The saddest page on Wikipedia

Michel Vuijlsteke linked to this sad, moving article at The Awl about the last two surviving veterans of World War I:

There are two veterans of the First World War left in the world. Of all the parts of the world that move on without you, of all the borders beyond the horizon, of all the varying speeds and trajectories and characters and stories colluding together in giant waves of “now,” “yet-to-come,” “once was,” and then it boils down to two. It’s not even the whole hand.

Nine years ago, there were 700 left alive.

With the recent deaths of Frank Buckles, John Babcock and Harry Patch, we are left with Claude Choules and Florence Green. (Upon learning this, Claude remarked: “Everything comes to those who wait and wait.”) Nearly 10,000,000 men were killed in the conflict, 65 million participated, and now we are left with two. Think about that. Think about those numbers. What are you supposed to do when an era is inches away from disappearing?

Two days after this article appeared, Claude Choules died, leaving Florence Green as the last surviving veteran of World War I and Józef Kowalski, who fought in the Polish-Russian War as the last surviving WWI era veteran, but there are no more surviving witnesses of the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow. When Harry Patch died two years ago we lost the last survivor of the trench warfare at the Western Front; nobody’s left to tell us if Blackadder goes Forth got it right. Before that, when Henry Allingham died, just a week before Patch’s dead, we lost the last surviving founding member of the RAF, the last surviving RNAS veteran and the last eyewitness to the Battle of Jutland. Thus history passes out of living memory.

And hence the List of surviving veterans of World War I is the saddest page on Wikipedia, slowly shrinking in size, now with only two names left and no idea what to do with it if these last two die as well. Should the page then be deleted, its history gone as well, or kept in some way as a monument to this history? There’s still no consensus and time is ticking…