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The tiny silver star that James Gray cradled in age-wrinkled hands last week spoke of the "Great War" in which his father had nearly perished. 
The missing toes on the Garden City Army veteran's feet serve as a hard reminder that although World War I helped pull Long Island into the modern age, it failed the hopes that it would prove to be the war to end all wars. 
"Unfortunately, not enough was learned from that war," said Gray, 89, whose father had served in World War I, and who himself fought in Europe a generation later during World War II. "The technology of World War II, that killed people faster and more thoroughly, still came along." 
World War I, a first-ever global war that killed as many as 10.7 million combatants and 2.4 million civilians, began 100 years ago Monday, the date Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. 
Brought on by hardened European alliances and sparked by the assassination of a largely unknown Austrian nobleman, the war eventually engulfed all of the world's great powers. 
And at home, the war helped propel Long Island fully into the 20th century as fledgling companies, drawn by the region's broad, flat terrain, began building and testing aviation equipment. These aviation companies attracted some of the area's most skilled workers to fill their design studios and assembly lines, forever changing what was Long Island's largely rural character. 
By the war's end in 1918, Glenn Curtiss, a disciple of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, was operating the largest aircraft manufacturer in the United States from a plant adjacent to what is now Roosevelt Field. Curtiss, who biked to work from his Garden City home, had 2,500 employees, making his Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Co. Long Island's largest employer. 
LI aeronautics industry 
Joshua Stoff, curator of the Cradle of Aviation Museum, said that as war raged in Europe, Long Island found itself particularly suited to developing one of the world's newest war machines -- airplanes. 
New York City provided a source of skilled immigrant workers, who settled on Long Island to work in fledgling aircraft manufacturers arrayed from Mineola to Southampton. Spurred by the promise of military contracts, the Ordinance Engineering Company, of Baldwin, designed the first fighter plane to be built on Long Island. The Continental Aircraft Company, which opened in 1915, produced a rear-propeller reconnaissance plane in Amityville. 
Related industries also sprang up, drawing more skilled workers to Long Island and planting the seeds for a defense industry that would be the backbone of Long Island's economy for the next half-century. 
Designers and engineers raced to be the first with innovations while working from shops built adjacent to the seven airfields paved onto Long Island during the war years. One shop was operated by the Sperry Gyroscope Co., which designed bomb sights and gunnery fire-control systems. The owner's son, Lawrence, spun off his own Lawrence Sperry Aircraft Co., at the edge of an airfield in Farmingdale and often flew there from his Garden City home, using Washington Avenue as a runway. 
"When the war ended and defense contracts dried up, most of the companies were not successful," said Stoff, of the Cradle of Aviation Museum, which stands on what was Mitchel Field air base, established during WWI. "But it was the beginning of an industry that continued here for more than 50 years." 
The war years also drew thousands of military recruits to training sites, including Camp Mills, next to Mitchel Field, and Camp Upton, at what is now Brookhaven National Laboratory. 
When the United States entered the war in 1917, men who trained here left for the trenches of France. 
Although other New York National Guard units trained on Long Island, including members of the "Fighting 69th," Gray's father, 1st Lt. Maxwell Gray, trained in South Carolina and arrived in France in early summer 1918. 
Horrific casualties 
His experience there reflected two of the war's most distinguishing characteristics -- the introduction of horrific new weaponry that killed on an industrial scale, and trench warfare that locked opposing armies in casualty-gobbling standoffs. 
An accounting by a historical website said in the three months Gray's 27th Infantry Division was in France it "advanced eleven kilometers" or less than seven miles. 
On Oct. 17-18, Gray commanded troops under heavy fire as they attempted to build a bridge under enemy fire near St. Souplet, France. He was awarded the Silver Star, the military's third-highest honor. 
But his service came at great cost. Injured by mustard gas, a lung was removed before he came home to America, his son said. 
A quarter century later, James Gray was also disfigured by war. 
Sent to battle in Europe during World War II, James Gray was captured in Dec. 20, 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge and lost two toes to frostbite in a German prisoner of war camp. 
The "war to end all wars" that Maxwell Gray fought in did not spare his son from combat. 
"If you think of why it started in the first place, it was weird," James Gray said. "You wonder why there was ever a World War I."

Long Island

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Garden City man injured in WW II followed father hurt in WW I

