When I was a boy, back in the 1970s in Australia, I was taken to see a veterans’ parade. There they were, all these old men in their bemedaled blazers and striped ties and black berets and gray slacks and comfortable shoes muscle-memoriedly marching down the street, accompanied by golf claps as they passed. I was 8 or 9, and it was there I first heard chatter of some place called “Gallipoli.”
They are dead now—those who fought in that terrible battle, and at Verdun, Passchendaele, Tannenberg and all the rest—and World War I has receded from living memory. Soon its incarnadine sequel will, too, given that its very youngest veterans are now in their mid-90s. And when it does I wonder what will happen to books like Saul David’s “The Force: The Legendary Special Ops Unit and WWII’s Mission Impossible.” Will people still read them? Or will they languish alongside the memoirs of near-forgotten Napoleonic generals?
