War’s Shadows

We arrived in the United States in the summer of 1951, thus some months before the last veteran of the American Civil War died on December 31 of that year. He was Albert H. Woolson aged 106. That war ended in 1865. Some long shadow. An image of Woolson is on Wikipedia; he looked exactly like the men whose images are now being shown as veteran survivors of Pearl Harbor. This suggests that not until 2033 will our energetic media fail to find a person who had been there when the time to recall the “Day of Infamy” returns yet again. What is said at such occasions tells me something of our current culture. Maybe in 2033 we’ll mark the day with silence.

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I stand corrected. Albert H. Woolson died August 2, 1956. I have friends with keen ears and eyes in the Civil War field. My eye may have slipped as I looked at that list...