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Editor's note: Thirty years ago, Newsday published this article by a professor of history and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It ran with this subheadline: "World tensions of 70 years ago resemble today's. Technological developments had pushed two antagonistic alliances to the brink. Then a terrorist assassination on June 28, 1914, sparked World War I." 
We republish it today, 100 years after the war began. 
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Seventy years ago today, a nationalist schoolboy shot dead the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 
The murder in Sarajevo — the town where the Winter Olympics were held this year — set in motion events that led first to World War I and then to World War II. No other event has had such fateful consequences in shaping the 20th Century and in leaving problems, not least !n Eastern Europe, that still trouble the world. 
Historians and the public remain fascinated with the tragedy. Statesmen and publicists refer to the 1914 analogy, to the balkanization of this region or that, and to the dangers of military plans dominating civilian decision-making. And indeed the crisis of July, 1914, that followed the assassination contains some lessons of history that deserve notice on this anniversary. 
In Europe in the summer of 1914 — as in 1984's&nbsp;— two armed camps faced one another. The Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) had developed out of the attempts of Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, to protect his recently unified nation. In the early 20th Century, the Anglo-German naval race convinced Britain to align itself with France and Russia in the Triple Entente. 
The naval race had other consequences as well: It led Britain to consider military intervention on the Continent and it forced London to tolerate Russian behavior in Iran and Afghanistan that has a familiar ring even today. The flurry of press comment over dreadnought construction, like current press attention to the MX missiles, exacerbated relations. Arms control negotiations were attempted but never succeeded. Neither side would yield for fear of appearing to concede something that might be useful if war came. Nor did meetings between heads of state, which, unlike today's, were frequent and without undue fanfare, overcome the hostility that the alliance structures had engendered in Europe&nbsp;— any more than today's summit conferences do. 
Earlier clashes between Britain, France and Germany over their overseas empires had soured relations. But though no one would go to war over Fashoda {in the Sudan). Serbia, Poland, Rumania, even Albania, were different matters. The problems of Eastern Europe ensured competition between the three empires; the prospect of the collapse of the Turkish Ottoman Empire&nbsp;— the “Sick Man of Europe" — simply added to the tensions between the three conservative regimes. The perennial Irish question was at a new height in Britain, while France found itself adjusting to still another new government and a spectacular murder trial. 
The Sarajevo assassination convinced the Austro-Hungarian leadership that only a military defeat of Serbia, a small nation now part of Yugoslavia and the correctly presumed instigator of the murders, would end Serbia's threat to the multinational monarchy. Earlier attempts to curb Serbian agitation by negotiations, concessions and economic sanctions had apparently failed. War was the last resort, but a resort. Vienna drafted a deliberately unacceptable ultimatum and dispatched it to Belgrade. The Serbian answer was summarily rejected and Austro-Hungarian forces opened fire on Serbian territory on July 28, 1914. 
The alliance structures converted the local fray into a European war, and the military plans that the general staffs had made accelerated the pace of the crisis. Russia, Austria-Hungary's giant neighbor and rival for power in the Balkans, resolved immediately to defend its Slav protegee, Serbia. It began to commission cadets and recall some reservists. 
Everywhere the pressures were for action, for not allowing the other side to gain any presumed advantage. Standing armies, reinforced by the prompt appearance of reservists, stood ready to launch their carefully prepared offensives. Russia's moves alarmed the Germans. The mercurial Kaiser Wilhelm II and his advisers decided that they had to declare war on Russia and on its ally, France, and to put into motion the plan for an immediate defeat of France by an attack through Belgium while resisting an expected Russian offensive. But the violation of Belgian neutrality brought Britain into the conflict. By Aug. 4, the local war had expanded into a European war. (Italy remained aloof — for a while.) 
In these decisions the railways and their chiefs dominated, since all of the war plans involved complicated railroad movements. In 1914, decisions came in days and hours; in 1984, strategic missiles might bring such decisions in minutes. 
But in the final analysis it was men, not alliances or railway lines, who decided for war. Kaiser, emperor, czar, king, premiers, foreign ministers, generals: they were sincere, well-meaning men, educated by experience and politics. But they were also men of an earlier, aristocratic, agarian age thrust into a newer world of technology, of great power alliances, and confronted with the problem of nationalisms fueled by terrorist acts. 
In 1914, this political leadership was not seeking war so much as it was willing to consider war an acceptable policy option. In 1984, there are again similarities, from the less-than-confident and aging leaders of the East bloc to the uninspiring leadership of the West. Good intentions and platitudes do not necessarily preserve the peace. 
Yet the public at large in 1914 found the prospect of war appealing. The clashes of imperialism, the growth of standing armies and conscription, the formation of paramilitary units (including the Boy Scouts), Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest, and the glorification of nationalism had created in Europe a mood that made battles an acceptable risk. 
The Spanish-American War had, after all, been a "splendid little war" and the Russo-Japanese and Balkan Wars rather quick episodes that appeared to solve something. Economists argued that the economic structures could only support a short war and the generals promised the next conflict would indeed be short. 
In the summer of 1914 there were two dangerous illusions: the belief that war might offer a more acceptable solution than peace to the problems of diplomacy and the belief that the war would be short. Those illusions have not yet disappeared. Members of the Reagan administration refer to winnable nuclear wars; interventions such as that of Grenada are seen as surgical. 
Another illusion has changed from white to black. When H. G. Wells entitled his 1914 book "The War That Will End War," he perhaps expressed a universal hope. Seventy years later, men acknowledge that the next war may indeed end war — but by ending everything. 
From 1914 to 1984: What has changed and what remains disturbingly the same? Eastern Europe remains pivotal to world peace. The Russians then as now seek to control Eastern Europe and are willing to push the diplomatic process to the limit. Austria-Hungary has disappeared, leaving only the idea of a multinational state that might have had more advantages than the nationalist leaders of 1914 acknowledged. 
Militarism, huge standing armies confronting each other, arms races, the inexorable demands of military technology, and the national security state writ large, with each government fearful of the game of "international chicken" — in those senses 1984 and 1914 have a strong kinship, and certainly not for the better. Outside Europe there are no longer large empires, but the legacies of the empires shape the political debate, not least in the field of international economics. Terrorism remains a threat, indeed has become, in some intelligence services, a profession. 
The situation is the most different for the United States. The Atlantic moat no longer exists. The communications revolution that brought Sarajevo into our living rooms during the Winter Olympics can also bring Americans to war. Seventy years after the murder in Sarajevo that city is not distant, nor would a war in Europe be distant for the United States. 
Franz Ferdinand's assassination challenged the wisdom of the European statesmen. But their prudence gave way to an attempt to cut through or past vexing problems of statecraft; desperation replaced adequate calculation. For peace to endure, relentless and imaginative statecraft, coupled with a clear realization of the risks of war, must prevail. For a moment in the summer of l914 this imagination failed, and so did peace. 
The world, the power structure that had existed since Napoleon's defeat 100 years before, collapsed. After Germany had been twice defeated in its efforts to dominate Europe and the Russian colossus arose in new garb, power coalesced in new alignments. These are as precarious and delicately balanced as those of 1914 — and therein may lie some lessons for 1984. 
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The original article:

Opinion

NW-World War I in Newsday in 1984

From the Newsday archives: The War That Failed to End All Wars

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Editor's note: On June 27, 1964, Newsday published this article that went "Behind the Headlines," examining the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand 50 years after it occurred. 
We republish it today, another half-century later&nbsp;— and 100 years after World War I began. 
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On a sultry Sunday morning half a century ago, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir-apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, set out in a lumbering motorcade through the main street of a provincial capital — a main street which became a short-cut to the First World War. 
The date was June 28, 1914, the city was Sarajevo, and the route the Archduke took led to his assassination and plunged the world into a holocaust in which 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 men were to lose their lives. 
Political murder was nothing new to the turbulent Austrian province of Bosnia where the Slav minorities were struggling against the domination of Vienna. Five Austrian officials had been assassinated during the preceding four years. And members of a Serbian terrorist society known by the flamboyant name of “The Black Hand,” decided that the Archduke — whom they considered the sworn enemy of the Pan Slav movement — was to be its next victim. They recruited a ring of seven Slav nationalists to do the job. 
The Serbian government, one of Austria’s rivals in the Balkans, got wind of the scheme. Responsible Serb leaders feared the consequences of such a murder and to prevent it, they hinted at the plot to the Austrians. Austria didn’t take the hint. One Serbian diplomat who had tried to warn the Austrians of the plot was told by an Imperial official: “We are in possession of information that Bosnia is completely quiet.” 
Franz Ferdinand’s instincts were more accurate than the Austrian intelligence. Before leaving for Sarajevo to supervise military maneuvers as Inspector General of the Austrian Army, the Archduke had a foreboding of disaster. As he was preparing to leave Vienna, the electricity failed in his railroad car and candles had to be lit. The Archduke joked that the place looked like a tomb and then confided to an aide, “another premonitory sign.” 
Franz Ferdinand was the embodiment of an archduke. He cut an imposing figure with his beribboned military uniforms and waxed mustache. But along with his bearing went an explosive character and tenacious will which made him unpopular at court. 
He had made an enemy of the pro-German party in Vienna because he feared war with Russia and wanted to remain on good terms with Serbia. The Archduke’s marriage to Sophie Chotek, who had once been a lady-in-waiting at court, antagonized Austrian royalty. 
It was with Sophie at his side in an open car that Franz Ferdinand entered Sarajevo on St. Vitus Day, a Serbian patriotic holiday, when national feeling among the empire’s Slave [sic] minorities was at its highest. The state visit was part of a show of strength which Austria was making in her rebellious Slav provinces. 
The four-car entourage rolled along the flag-decked Appel Quay towards the Town Hall where the Archduke was to be received. The quay was bordered on one side by houses and on the other by a river which was all but dry in the summertime. As the royal couple rolled pass the cheering, gaily dressed holiday crowds, they were unaware that in front of them stretched an avenue of assassins. 
As the procession reached a bridge, the first terrorist struck. A bomb hurtled towards the Archduke's automobile, landed on the fold-back hood of the car, and rolled off lo explode under the back wheels of the vehicle behind, wounding an official. The youth who had hurled the bomb tried to flee by leaping into the shallow river, but was seized by police and dragged off. 
The Austrians were unnerved but they weren’t the only ones. The other assassins were so jarred by the explosion that they either lost their nerve, or fled assuming that the bomb had done its job. With two exceptions, the assassins were all under 20 — and they were amateurs. 
Although shaken, the officials decided to continue with the motorcade. At the Town Hall, the Mayor, not knowing what else to do, mechanically began his speech without alluding to the incident. The Archduke lost his patience. "Mr. Mayor, I came here on a visit and I get bombs thrown at me. It is outrageous. Now you may speak," he said. The chagrined mayor continued as if by rote, "Our hearts are full of happiness." 
After the ceremonies it was decided to cancel the program and leave town by a different route. But what actually happened was that most of the return journey was made over the exact route which had been advertised in the newspapers. As the motorcade neared the Latin Bridge driving at full speed, the leader of the assassins — 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, a frail, dark, sharp-featured student who had been brooding over his lost chance earlier — was waiting for it. 
Princip was worried that he would never be able to hit his mark with the motorcade traveling at full speed, when a blunder occurred which gave him his opportunity. The lead chauffeur — who had not been told of the modified route — turned into a narrow side street designated on the old itinerary. The Archduke’s car followed suit. "Not that way you fool,” an official shouted. The driver swerved to a halt and was backing up slowly when Princip fired two shots from about four to five paces away. The first pierced Franz Ferdinand's jugular vein. 
A thin stream of blood flowed from the Archduke's mouth. "For God's sake, what's happened to you?" Sophie cried. Then she sank down on her husband's lap. The second bullet had entered her abdomen. The Archduke, still conscious implored her, "Sophie! Sophie! Don't die! Live for my children!" But she was nearly dead already. An aide asked the Archduke if he was in pain. Franz Ferdinand repeated several times, "it is nothing," and died. 
Princip — buffeted by a lynch mob — was about to turn the murder weapon on himself when police seized him and wrested the bleeding youth away from the crowd. All the conspirators were arrested except one who escaped to Serbia. Because of their youth, they were not executed but given long jail sentences. Only one, who was over 21 years old, was hanged. 
Despite reports that Franz Ferdinand’s death came as a relief in the highest official circles in Vienna, and the fact that the Austrian government had made no attempt to prevent the assassination, Austria nonetheless set about to exploit the murder. The Austrians implicated Serbia in the plot and threw an ultimatum at the Serbs which 33 days later opened the abyss of World War I. 
It once flattered Franz Ferdinand's military ambitions when a gypsy foretold that he "would one day let loose a world war.” The Archduke never learned how accurate her tragic prediction was. 
---------- 
The original article:

