, in the showroom.” The dealership belonged to the Rickenbacker Motor Company; its owner, the man standing in the showroom every morning and evening, was Eddie Rickenbacker, a former racecar driver who became America’s top air ace of the war, with twenty-six confirmed kills. “And he liked to talk to me,” Mr. Buckles explained. “I guess because I was probably the one ex-soldier . . .” His voice trailed off; I knew what he meant to say.

In 1921, he heard about a Bible class being given at a Baptist church in Manhattan, and decided to start attending—not for religious reasons, but because the class was being taught by the future vice president’s father, John D. Rockefeller Jr. “I sat about how close we are now,” he told me, also in 2006. “There were never more than forty, if there were that many, in the class. I always sat down in the front, in the old-fashioned pews. And he would sit there with his feet on the seat, and I would be facing. That would be the first row I would be in.”

“Did you get to know him?” I asked.

“I sure did,” he said. “And I remember, I was clearly impressed by the frankness with which he could speak. And the ease, and such a relaxed person. He was a little bit different than the reporters tried to make him out to be. Because they made him to be a statesman, but a young man has a better way of analyzing the situation than some reporter.”

“He was quite a philanthropist.”

“That is what he talked about.” His father, John D. Rockefeller Sr.—still alive then, at eighty-two—had made the money, his son liked to say; and now, he said, it was his time, to “utilize that money in the right way, to help people out.” He told Frank Buckles, “‘I have an entire staff whose job it is [to read through the many letters he received], and we look seriously at every one.’ Then he described some of them—[for instance,] a woman who needed money so her son could go to college. Naturally, and some of them were more private nature, but still, [he said,] we never bypassed any of them.”

In 1923, Frank Buckles, now twenty-two years old, decided he was ready for another change, so he got a job with the Munson Steamship Line, as a purser. “Now, as the purser on a ship,” he explained, “you’re dealing with all of the crew, right from the captain to the lowest boy. You’re dealing with all the passengers. In the ports, you’re dealing with all of the officials. It’s the job where you know everybody. So that was the place where you learned.”

And he learned well. In his spare time he studied Spanish, as he’d become fascinated with the idea of seeing South America. In 1924 he moved over to the W. R. Grace Line, which made him purser on the SS George Washington, a luxury liner that had been seized by the government after April 6, 1917; it had been launched in 1908 by the North German Lloyd Company, which had christened it . . . George Washington. Really. “I probably did twenty or thirty ports in South America,” he told me. “I was in Brazil, and Uruguay, and Argentina . . . then I went to the west coast of South America.” Through the Panama Canal, too. After that, he decided he wanted to see the Orient, and traveled from port to port, China and Japan, for a while. One day, onboard, he was approached by a very distinguished-looking Japanese gentleman who engaged him in conversation. As a young man, this gentleman had left Japan to live and study in Portland, Oregon, returning to Japan in 1902, at the age of twenty-two, having earned a law degree. He was drawn to the young American. “And he asked questions. Where I was going? What I was going to do on the boat? . . . Are you going to Japan? And I said . . . I probably will. And I said, of course, if I go there, I’ll go to Tokyo. And he said, ‘When you come to Tokyo . . . come to my office and I will take you around Tokyo and show you the sights. Now, if I’m not there’—and he wrote on the back of it—‘you just present this card, and you’ll get a chauffeur, and an interpreter, and taken around sightseeing.’ He signed it—and I have it somewhere if I could find it—Yosuke Matsuoka.” He added: “Look him up.”

I did. Matsuoka was a successful businessman turned diplomat; in 1933, some years after his encounter with Frank Buckles, he stood before the League of Nations in Geneva and, disgusted by international condemnation of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, delivered a scathing address condemning that body, then led his country’s delegation out, never to return. He then went into politics, and was eventually named Japan’s foreign minister; he conceived and vigorously campaigned for a tripartite alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which was realized and became known as the Axis. He tried to get Japan to invade Siberia (because that had gone so well the last time), but was unsuccessful; after the war, he was arrested and charged with war crimes, but died in prison before he could be tried.

