world war 1914-1918

Gail Lumet Buckley is the daughter of Lena Horne. Starting with her great-great-grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who became a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, she follows two branches of the family: one that stayed in the South and the other that settled in Brooklyn. From Atlanta during the Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, to world wars and the civil rights movement, her family participated in the most crucial turning points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

At the start of World War I, Arthur Beecroft was a recently qualified British barrister (lawyer) in his twenties. He volunteered for military service and was offered a commission in the Royal Engineers. In 1915 he saw action at Gallipoli. He was lucky to survive and wrote a detailed memoir of his experiences. Discovered by his grandaughter, it has now been published, a century after the events, and perhaps more meaningful today in its discussion of comradeship, devotion to duty, fear, and facing death.

Harry Patch was the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War. His memoir chronicles his Edwardian childhood, fighting in the mud during the Battle of Passchendaele, working on the home front during World War II and his fame in life as his legacy grew. He died in 2009 at 111 years of age.