NW-World War I in Newsday in 1964

From the Newsday archives: Anatomy of the Archduke's Assassination

Franz Ferdinand PG 3 jcm -- cropped

ALBANY -- New York has named part of a highway in Nassau County for a two-time Medal of Honor winner who rallied his fellow Marines in World War I with the battle cry, "Come on! Do you want to live forever?" and a bridge in Suffolk for a sergeant who died leading his troops in Afghanistan.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the bill Thursday that honors Marine Sgt. Maj. Daniel Joseph Daly of Glen Cove and Army Sgt. Michael J. Esposito Jr. of Brentwood, along with other soldiers statewide.
The Sgt. Michael J. Esposito Jr. Memorial Bridge is on the portion of Washington Avenue that crosses the Long Island Expressway in the Town of Islip.
The Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph Daly Memorial Highway is the portion of state Route 107 from the southern Glen Cove city line to Pulaski Street.
In 2004 in Afghanistan, Esposito led his Army team to clear a building. He spotted a door and went to it ahead of his squad. There, he was mortally wounded by rifle fire, but his squad survived to secure the building.
Daly received his first Medal of Honor in 1900 for inflicting 200 casualties during the Boxer Rebellion in China as he defended his position alone. The second top medal came in 1915 for leading a group of Marines to a fort after they were overwhelmed by an ambush of rebels in Haiti. Daly uttered his quote, famous in the Marines, on a French battlefield in World War I. 
"Sergeant Major Daniel 'Dan' Joseph Daly was once acclaimed by the former Commandant of the Marine Corps, as 'The outstanding Marine of all time,'" said Sen. Carl Marcellino (R-Syosset). "Fearless, tough, and well respected he exemplifies what it means to be a Marine."
"History reflects that Sgt. Major Daly was recognized not once but twice for separate acts of heroism; a significant achievement by any standards," said Assemb. Charles Lavine (D-Glen Cove).
The state will install signs in the coming months noting the new memorials.

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State bill names LI highways for hero veterans

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The Town of Babylon has commissioned a statue of a doughboy -- a term used to describe soldiers and Marines from World War I -- to be placed in a veterans' memorial in Copiague. 
The granite statue, which is being created by Wellwood Memorials Inc. in Lindenhurst, will be placed at the corner of Great Neck Road and Marconi Boulevard. There is currently an American flag and small veterans memorial at the site. 
"The way we live now, there's a war going on in another part of the world and we just go on business as usual," said town Councilwoman Jackie Gordon, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who heads the town's Veteran's Advisory Council. "The hope is to bring awareness of the veterans and the sacrifices they and their families make." 
This summer marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. The origins of the term doughboy are unclear. One legend dates to the Mexican-American War, when soldiers were often seen covered with chalky dust emanating from the dry terrain of northern Mexico. It is said the men looked like unbaked dough, thus the nickname. 
The town originally sought to buy a doughboy statue that was outside a town business but the owner was asking for too much money, Gordon said. Assemb. Robert Sweeney (D-Lindenhurst) secured $25,000 in state funding, Gordon said, and the town commissioned its own statue, which will cost $18,750. Gordon said they will use the remainder of the funds for plantings and fencing around the memorial. 
Gordon said the statue should be completed in the fall.