October, 1929, found Frank Buckles back in New York, living at 111 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, walking distance from the West Side piers and across the street from poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom he often ran into at a certain restaurant. His job protected him, personally, from the economic chaos that was descending upon the country, but there was no mistaking that a depression was under-way; “nobody had any money to spend, that’s one thing,” he said. Perhaps because of that, he started thinking about Europe again. He had been to England with the Munson Line, but a 1928 trip to Bremerhaven revived fond memories of Germany, and he sought a position that would take him there. He found one, and traveled back and forth between New York and Hamburg many times over the course of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, on the SS City of Norfolk, which had a mail contract.

It soon became apparent that something was up. Much of the crew of the George Washington had been German, friendly fellows who taught him the language. During one visit to Germany, he told me, he’d met a German gentleman and his father-in-law, who had been, respectively, a captain and a major in the last war; they invited him to visit them down at the family estate—he was moving in lofty circles again; or, more accurately, had never stopped doing so—where, in the course of entertaining him, they took him into their confidence. “And they said, ‘We are going to tell you something that will surprise you—that we are preparing for another war.’ He says, ‘It’s not the wish of the officers who have been through the war, but still . . . we are going to get into another one.’” On another occasion, he said, he was visiting a baron’s estate in Hungary and enjoying lunch on the lawn, “and there was a plane flying over. And he says, ‘We never know, when a plane is flying over, when we might get a’—I forget how he expressed it, but—‘get a visit from Germany.’” But few people did much more about it than just nod knowingly, and shrug: What can you do? Even the newspapers, he said, didn’t report such things. Many people felt guilty about the harsh terms of the peace treaty, and few could bring themselves to contemplate the prospect of another war so soon after the last one.

The iconic image of post–World War I Germany is people pushing wheelbarrows full of money to the bakery just to buy a loaf of bread; but by the time Frank Buckles first saw Hamburg, “in 1931, they had, they did an excellent job of recovery,” he told me. “And Germany was doing quite well.” Two years later, though, Adolf Hitler was made chancellor, and things started to change. He first took notice at an antiques shop in Hamburg that he had started frequenting on his first visit; it was owned by a Jewish lady. “She would invite me to have tea,” he said. “So I would go up in the center dais and have tea. And this time I came, and she saw me, and came right over to the door and said, ‘I’m sorry, my situation has changed. I won’t be able to talk to you. I can’t invite you in to have tea.’” She was, she said, being watched.

“Then I went into one of the very fine big stores,” he continued. “And they had put up signs in front of it.” Signs: Don’t Buy from Jews, or some equivalent sentiment; “signs against the Jews, against the Jewish people,” is how he put it. (One of his earliest memories, he once told me, was of a Jewish peddler coming by his family’s farm in Missouri; “Every place they went, they were received . . . they always sold something . . . [and] they never went hungry.”) One time, he said, he was at a party, enjoying the company of a young Jewish woman—“the life of the party, always cheerful,” he recalled—until “she went to the telephone to call her family, who I think were in Hanover . . . and, my gosh, when she came back, she was just broken up. She said nobody could believe what they . . . what was happening there, what was happening to some of her family.” He added: “And there were Americans going over to Europe, making a trip around, telling [people back home] what a wonderful time they were having in Germany.” And not just older folks, who perhaps didn’t know better; “I had students during that period,” he said, “who had traveled around in Germany and stayed at youth hostels, and came back and said it was wonderful.”

For years after that first visit, I had a terrible time trying to reconcile the things Frank Buckles had seen in Nazi Germany—and, looking at the entire picture, I know he’d seen almost nothing of it, but not quite nothing—with those stories he’d told about his encounters with the German prisoners, with those tired, underfed men who had fashioned musical instruments out of scrap and gave concerts behind barbed wire, with those big, older fellows who had pinned his arms behind his back and whispered for him to calm down until he did, when just as easily they could have strangled him and buried his body out in the woods. In 2006, three years after our first conversation, I asked him: “The Germans that you knew right after World War I seemed like very decent people; was it hard for you to imagine them then following Hitler?”

