Armistice Day

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

Ninety-nine years ago to the day, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent on the Western Front, signally the end of the World War (der Weltkrieg), the Great War, the War to End All Wars. Tens of millions had perished—from bullets, from shells, from bombs, from poison gas, from drowning, from starvation, from thirst, from disease, from fire—since war broke out in August 1914, following the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian crowns by a Serbian nationalist terrorist. The war was fought on land, on the sea, & in the air; in Europe, Africa, & Asia; off the coasts of South America, Australia, & North America; in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean; the Mediterrarean Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Black sea, the North Sea, Lake Tanganyika, & all the seven seas. The war was fought on the ground & under the ground with vast defensive shelters & offensive mines; on the sea & under the sea, with submarines sinking both military & civilian ships indiscriminately; in the air, with the new aeroplane used first as a scout & artillery spotter, then as a fighter, ground attacker, & long-range bomber; Zeppelins & other dirigibles hung in the air like great whales, raining death on the people below. It was the "chemist's war," with the full weight of man's ingenuity & technological prowess brought to bear, all but perfecting the process of rapidly killing large numbers of heavily-armed men who desperately wish to stay alive. The scale of the disaster staggers the mind.

I think upon the Great War every week, researching & preparing episodes of "The Explorers' Club." I've lived with it now as if it is the now, not the distant then, for three years. This is not to say that I know at all what it was like—the fear, the thrill, the discomfort, the pain. But I do know how afraid I am of forgetting, how deeply I am convinced that we of the West are lost because we have forgotten our story, have forgotten our history. They paid too high a price for us not to learn the lessons of the 1914-1919, of all the destruction & death that stalked the earth from the July Crisis to the Armistice & beyond to the Paris Peace Conference. Lest we forget, the Armistice took effect on 11 November 1918, ninety-nine years ago today.

"Suicide in the Trenches"
by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye,
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know,
The hell where youth and laughter go.

"The Unconquered Dead"
by John McCrae (1872-1918)

Not we the conquered! Not to us the blame
Of them that flee, of them that basely yield;
Nor ours the shout of victory, the fame
Of them that vanquish in a stricken field.

That day of battle in the dusty heat
We lay and heard the bullets swish and sing
Like scythes amid the over-ripened wheat,
And we the harvest of their garnering.

Some yielded, No, not we! Not we, we swear
By these our wounds; this trench upon the hill
Where all the shell-strewn earth is seamed and bare,
Was ours to keep; and lo! we have it still.

We might have yielded, even we, but death
Came for our helper; like a sudden flood
The crashing darkness fell; our painful breath
We drew with gasps amid the choking blood.

The roar fell faint and farther off, and soon
Sank to a foolish humming in our ears,
Like crickets in the long, hot afternoon
Among the wheat fields of the olden years.

Before our eyes a boundless wall of red
Shot through by sudden streaks of jagged pain!
Then a slow-gathering darkness overhead
And rest came on us like a quiet rain.

Not we the conquered! Not to us the shame,
Who hold our earthen ramparts, nor shall cease
To hold them ever; victors we, who came
In that fierce moment to our honoured peace.

The Wayback Machine Tour of Armistice Day: Lest We Forget
Armistice Day '16 + Armistice Day '15 + Armistice Day '14

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 o' Armistice Day
Enrico Caruso, "Over There!" from Over There! Songs of the American Expeditionary Force 1917-1918 (The Last Angry Man)

Commentary: By November 1917, America had declared war on Germany, but had yet to engage in ground combat on the Western Front, as the American Expeditionary Force was still being drafted, trained, & equipped. "Over There!" was written by the great George M. Cohan in 1917 & debuted that fall at a Red Cross fundraiser in New York City.

"Over there! Over there!
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming everywhere!
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware!
We'll be over, we're coming over,
And we won't come back till it's over, over there!…"

God help us, lest we forget.