Great War

Along with millions of idealistic young men who were cut to pieces by machine guns and obliterated by artillery shells, there was another major casualty of World War I: traditional ideas about Western art. The Great War of 1914-18 tilted culture on its axis, particularly in Europe and the United States. Nearly 100 years later, that legacy is being wrestled with in film, visual art, music, television shows like the gauzily nostalgic PBS soaper "Downton Abbey" and plays including the Tony Award-winning"War Horse," concluding its run at the Ahmanson Theatre.

WASHINGTON - The fight for a national World War I memorial in the nation's capital will continue in the new year. Legislation sent by Congress to President Obama calls for creating a commission to plan for activities to commemorate the centennial of the Great War. A bill approved earlier by the House called for a national memorial in Washington but the provision was stripped out by the Senate. The final measure was approved by the House on Monday.    David DeJonge, president and co-founder of the  WWI Memorial Foundation, said he hopes that a national memorial in Washington will be considered in the next Congress.

For social historian and critic Paul Fussell, the most enduring moments of truth came as a 20-year-old platoon leader in France during World War II. German shrapnel tore up his back and thigh. The blood and guts of fellow soldiers were spewed on him. His staff sergeant died in his arms. He realized there was nothing romantic about war, only mud, cold, death, outrage and fear. "The war," Fussell told the Washington Post decades later, "is behind everything I do," beginning with his book "The Great War and Modern Memory," a classic 1975 critique of art and literature after World War I that showed how that conflict forever changed Western society and culture.

All supernatural thrillers spring from the idea that there are things about the human spirit we just can't understand. But an excessively tangled plot can drain all the color from that essential mystery. That's the chief problem with "The Awakening," a quiet, unassuming little ghost story, set in England in the early 1920s, that's ultimately more complicated than it needs to be. Rebecca Hall plays Florence Cathcart, a distinguished author who specializes in debunking supernatural hoaxes.

It's almost three years since Barbara Tuchman died, and Robert K. Massie has been an obvious aspirant to her title as the finest narrative historian alive. Though his track record has been relatively short, it has already won him a Pulitzer Prize, his study of Peter the Great crowning his earlier work on the last of the Romanovs. Like Tuchman, Massie handles epic themes, and now he has tried one of the biggest: nothing less than the origins of World War I.

The guns of November roar Sunday. "The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century" is as elegant and intoxicating as any documentary to appear on television, and also as ghastly--eight hours of emotional thunderbolts powerful enough to convert possibly the most gung-ho hawk to pacifism. Granted four consecutive evenings on PBS, this memorial to World War I--and its 9 million dead and millions more physically and emotionally wounded--may wring you like a rag.

On the 80th anniversary of the end of World War I, the French consul general in Los Angeles summoned two American veterans to his Beverly Hills residence Wednesday to honor them for fighting for his country's freedom. Consul Guy Yelda pinned the French Legion of Honor on Albert Willard, 101, of Sherman Oaks and Fred Roberts, 102, of Temple City. "Today, France wishes to express its gratitude," Yelda told the veterans in a ceremony attended by their families, friends and others.

The November ratings sweeps are in full swing this weekend, with several high-profile TV movies and a major documentary series vying for viewers' attention. TNT premieres "The Man Who Captured Eichmann," Sunday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. Robert Duvall stars as the infamous Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who was tried and executed in 1961 for sending millions of Jews to death camps during World War II. Arliss Howard plays the Israeli intelligence agent who captured him in a suburb of Buenos Aires.

Roaming wide-open skies with no commanding officer -- it was the perfect combat job for a congenital misfit, and William Avery "Billy" Bishop, the most celebrated Allied fighter pilot of World War I, certainly fills the bill. The story of how Bishop -- a liar and cheat facing expulsion from the Royal Military College of Canada -- found his true calling inspired "Billy Bishop Goes to War," John Gray and Eric Peterson's two-performer biographical drama with songs.

Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy (Summit Books; $19.95; 700 pp.) This book deserves to have an entire book written about it, and, with luck, within the next 20 years that will happen. For now, in this paltry thousand words, let it be said that "Gone to Soldiers" is a landmark piece of literary prose, a totally infuriating narrative, an amazing feat of research, a wildly audacious gesture. "Gone to Soldiers" is a book by a woman; it is also a "great" novel of World War II.