“No,” he said. “I knew how it was done. Hitler wrote in his book Mein Kampf, which is, if you read that, you can see what, that he had to have somebody [for a scapegoat], and the way he got control of the people—Germany wasn’t all . . . it wasn’t Germany speaking in their attitude toward the Jews; it was a certain group, and they got you either for them or against them.” It was, he said, very effective; as he told me during another visit, “When they get control—boy. And I’ll tell you something: You have difficulty keeping your hand in your pocket when they said ‘Heil Hitler.’” Most historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists would probably agree with that; but that doesn’t make it any more satisfying an explanation. One thing is certain, though: Without the previous war—and the peace treaty that officially ended it—none of it would have happened.

Frank Buckles made his last trip to Germany in August, 1938. “Our company could see what was happening,” he said, “and we diverted all our ships.” The signs—literally—were everywhere, now, even at the elegant hotels at which he stayed. That spring, Germany had annexed Austria, in what is now known as the Anschluss. Austria capitulated without a fight; indeed, many Austrians were thrilled with the development. In September, in an act that has become synonymous with the word “appeasement,” Western Europe sold out Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, allowing them to seize the Czech territory known as the Sudetenland without uttering a syllable of protest. In November, the Nazis unleashed a night of terror—Irving Berlin might have recognized it as a pogrom, but for its massive scale—upon the Jews of Germany and Austria, during which nearly a hundred Jews were killed, tens of thousands more were arrested and sent to concentration camps, more than a thousand synagogues were burned to the ground, and many thousands of Jewish-owned shops and businesses were destroyed. It has since come to be known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, an unmistakable harbinger of what was to come.

After Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, dragged Europe back into another war, Frank Buckles knew he wasn’t going to be sailing there anytime soon. Nevertheless, he didn’t have any trouble finding work. Actually, “I had two jobs offered to me,” he told me. “One of them was to go to Buenos Aires with the Captain of the Port, and the other one was to go to Manila. But the one in South America was with the McCormick Line, and wouldn’t give me any advantage coming back to the United States. If I went out to the Orient, I could use that advantage in San Francisco,” where the other company, the American President Line, was based. “So I took that,” he said. His job, he explained, would be “to expedite the movement of cargos in the port of Manila.” He arrived there in January of 1941, he told me, and “expected to be out in a year.”

And here Frank Buckles chose unwisely.

In 1931, Japan had invaded the northern Chinese region known as Manchuria, an act for which Japan was strongly criticized around the world. (This criticism, you will recall, led Frank Buckles’s former Tokyo tour guide to lead his country’s delegation out of the League of Nations, never to return.) The Japanese didn’t leave Manchuria, though; instead, they fortified their position there and then started pushing farther and farther into China, until the situation developed into an all-out war in 1937. The world took this turn of events rather badly, particularly the United States, which had significant interests in China, not to mention a residual wariness of Japan from their dealings in Siberia a couple of decades earlier. The farther Japan pushed on, the more the United States restricted sales of critical supplies to it, including machinery, oil, and gasoline. (As a small island nation, Japan was quite dependent on the United States and other nations to provide it with such necessities.) The more the United States withheld supplies, though, the more the Japanese felt the need to push on into China and other territories (like French Indochina) in search of new sources. In July, 1941, six months after Frank Buckles arrived in Manila—capital of the Philippines, then an American commonwealth—the United States cut off all oil sales to Japan. At that point, people on both sides of the Pacific who understood these things figured that it was just a matter of time before something bad happened.

December 7, 1941, was a Sunday. Across the International Date Line, it was already Monday, December 8; and so, while you might think that people in the British Crown colony of Hong Kong, or the Dutch East Indies, or Thailand, or British Malaya, or the Philippines—all of which, history records, were invaded by Japan on December 8, 1941—had at least a day’s notice of what was coming, they didn’t, really.