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Statue of World War I doughboy to come to Babylon

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Essential World War I movies, books and plays: 
Wings The first Oscar winner for best picture, this 1927 silent film features spectacular aerial sequences. 
A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, about the love affair between an American ambulance driver and an English nurse, has been filmed twice, in 1932 (Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes) and 1957 (Rock Hudson, Jennifer Jones). 
All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque's shattering 1929 novel, about a German soldier's experiences during World War I, was brilliantly filmed in 1930, with Lew Ayres in the lead, and super-realistic battle scenes. Oscar winner for director and picture. 
Grand Illusion This 1937 masterpiece is about class relationships between French officers held in a German prison. 
Paths of Glory Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film, based on a Humphrey Cobb novel, is the story of three French soldiers unjustly executed for cowardice. Kirk Douglas gives one of his finest performances. 
Many Wars Ago A 1970 film detailing the stupidity, arrogance and sadism of Italian officers in their campaign against the Austrian Army. Very grim. 
Gallipoli Mel Gibson stars in this 1981 film, about the disastrous campaign fought by Australian troops against the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. 
A Very Long Engagement Based on the 1991 Sébastien Japrisot novel, this 2005 French film stars Audrey Tatou as a woman searching for her fiancé, who might have been killed in the battle of the Somme. 
Joyeux Noel The Oscar-nominated 2005 French film is about the 1914 Christmas truce, when the opposing sides laid down their arms to celebrate the holiday. 
Journey's End R.C. Sherriff's 1928 drama, set entirely in a 1918 British Army dugout, was filmed in 1930 by "Frankenstein" director James Whale, and given a top-notch, Tony Award-winning Broadway revival in 2007. 
War Horse The 2011 Tony Award-winning play about a U.K. farm horse sold to the British cavalry was notable for its innovative staging and later made into a feature film directed by Steven Spielberg.

Entertainment

Movies

ETWARSIDE29.WEB

World War I: What to see and read

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My older brother and I share an obsession with time. 
Every now and then, we email each other some interesting nugget about our relative position to it, such as: the end of World War II at our births, timewise, was what 9/11 will be to people born in the next few years (he was born in 1961; I in '63). Or, Spanish-American War veterans, when we were little, were a decade younger than most surviving World War II veterans are today. 
Wars and assassinations are easy benchmarks by which to measure time. The President Kennedy assassination, for example, happened three months after I was born, making the 1912 assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt a more recent event at my birth than Kennedy's killing is to newborns today. I don't know why we find these exercises so interesting, but we do. 
Saturday marks the tidy centennial both of an assassination and of the launch of one of mankind's most terrible conflicts. It was on June 28, 1914 that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was famously gunned down in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist, leading to a chain of events the world was supposed to never forget. 
World War I is still remembered, of course, but it doesn't seem to be felt anymore. When I was little, fathers were World War II veterans and grandfathers had served in the "Great One." Mentions of Verdun or the Somme were met with long stares and awkward pauses. Speak of World War I today, and you're likely to hear rote talking points about entangled alliances and mechanized warfare -- in a tone not too different from what you'd hear if you asked about the Boxer Rebellion or the Peloponnesian War. 
I've been fiddling at my desk this week with a worn Brass No. 5 cigarette lighter that I bought at an auction about 30 years ago. It belonged to a World War I doughboy who carried it throughout the war, or so the seller swore. It's badly discolored now, but the monogram is clear: JSF. Was that Joseph S. Fredrickson? James S. Franco? Jeffrey S. Freedlander? Was it a gift from his wife on the eve of his departure? Did it light French Gauloises cigarettes in those awful, rat-filled trenches? Was it on the battles of Saint Mihiel or Belleau Wood? 
There's no way to know. But I do know it was carried by someone who once reflexively reached for it in his pocket, when, for him, then was now. 
The History Channel has a terrific print advertising campaign running. It's called "Know where you are." It transposes modern photos over historical ones to, well, remind us where we are. A particularly striking example depicts a modern couple lazily reading newspapers on a wall overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Transposed into the shot is a photo taken by German photographer Heinrich Hoffman in June 1940 of Adolf Hitler posed in the very same spot. Know where you are, indeed. 
I took my daughter to Mass a month ago to The Church of St. Thomas More on East 89th Street in Manhattan. It was my church as a boy and I hadn't attended Mass there since 1972, when my family moved out of the city. We sat in our old family pew, and I found myself gazing up at the very same hanging lamp I constantly looked up at as a boy. The lamp and the smell of the church triggered a like-yesterday memory of Msgr. James Wilders, a long-serving pastor at the church who died 16 years ago, announcing the departure of one of his priests to a place called South Vietnam. That must have been 1967 or '68. I told my daughter about the lamp and she asked, "What did it look like then, Daddy?" 
"It looked like that," I said, pointing back at the fixture. "It looked exactly like that." 
I wonder how the lighter felt in his hand. 
William F. B. O'Reilly is a Republican consultant who is working on the Rob Astorino campaign for governor.

