Armistice Day

"Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not."
—Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions

A decade & a half of war in Iraq & Afghanistan has changed Americans' appreciation of Veterans' Day, has deepened our public regard for all three divisions of the brotherhood of arms—the soldiers who defend us still, the veterans who in their time stood watch, & the glorious dead who gave the last full measure of devotion. In this second decade of the twenty-first century America's observance of Veterans' Day is not sacred, but neither it is sacrilegious.

I am weary, bone-tired of the nobility & the folly of the summer & fall of 1914. I am living with the Great War as never before, commemorating its centenaries through "The Explorers' Club." I am fatigued. Yet I dare not fail to remember them, those lads—brave & craven, idealistic & fatalistic, German & French & Russian & loyal to empires proud & strong that disintegrated before their bodies were cold in their graves—who died not in vain in 1914-1918. A century on we in the West have embraced a myth, have ensconced ourselves in a nihilistic fiction that it all meant nothing, that 'twas all folly & no nobility. But the men who fought, those who lived to see peace & careers & families & the greater war that followed, they knew for what they had fought, for what their friends had died. I dare not flag, dare not fail to keep faith with our fathers. They were not golden, brilliant men of a golden, brilliant age. They were as human as you or I. They made mistakes & they pulled of incredible coups; they were generous & they were petty. They did not operate with our smug, fatally flawed assurance that hindsight has made us wise. We dare not forget them because they were the same as we are now, because their fate can be ours unless hindsight leads to wisdom, unless we learn from their mistakes just as our posterity must learn from ours. I am weary, but remain devoted & undaunted.

Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom: Remembrance Sunday-link, & a temporary art installation titled Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red: Tower-link.

"Dulce et Decorum est" was, alongside "In Flanders Fields," one of the two poems selected for our annual Armistice Day exploration of the poetry of the Great War. I mean to honor a great variety of poets (all of them writers of the English language, due to my monoglot nature), yet repeat "Dulce et Decorum est" due to its prominence & enduring urgency. As the arch-traitor General Lee is reputed to have remarked half a century before the Marne, & Verdun, & Ypres over & over & over again, "It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it." I keep a framed copy of "Dulce et Decorum est" in my bedroom—I have for years—as an antidote to mine own tendency to romanticize war.

"Dulce et Decorum est"
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)†

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.



"How to Die"
by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Dark clouds are smouldering into red
While down the craters morning burns.
The dying soldier shifts his head
To watch the glory that returns;
He lifts his fingers toward the skies
Where holy brightness breaks in flame;
Radiance reflected in his eyes,
And on his lips a whispered name.

You'd think, to hear some people talk,
That lads go West with sobs and curses,
And sullen faces white as chalk,
Hankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses.
But they've been taught the way to do it
Like Christian soldiers; not with haste
And shuddering groans; but passing through it
With due regard for decent taste.



†Lieutenant Owen did not survive the War, perishing in combat on 4 November 1918, one week shy of the Armistice.

Wayback Machine: Lest We Forget
I believe this in my bones, all the way down to the quick: we will damn ourselves to the trenches & the gas & the barbed wire should ever we forget the trenches & the gas & the barbed wire. I live in dread, not continually before mine eyes but always rattling around the back of my mind, a ghost in my machine. Truly, truly, truly, "lest we forget."

Armistice Day '13 | Armistice Day '12

Armistice Day '11 | Armistice Day '10

Armistice Day '09 | Armistice Day '08

Armistice Day '07 | Armistice Day '06

Armistice Day '05 | Armistice Day '04

Armistice Day '03 | Armistice Day '02

The Rebel Black Dot Song of Armistice Day
Eric Bogle, "The Band Played 'Waltzing Matilda'" courtesy The Watergirl (T.L.A.M.)