Being the kind of person he was, Frank Buckles had, after his arrival in Manila, made the acquaintance of the commander of the US Army Forces in the Far East, headquartered there: Major General Douglas MacArthur, former commander of the Rainbow Division, commandant of West Point, Army chief of staff, and conqueror of the Bonus Expeditionary Force. “I met him on occasions when they would have meetings at the Manila Hotel,” Mr. Buckles recalled. When Japan invaded, he said, he tried to enlist, but was turned away, an act that, depending upon how you look at it, either saved his life or very nearly took it. I’m not sure even he, more than six decades later, knew for sure which it was. “I was trapped,” he said, “because MacArthur’s headquarters said that I was more valuable to them staying where I was than being in the Army. I could see that, because we were congregating the people in the Philippines.” “The people” he was referring to were citizens of countries then at war with the Axis—Britons, French, Dutch, and Americans, among others—who had fled there from other Pacific points under attack. “We were telling them that was the safest place in the Orient.” He added: “We knew damn well better than that.”

He surprised me with that; it wasn’t like him. “Why would they do that?” I asked him.

“To keep a good impression of the Orient,” he said. A few months later, he told me that a Captain Hatfield, who worked for another American shipping line, managed to sail out of Manila and escape after the invasion; “he told me to fetch a bag and come along,” Mr. Buckles recalled. But, he added, “I had already told MacArthur’s headquarters that I was going to stay there . . . They told me that I would be more valuable to stay there in case we decided to take the people out and to take the cargos out.”

The American force in the Philippines was far too small to keep the Japanese at bay. There wasn’t much they could do, though they certainly did try. One afternoon, Frank Buckles recalled, he was walking in Manila when he spotted “a Japanese plane flying over, very high.” Suddenly, he said, an Army truck pulled up, “and a sergeant and his squad of eight men hop out and start firing, shooting at the planes. So I tell the sergeant, ‘Sergeant, what’s the extreme range of your rifle?’ He knew right off. I said, ‘Well, now, how high do you think that plane is?’ It was about twice it. And he said, ‘Mister, I’ve just got to do something.’”

Everyone now knew what was coming. MacArthur left Manila, moved his headquarters to the fortress of Corregidor, on an island in Manila Bay, and then to Australia. The Japanese marched into Manila—left defenseless, as an “open city”—at the beginning of January, 1942. The city was full of foreigners who had fled there seeking sanctuary; in addition to the aforementioned British, French, Dutch, and Americans, there were, Frank Buckles explained, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, too. “Many of these people,” he recalled, “had no residence in Manila at all. They had just been staying at the hotels.” Now, he said, the Japanese “gave word that everybody was to present themselves . . . at the Santo Tomas University [in Manila], and to bring provisions for three days.” He didn’t, deciding instead to wait until they came and got him.

It didn’t take very long. They found him at his apartment: a Japanese soldier—“big, bad”—and “two Japanese civilians, nice little people.” After they took him to Santo Tomas, the Japanese civilians returned to his apartment, “took a mat I had, about this size, and put all my canned goods and stuff in it, bound it up and took it out there for me.” It was one of the few lucky breaks he would catch over the course of the next few years.

I asked Mr. Buckles why the Japanese had told people to bring along only enough provisions for three days; what did they expect to happen after that? “They thought you would go back to your home,” he replied. In Manila. “Japanese were not accustomed to taking prisoners. They didn’t know how to handle them. They didn’t want prisoners. Even their own people. If their own people were taken prisoner, they never wanted to see them again. He’s marked off . . . It was a disgrace to be taken a prisoner. They said they would die for the emperor, and so forth.” Consequently, he said, “they hadn’t made any provision for it.” Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to the Japanese that taking prisoners also meant feeding prisoners. “At first there wasn’t anything,” Frank Buckles explained, during our second visit. “Then a man who had a warehouse full of coffee and so forth managed—you get permission to do a lot of things—to go outside and bring in coffee. And he brought in enough coffee for the whole [camp] . . . In the beginning we were only a thousand people there; eventually, there were three thousand. And then we negotiated with the Japanese. The Japanese began to give a certain amount of foodstuffs.”