Along with millions of idealistic young men who were cut to pieces by machine guns and obliterated by artillery shells, there was another major casualty of World War I: traditional ideas about Western art. The Great War of 1914-18 tilted culture on its axis, particularly in Europe and the United States. Nearly 100 years later, that legacy is being wrestled with in film, visual art, music, television shows like the gauzily nostalgic PBS soaper "Downton Abbey" and plays including the Tony Award-winning"War Horse," concluding its run at the Ahmanson Theatre.

For social historian and critic Paul Fussell, the most enduring moments of truth came as a 20-year-old platoon leader in France during World War II. German shrapnel tore up his back and thigh. The blood and guts of fellow soldiers were spewed on him. His staff sergeant died in his arms. He realized there was nothing romantic about war, only mud, cold, death, outrage and fear. "The war," Fussell told the Washington Post decades later, "is behind everything I do," beginning with his book "The Great War and Modern Memory," a classic 1975 critique of art and literature after World War I that showed how that conflict forever changed Western society and culture.

World War II has inspired far more movies than any other war, which is understandable, given the sharp demarcation between good and evil that characterized the battle against Hitler and his allies. By contrast, World War I is rarely depicted on the screen. It doesn't offer the same moral clarity as the fight against fascist tyranny. In one of the best World War I movies, Peter Weir's "Gallipoli," a hermit living in the Australian outback asks the young hero how the war started. "I don't know exactly," the eager recruit replies, "but it was the Germans' fault.

On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp set at 23,000 feet on Mt. Everest. They were George Mallory, who, at 37, was already one of the world's most accomplished climbers, and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, a 22-year-old Oxford graduate with little climbing experience. They walked out of the camp, vanished into the mists that surrounded the peak, and were never seen again until Mallory's frozen body was found in 1999. In his magnificent, if perhaps overlong, new book, "Into the Silence," Wade Davis tells the full story behind this almost mythic story, imbuing it with historic scope and epic sweep, perceiving the quest to conquer Everest as an emblem of Britain's damaged nobility and infatuation with heroic failure.

"Grand Illusion" Jean Renoir's 1937 antiwar film set in a World War I POW camp was the first foreign production to earn a best film Oscar nomination. "Il Generale della Rovere" Roberto Rossellini directed this award-winning 1959 World War II drama starring famed Italian director Vittorio De Sica as a con man arrested by the Gestapo. "War and Peace" Sergei Bondarchuk's epic adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel won the 1968 best foreign film Oscar.

To End All Wars A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 Adam Hochschild Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 450 pp., $28 We think of Europe in 1914 as a continent all too eager for war — volunteers jamming recruiting offices, festooned soldiers joyfully marching to battle and delirious crowds waving them off. To a significant extent, that vision is true, and for a time the Great War brought domestic unity and shared purpose to...

Harry Richard Landis, who enlisted in the Army in 1918 and was one of only two known surviving U.S. veterans of World War I, has died in Florida. He was 108. Landis, who lived at a Sun City Center nursing home, died Monday, according to Donna Riley, his caregiver for the last five years. He had recently been hospitalized with a fever and low blood pressure, she said. The remaining U.S. veteran is Frank Buckles, 107, of Charles Town, W.Va., according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Sandow Birk's show at the Laguna Art Museum is a big, fat lie, thoroughly calculated and terrifically amusing. It flaunts its own fakery every step of the way, and is one of the most delicious deceptions one is ever likely to submit to willingly. "In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works From the Great War of the Californias" documents battles that never happened, through paintings, drawings and models borrowed from archives that don't exist.

Henry Bright endures. His mother raised him in a tiny cabin in West Virginia, eking out a marginal survival; when she died, he was left to bury her. He must do the same for his wife, who dies in childbirth, even as he's mourning her and trying to care for their newborn son. These are just a few of the hardships the 20-year-old Bright has faced: He's not long back from the Great War, as he would call World War I, where he was a foot soldier engaged in...

Claude Stanley Choules, the last known combat veteran of World War I, died Thursday at a nursing home in the Western Australia city of Perth, his family said. He was 110. Beloved for his wry sense of humor and humble nature, Choules — nicknamed "Chuckles" by his comrades in the Royal Australian Navy — usually told the curious that the secret to a long life was simply to "keep breathing. " Choules was born March 3, 1901, in the small British town of Pershore, Worcestershire.