Columnists

William F. B. O'Reilly

OPORE28

O'Reilly: The unceasing march of time

Decades ago, an unknown hand painted dozens of mysterious symbols on the basement walls of a stately home near the Brightwaters canal. 
A rooster crowing in front of a sun as a snake dances. A bucking donkey kicking at the ground. A mythical griffin -- half lion, half eagle -- poised with one paw atop a capital letter L. A floating top hat with stars and stripes. An Uncle Sam in spats, with a bomb tucked under one arm. 
When Randy Meyn discovered the 30 or so basement paintings during a renovation, he thought they were the remnants of a cult that held meetings inside the late 19th century home he bought in 1998. 
"We thought it was Nazi sympathizers. There was also a black and red stripe that ran all around the basement," he said, recalling the spooky atmosphere. 
When Meyn's friend, Islip Town Councilman John Cochrane, visited the home last summer, he knew immediately what he was looking at. 
"Anytime you have a Navy or Army bar, they mark it with insignias," said Cochrane, a reserve Navy captain. 
Brightwaters must have once had a military bar or possibly a speakeasy in this home, Cochrane said, and the strange paintings are aircraft decorations from different squadrons and battalions of the military drinkers. He wants to have military and local aviation museums examine the paintings for possible preservation. 
"You preserve these, absolutely. There should be a plaque under each of these," Cochrane said. 
Wood panels had covered the paintings until Meyn renovated the house and discovered them painted on the original bricks. He also removed the remnants of a 6-foot-long wooden bar. 
The home sits on the Brightwaters canal, a known route for bootleggers bringing rum from the Great South Bay during Prohibition, said Islip Town historian Jack Whitehouse. Prohibition took effect in January 1920. 
Though there is scant evidence of speakeasies around Islip, there was a naval air station in Bay Shore in the early 20th century. 
"It was a big base, and certainly the townspeople got heavily involved with the base," Whitehouse said. "It was open from April 1917 to 1919. It went from a naval auxiliary base to the second-largest naval air station after Pensacola [Florida]. They ended up training well over 1,000 men as preliminary air pilots. They had a course around the Great South Bay." 
Military historians said the insignias match those used by Army Air Corps squadrons during that era. Some of the identified symbols were used by "the 11th Bomb Squadron, 20th Bomb Squadron, 94th Fighter Squadron, and 95th Bomb Squadron," said historian Margaret Ream of the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. "These units and their emblems all trace back to World War I." 
She said the kicking donkey was the insignia of the 95th Bomb Squadron, and the stars-and-stripes hat was the insignia the 94th Fighter Squadron -- home of famous fighter pilot Eddie Rickenbacker. 
"Insignia were very popular with squadrons," said Hill Goodspeed, a historian at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. "They were like a coat of arms." 
Goodspeed said if the paintings were legitimately painted by World War I-era personnel, "it would be a pretty amazing find." Goodspeed and Ream, given email photos of the paintings, could not immediately identify all of the insignias, but Ream noted that obscure or previously undocumented insignias are possible. 
Who painted the insignias remains unknown. According to property records, George Furman and John Weber sold the home in 1924 to James Osterhout, who then sold it in 1925 to Lionel and Edna Hermann. The Hermanns sold the house in 1945 to Otto H. Bauer and Elias Simon, who in turn sold it to Katherine Flynn. 
Flynn's grandson Tim Flynn said the insignias provided a colorful atmosphere for playtime when he was a child. 
"We used to play like there was a secret society, like spies, because they had a military feel to them, but we never knew what the heck they were," he said. 
The fact the insignia have lasted this long is in part thanks to the contractor that Meyn hired a decade ago to renovate his basement. Intrigued by the symbols, Robert Neill of Brightwaters decided to paint carefully around the insignias. 
"Based on the type of paint that was worked with, heavy enamel oil-based paint, I knew they were old. I knew they were done a long time ago," Neill said. 
"The quality and the caliber of the paintings, they were clearly done by a talented guy in the crew, the guy who knew to make that insignia," he said. "There was enough of them that it would be a shame to cover it up." 
Do you recognize any of the insignia in these photos? If you have any information, please contact Sophia Chang at <a href="mailto:sophia.chang@newsday.com">sophia.chang@newsday.com</a> and help us learn more about the origins of the paintings.