In some ways, the walls at Santo Tomas were porous; the Japanese recognized that the more food prisoners could have brought in to them from the outside, the less food their captors would have to provide. But you had to have connections. Fortunately, Frank Buckles did; he’d actually had the presence of mind to make the arrangements as the Japanese were escorting him out of his apartment. “I told my Filipino houseboy—I gave him money, I told him, ‘You just stay here.’ He lived someplace nearby; I said, ‘You just move in, you and your wife move into this apartment and stay here’ . . . The people who lived in Manila all had servants . . . loyal servants. And they came right down bringing food. So finally the Japanese allowed an arrangement where they could come down and put it in an apartment inside the wall in Santo Tomas. Then my houseboy would right away bring . . . little containers; there would be one, two, three, four, five of them, and then a handle at the top. And he would bring about, more food than I could eat. And I had two or three friends there. One of them . . . was from the Shell Oil Company. And he didn’t, he couldn’t immediately find any contact; and he was a big man, too. So I kept him alive for the first few months.” Despite such arrangements, though, food was never plentiful; “even the first few months, we were suffering from hunger,” he explained.

That wasn’t the only problem at Santo Tomas, even in the early days. “We were in this building, well, I guess about seven hundred in that building,” Frank Buckles told me during our first visit. “The ruling was, you had to be in at seven o’clock, seven o’clock out in the morning. Well, men were getting stiff, and complaining about everything . . . and they wanted some exercise. I said, ‘I’ll give you some exercise.’ So I took about forty men, lined them up, and started giving them stick drill. The Japanese commandant came along with his crew. And everybody thought I was going to get into trouble. The Japanese said: ‘Put up a notice on the bulletin board—everybody should take exercise.’” The incident earned Frank Buckles some measure of renown among the prisoners; one day, he told me, he was approached by another American, a man whose family had owned a large sugar plantation on the Philippine island of Luzon before the invasion. “Name of Walter Weinzheimer,” he recalled. “Was in there with his family, and the little daughter, nine years old, had the polio. And [they’d] had an Austrian doctor, a woman, who was taking care of her.” Austria, of course, had been annexed by Germany in 1938; as a German citizen, the doctor would not have been interned by the Japanese. But at a certain point, he explained, “she could no longer come in [to Santo Tomas]. So she asked if somebody could take care of the daughter. And the father came to me and asked if I could . . . So every morning, I gave her exercise, and I walked her around the place.” They’d stayed in touch ever since; he showed me a letter he’d just recently received from her.

Others started coming to him for help, too. But though he appreciated the responsibility that came with his position in the community, internment grated on him; so when, after a year or so at Santo Tomas, the Japanese announced that they would be moving eight hundred men to a new camp at another university in Los Baños, about fifty miles away, Frank Buckles stepped forward. “It had been part of the Philippine Agricultural College,” he explained. “I volunteered to go because I knew the mountains around there and thought that I would be able to get out. Well, I thought it was a possibility.” He was quiet for a moment. “But I didn’t make it.”

“You tried to escape?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “We have very good reasons why you don’t.”

“What are they?”

“They’d take the next twenty people around you. Execute them.” Their allies, the Nazis, were known for doing the same thing.

Life had never been comfortable at a Japanese internment camp. Food was always scarce; the soldiers, officers, and commandants always indifferent, and often cruel. As the war started turning against the Japanese, though, things got much worse for their prisoners. Rations were cut, and cut again, and again, to the point where they were almost nonexistent. Brutality surged, became the norm. Prisoners died of disease or starvation; others were taken away by soldiers and never seen again.

