THE SENIOR CITIZEN-SOLDIER
On August 11, 1914, His Majesty’s Regular Army took out a full-page advertisement in the London Daily Telegraph seeking the immediate enlistment of an additional 100,000 men, ages 19 to 30, to help with the “grave National Emergency” unfolding beyond the borders of Great Britain.
Nine days earlier, Europe had begun fraying at its seams. Germany invaded Luxembourg and then Belgium after the Belgian government denied German forces passage across their nation for a planned assault on Paris. The British government pledged its military support to the historically neutral Belgium, and the budding Great War went into overdrive. In Liège, for example, some 30 miles southwest of the German border, the American war correspondent Granville Roland Fortescue—a Rough Rider who had been wounded in Cuba fighting alongside cousin Teddy Roosevelt in the Battle of San Juan Hill—witnessed the precision with which invading troops bombarded a trio of strongholds, leading to the capture of the Belgian city. “The artillery practice was perfect,” he wrote in an eyewitness scoop. “Shell after shell was exploded