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Mysterious symbols uncovered in Brightwaters home's basement

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It was called The Great War, and The War to End All Wars. World War I, which began 100 years ago, in July 1914, was many things -- an orgy of mass slaughter, the first mechanized war, the first truly global conflict. It was also fodder for writers, authors, playwrights and artists, who filtered their war experiences through their creative sensibilities. And it was reflected in that new medium, the motion picture. 
When it came to depicting the war, film was "immensely important," says Robert Eberwein, author of "The Hollywood War Film." "Film gives a sense of reality. If I'm seeing it, it happened. It was the immediacy of the war experience which photography could convey." 
Yet not just in film, but in all the other arts, there were key differences in how the war was portrayed. Europeans saw the war from a more intimate perspective, having endured three years of bloodshed before America even entered the conflict in 1917. Americans, as seen in jaunty marching songs like "Over There" ("Over there . . . send the word . . . that the Yanks are coming"), and star-studded war bond rallies featuring the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, saw entering the fighting as something of a lark. 
"The American version is different from the European version, because the war was fought over there," says Paula Uruburu, a professor of film and literature at Hofstra University. "This machine goes into effect in America that is romanticizing the idea of going to war." 
"The American view, starting with 'The Big Parade,' was about great marching groups of men going off to fight, this virile manhood kind of thing," says Doran Cart, senior curator at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. "The Europeans," he adds, "represented a more personal viewpoint, not necessarily a sweeping scale. British films, for example, show the comradeship, in it for the common man, fighting for the king and our buddies." 
There was also a contrast in how artists portrayed the war on the ground and the conflict in the air. The ground combat, with its trench warfare, mustard gas and staggering number of casualties (an estimated 10 million military deaths), was always shown as realistically as possible, in works like "Paths of Glory" and "All Quiet on the Western Front." Yet the war in the air has been romanticized, in everything from film ("Wings," the first Oscar winner) to Snoopy and his Red Baron fixation. 
"These were going up in these little boxes that had only been invented a decade before," says Uruburu. "There was something extraordinarily heroic about their actions, and that's why they were romanticized." 
"It's an aestheticizing of war," adds Eberwein. "Air films had cameras in the planes and there is a certain visual appeal to aerial shots. The fact is you're being shot at, but it isn't the same as hand-to-hand combat." 
And there was this: The war was so horrific, so much worse than anything that had gone before, that it altered the way humanity saw itself. Cynicism became rampant, and a sense of "let's live for today" permeated society. You can see it in America's "Lost Generation," a term used to describe the young people who came of age during the war, and mentioned by Ernest Hemingway in his novel "The Sun Also Rises." It's evident in the hedonism and debauchery of postwar Germany, captured in the show and film "Cabaret." And it's evident in artistic movements like dada and surrealism, which dealt with the absurdity of existence, and the unreality of reality. 
"The war came, and caused people to lose faith in humanity and civilization," says David Beer, who has taught World War I film and poetry at the University of Texas. "It subconsciously crushed the psyche of society for a while. There's an awareness that the war pretty much changed the whole world." 
Contrast World War I with World War II -- a conflict invariably portrayed as just and necessary, in order to save the world from fascism. Then compare WWI with Vietnam, another conflict seen as futile and unnecessary, with massive loss of life, societal upheaval and a generation of soldiers returning home disillusioned and mostly unappreciated. Films like "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now" reflect the same sense of despair and loss as classic World War I films like "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Gallipoli." 
"Especially people who experienced the war firsthand, like Hemingway, who was a volunteer with the Italian Red Cross, it was hard not to be changed by that," says Cart. "People were disillusioned, and it is reflected in the culture. They saw things that changed them, and it's reflected in their art."

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World War I let artists show how it changed our lives

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One hundred years ago this summer, Europe braced itself for war. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, set off a cascade of events as France, Great Britain, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary mobilized troops. By August -- in a summer still remembered for its lovely weather -- battles erupted across the continent. The German army invaded Belgium, then France, and brawled with Russia. Sides dug in; the trenches that scarred the landscape became one of the ghastly icons of the 20th century. 
Some 8.5 million soldiers died fighting the First World War; millions more were wounded. Empires were swept way; new nations were born. The historical consequences were profound. As Tim Butcher observes in "The Trigger," his fascinating look at Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who gunned down Franz Ferdinand, "The Great War's power lies with the suspicion that its impact has yet to be fully understood." 
Though the war has become synonymous with the Western Front, the conflict actually began in the east, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia for its alleged links to Princip. In "A Mad Catastrophe," military historian Geoffrey Wawro examines a less familiar dimension of the conflict. Wawro's book would be funny -- the author writes with a scathing wit about this ramshackle empire of Slavs, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks and Magyars governed by the German-speaking Hapsburgs -- if the events he describes weren't so appalling. The Austro-Hungarian Army was poorly equipped and badly led, and its clashes with Russian and Serb forces in 1914 and 1915 were calamitous. 
Things were no less grim on the Western Front. French and British armies threw themselves against resolute German troops in a series of offensives that gained little ground -- the most notorious being the Somme, where the British suffered more than 50,000 dead and wounded on July 1, 1916. Yet the Allies persevered and were able to defeat Germany. 
How this happened is the subject of William Philpott's masterful, if dry, account, "War of Attrition." Philpott, a noted Western Front scholar, is ruthlessly unsentimental about all the blood that was spilled. Millions of men had to die to break an implacable foe, Philpott argues. "By the middle of 1915," he writes, "both sides accepted that the only way to conduct and win such a war was by mobilizing all society's resources and grinding down the enemy's capacity and will to fight a sustained war of attrition." Philpott shows how the British and French prevailed through superior management of men and munitions (American money was key). 
For the front-line soldier, the First World War was harrowing. The war inspired a torrent of words, and the English war poets have earned a place in the literary canon for their brave, agonized eloquence about trench life. Max Egremont's "Some Desperate Glory" offers a series of biographical portraits of famed figures Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as the lesser known Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney. Rosenberg wrote some of the finest poetry, collected here: "My eyes catch ruddy necks/Sturdily pressed back, -- /All a red brick moving glint./Like flaming pendulums, hands/Swing across the khaki -- /Mustard-coloured khaki -- /To the automatic feet." Egremont doesn't offer startling observations or profound criticism, but he is correct to note that the poetry "reflects individual experience rather than objective judgment." 
Owen and Sassoon's work has been read as a protest against war, but this is too simplistic -- each was a decorated warrior who fought with distinction. They have become part of the war's murky mythology. In "The Long Shadow," Cambridge University historian David Reynolds examines the shifting perceptions of the conflict. He takes aim at the notion, in Britain, that the war was a futile waste. Reynolds' goal is "to offer a much-needed corrective to the narrowly Anglocentric conceptions of what the hell it was all about." If you want to fully understand the impact of the Great War, this admirable book is a fine place to start. 
THE TRIGGER: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War, by Tim Butcher. Grove Press, 326 pp., $26. 
A MAD CATASTROPHE: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire, by Geoffrey Wawro. Basic Books, 440 pp., $29.99. 
WAR OF ATTRITION: Fighting the First World War, by William Philpott. The Overlook Press, 400 pp., $32.50. 
SOME DESPERATE GLORY: The First World War the Poets Knew, by Max Egremont. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 337 pp., $28. 
THE LONG SHADOW: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, by David Reynolds. W.W. Norton &amp; Co., 514 pp., $32.50.