Frank Buckles was not spared. Though he continued to lead his daily calisthenics class, his body was breaking down. Before the war, he’d been a healthy 150 pounds; now—well, he didn’t know, exactly. “They had scales there,” he said, but after a while he stayed away. “When I got down to a hundred pounds,” he explained, “I quit weighing.” He developed beriberi, a disease of the nervous system caused by malnutrition, which would affect his sense of balance for the rest of his life; whenever we walked somewhere together—across his lawn, into a restaurant—I had to gently press one hand into the small of his back. It got to the point, he said, where “you can’t get any worse, or you die.” He added: “Lots of them did.”

News had a way of filtering into the camp, through civilians outside the walls and secret radios inside them, and when Allied forces started liberating parts of the country toward the end of 1944, prisoners’ hopes and spirits rose. “We were accustomed to seeing planes fly over, cargo planes,” Frank Buckles recalled. “And we knew Americans were there somewhere, because . . . here a Filipino would appear with a package of American cigarettes.” But the Philippines is a large place, spread out over many islands, and the Japanese were tough defenders, known for fighting to the death; the process of liberation took time. By early February, 1945, the prisoners of Los Baños were hearing rumors that the Japanese were killing prisoners wholesale before the Americans could free them. It’s difficult to imagine the sense of anxiety the prisoners must have experienced, wondering which set of rifles would get to them first; it must have been hard for many of them even to get out of bed. Except they had to, from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., every day.

“The morning of the twenty-third of February, 1945,” Mr. Buckles recalled, during our second visit, “most of us were out. You’d go out early, maybe have a folding chair or something to sit on . . . [We] saw a plane fly over, and the paratroopers started dropping out . . . Most people in there had never even heard of a paratrooper. And the guerillas had been hiding up in the trees in the background along the mountain. They came out with their wire cutters and opened up the wires, the fences. And the paratroopers”—that is, men of the 1st Battalion, 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne Division, United States Army—“started coming through. About 180, about the same number of Japanese in the camp. And fortunately for the paratroopers, it was just calisthenics time. The Japanese all do calisthenics, and not all would be out doing that, but many of them were. So paratroopers came through and killed the Japanese—except those who escaped. And plenty of them got out, too; they are not all as brave as they try to tell you.” The prisoners, he said, were elated, bordering on hysterical. “After you have been in prison camp three years, you’re a little bit stir-crazy,” Frank Buckles explained. “Some of them were trying to take all their possessions with them.”

And by them, he meant: us. “When the paratroopers started going through the barracks,” he recalled that same day, “my bunk was up high. I reached up on the wall and grabbed my rucksack, and put a mat on the floor. And I reached into the rucksack and I took out my shirt, that I’d had made, and shorts. And there was still starch on them, where my boy had starched them when I was back in Manila a couple of years before . . . I had a pair of knit socks, and I was one of the few men who had a pair of shoes. I dressed up, put on my shoes, put my rucksack on, and just as I walked out the door, the roof was on fire. Just as I walked out the door, the roof fell in.” He wanted to honor the occasion accordingly; you can’t teach that kind of dignity. Or style.

“Did you know that the roof was on fire when you were getting dressed?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, with a wry grin, “I sort of suspected it.”

Add poise to that list.

He returned home, visited his eighty-eight-year-old father in Oklahoma (his mother had died of cancer in 1936) and a lot of other people here and there who’d believed for years that he was dead, took that job in San Francisco, and married a woman he’d met there before the war. In 1953, he moved to West Virginia; the following year, he bought Gap View Farm. A year after that, at the age of fifty-four, he became a father. Gap View was always a working farm; when I first met Frank Buckles, he still drove the tractor, still hired and supervised the hands, still kept the farm’s books and paid all its bills himself. He never really retired.

But, though farming was much harder than he had imagined it would be when he bought the place, he never withdrew from the outside world, not a bit; never even limited his scope at all. He still read the newspaper, remained active in his community, traveled. And though his gaze now extended backwards, too, he never lost his fascination with the new. At one point, toward the end of our first visit, I said to him: “You have lived to see so many changes. What kind of things have you seen that you never could have imagined?”

He didn’t hesitate: “That little instrument you have there in your pocket,” he said. My cell phone. I had forgotten to turn it off, and it had rung while we were talking.

“I was calling on an elderly gentleman in the county,” he told me. “And while I was there, his grandson was in Singapore onboard of an oil tanker, the chief engineer, [and] he gets on a telephone and calls his grandfather.” He laughed. “That’s the change,” he declared.

We talked, as I said earlier, for more than four hours that day, and only stopped because I got tired. I came back a few months later, and many times after that, until he became too frail to receive visitors, a turn of events that, despite his greatly advanced age, surprised me. When I’d gone to see him in 2008, he told me he wasn’t at all surprised that he’d lived to be 107, his age then. “I had been warned by my two aunts, both of whom made it past 100,” he explained, “to be prepared—that I was going to live past 100 years old.” His father’s mother, Harriet Ripsom, the great-granddaughter of Mathias Riebsomeer, killed at Oriskany in 1777, had lived to ninety-six; born the same year that the House of Representatives elected John Quincy Adams president (thus infuriating Andrew Jackson, who’d won the popular vote), she lived long enough to hear the election of Warren G. Harding called on the radio. His father, James Clark Buckles, had lived to ninety-five; born three and a half years before the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, he had lived long enough to watch I Love Lucy on television. And he, Frank Buckles, born a few months before Theodore Roosevelt was verbally lynched for inviting a black man to visit the White House, lived long enough to vote for Barack Obama, and to see him sworn in as his country’s first African American president.

His wife, Audrey, had died in 1999, leaving her husband a widower at the age of ninety-eight. She was nineteen years his junior, and somewhat self-conscious about the age gap; while she was alive, he told me, he never really told their friends and neighbors about his experiences in the Great War, “partly [because] Audrey wouldn’t allow me to . . . she didn’t want to let anyone know that I was that old. Her father was overseas [during World War I].” So, he said, “I never talked about it.” Still, he maintained, his time in the Army “was [important] for me . . . it started my independence.” In lieu of friends and neighbors, he shared stories with his daughter, Susannah, and joined the Veterans of World War I of the USA, which had been founded in 1948, the year General Pershing died. He told me that in the 1970s, when he joined, the or-ganization had tens of thousands of members; decades later, when he was made national commander, there were but a handful. For the last five or six years of his administration, there was just one. “Someone has to do it,” he told me once, smiling. Still, he conceded, “it kind of startles you.”

About six weeks before our 2008 visit, the death of a 108-year-old Florida man named Harry Richard Landis, who had enlisted in the Army a few weeks before the armistice and never completed basic training, left Frank Buckles as the United States of America’s sole surviving veteran of World War I. I asked him if he’d ever thought, years earlier, that he might one day be the last of the last. “I had an idea that I would be among them,” he said. His status didn’t seem to please or sadden him; rather, he took the small modicum of fame it afforded him and used it to draw attention to the fact that there was no national World War I memorial in Washington, D.C. He testified before Congress, was received at the White House, rode in parades with celebrities. He continued to speak out for an appropriate memorial, was written up in newspapers and magazines for doing so. Senators and congressmen issued statements to the effect that they would make it happen. It still hadn’t when he died, three years later. It still hasn’t.

He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, the required special permission having been obtained before his death. Newspapers across the country ran obituaries; his name was always spelled correctly. The United States Senate passed a resolution in his memory: Senate Resolution 89, “Relating to the death of Frank W. Buckles, the longest surviving United States veteran of the First World War,” by name. It was sponsored by sixteen senators.

Whereas Frank Woodruff Buckles is the last known American World War I veteran, who passed away on February 27, 2011, at the age of 110, and represents his generation of veterans;

Whereas America’s support of Great Britain, France, Belgium, and its other allies in World War I marked the first time in the Nation’s history that American soldiers went abroad in defense of liberty against foreign aggression, and it marked the true beginning of the “American century”;

Whereas more than 4,000,000 men and women from the United States served in uniform during World War I, among them 2 future presidents, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower;

Whereas 2,000,000 individuals from the United States served overseas during World War I, including 200,000 naval personnel who served on the seas;

Whereas the United States suffered 375,000 casualties during World War I, including 116,516 deaths;

Whereas the events of 1914 through 1918 shaped the world, the United States, and the lives of millions of people in countless ways; and

Whereas Frank Woodruff Buckles is the last veteran to represent the extraordinary legacy of the World War I veterans: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That—

(1) the Senate recognizes the historic contributions of all United States veterans who served in the First World War; and

(2) when the Senate adjourns today, it stand adjourned as a further mark of respect to the memory of Frank W. Buckles, the longest surviving United States veteran of the First World War.