Books

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WWI: Books for the anniversary of the Great War

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THE HARLEM HELLFIGHTERS, by Max Brooks, illustrated by Caanan White. Broadway Books, 257 pp., $16.95. 
There is a tale told, perhaps most often by Mel Brooks himself, that the comedy legend entertained the troops during World War II. Oh, not our troops. The Nazis. The man who later wrote that funny would-be flop "Springtime for Hitler" serenaded distant German troops between defusing land mines in Europe. The Nazis may have trumpeted propaganda through loudspeakers, but Brooks countered by blaring, "Toot, Toot, Tootsie! Goodbye." Even in the hell of war, young Melvin (nee Kaminsky) Brooks -- that farce of nature -- knew how to mine the moment for entertainment. 
Fortunately for us, the great writer-performer's gift for spinning wartime narrative is genetic. Son Max Brooks is proving a master of the form. Brooks the Younger broke into comics with his best-selling "Zombie Survival Guide," helping to usher in the current wave of fascination with the flesh-eating undead. And he rode the crest of that trend when his "World War Z" became a Brad Pitt blockbuster. Now Brooks' new graphic novel, "The Harlem Hellfighters," shines a literary klieg light on a woefully overlooked chapter of World War I. 
The 369th Infantry Regiment was an all-minority (African-American and African-Puerto Rican) unit that proved crucial in the trench warfare of 1918. The 369th -- dubbed the Harlem Hellfighters by its foes -- was in combat longer than any other U.S. unit. Yet, while backing President Woodrow Wilson's battle cry of making the world "safe for democracy," the 369th fought racism every step of the way -- not only in the European theater, but also while training in the American South. 
Brooks tells their riveting tale by creating some fictional members of the unit and depicting actual heroes, including Lt. James Reese Europe, the bandleader who helped introduce Europe to jazz. The winning effect is that no matter how far specific characters venture into narrative invention, the novel marches in time with the history books. 
What gives "Hellfighters" its most poignant traction is not how foreign mortar fire wounds the flesh, but rather how the homefront racism does. Soldiers are beaten by countrymen in South Carolina, against the larger backdrop of lynchings. And once overseas, the 369th is restricted from fighting alongside white American soldiers. The great irony is that while Gen. John J. Pershing seeks to deny the 369th any battlefield glory, a Hellfighter becomes the first American awarded France's Croix de Guerre. 
Bolstering Brooks' storytelling muscle is the high-contrast black-and-white art of gifted Caanan White, whose graphic grit evokes Joe Kubert and "Sgt. Rock." The illustrator zooms in on the brawn, sweat and tears of trench warfare. His sinewy tension and egalitarian bleeding remind that flesh, no matter the tint, is all too mortal. White's grid work is forever shifting, as his overlapping panels shuffle like snapshots fallen from a scrapbook, and his full "splash" pages are so visually engaging that the greedy reader wishes he'd provided yet more of them. 
"The Harlem Hellfighters" is a powerful comic that may do more than any previous work to illuminate the heroism of the 369th. And now that Sony and Will Smith have optioned the film rights, perhaps an entire nation will come to salute its sacrifice.

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Max Brooks' 'The Harlem Hellfighters': War on two fronts

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World War I, 100 years later

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