It was an honorable gesture, perhaps even an indication of how far things had come since the days, just seven or eight years earlier, when no one at the Department of Veterans Affairs seemed to know or care how many doughboys yet survived, much less who or where any of them might be. And that, I suppose, is about as much as one can hope for in a congressional resolution of that nature; certainly, it’s not the United States Senate’s job to tell us why that war mattered, why the passing of its last veteran was significant. But having spent some time with him, and with a few others who passed before he did, I feel that I should at least try.

The significance of the passing of the last veteran of that war is obvious, if perhaps a bit difficult to articulate. It creates additional degrees of separation between us and the event; reshapes it in our consciousness, breaks it down and reassembles it in a somewhat less solid state, one that is harder to grasp, and to carry. You can read yellowed old books, watch grainy old silent films, peruse monuments verdant with decades of oxidation; you can stroll upon a forest floor still dimpled with shell holes, poke around crumbling concrete bunkers, zigzag through shallowed trenches, fill a grocery bag with jagged shrapnel picked from a freshly plowed field. None of it is anything like talking to someone who was there; or just looking at him as he lies in a hospital bed before you, mute; or even, simply, knowing that he is still alive out there, somewhere.

The significance of the war itself, though: that’s much harder, not because it’s difficult to discern, but because it’s so vast that you have to wonder how you can manage to step back far enough that you’ll be able to take it all in. You can’t, really; the best you can hope for is to stumble upon a crevice, a fingerhold somewhere on its surface that might offer you a place to commence.

Frank Buckles gave me that, too. It started with what seemed, in the moment, to be a fairly stupid question, which I posed toward the end of our first four-hour interview. (In my defense, though he could have talked for another four hours at that point, I was quite tired.) “Do you think,” I asked, “that the world in some ways is a much smaller place than it was?”

Ask a hundred people that question, and a hundred of them will tell you: Of course it is. Cell phones. Satellite television. Jet airplanes. The Internet.

But Frank Buckles was not one person in a hundred. He was Frank Buckles.

“Ah,” he said, and shook his head once. “No.”

I was startled. “You think it was smaller then,” I said, not asking a question so much as reciting the words, hoping to make sense of them.

“Yes,” he said. “Smaller then. At least, it seems that way to me.”

That was in August, 2003. It took me years, and many more conversations with World War I veterans—including quite a few more with him—to begin to understand what he meant by that, and more years still to understand that that’s the greatest legacy of the Great War. It made the world a much larger place for everyone involved: French and British and German, Russian and Austrian and Czech, Italian and Serb and Turk, Senegalese and Berber and South African, Australian and New Zealander and Indochinese, Newfoundlander and Canadian and Canadien. And American: native-born and immigrant, black and white, affluent and middle-class and indigent, southern farm boys and kids from Hell’s Kitchen, gardeners and lumberjacks, Connecticut Yankees and men of the West, drivers and mechanics and bakers and laborers and secretaries and students, people in search of adventure and people in search of a job, volunteers and draftees, the eager, the willing, the reluctant, the resigned. They left the world they knew—Livingston, Montana, or Kewaunee, Wisconsin, or Aberdeen, Mississippi, or Anna, Illinois, or Salina, New York, or Philadelphia, or New Orleans, or Harrison County, Missouri—for far-off places they’d never heard of, much less imagined, and there beheld things that even the people who’d always lived in them had never seen. They set off for a world war, and came back with a world. A much larger world.

And left it to us.