—Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
One hundred years ago to the day, 11 November 1918, "at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month," the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The "War to End All Wars" was over. Tens of millions were dead. In many villages throughout France, Germany, Britain, Austria, Italy, Turkey, Russia, Hungary, & a dozen other nations, an entire generation of young men had perished. Empires that had stood for centuries were gone, dynasties that had reigned for centuries were deposed, & nations that had groaned under foreign dominion for those selfsame centuries grasped for long-desired independence. The armistice ended the fighting, but the war would not formally end until 10 January 1920.
The fighting would resume in myriad places, as the old empires convulsed in death & the new nation-states struggled to be born, but on nothing approaching the scale of the World War. As a man once said, a difference of degree is a difference of kind. There had been far-ranging wars before, but nothing previously of the scale & intensity of the Weltkrieg. All of man's considerable ingenuity was put to the task of slaughtering vast numbers of heavily armed men who wished not to die. The sciences reached a fever pitch: chemical warfare, discussed for the preceding half century & forbidden by the Hague Convention of 1907, became a fixture of the war as clouds of "poison gas" created indelible images of soldiers in gas masks & lines of blinded casualties (some blinded tempoarily, others permanently) making their scuffling way back from the front. The aeroplane, invented only a decade earlier & far from perfected, unleashed death from above, with romantic images of fighter "aces" a chivalrous counterpoint to the unconscionable deliberate bombing of civilians, by both lighter-than-air dirigibles & heavier-than-air planes. The "tank," originally a cover name for what were more sensibly conceived as landships, debuted as a twisted, nightmarish caricature of the armored knight on horseback—terrifying, pitiless machines than spat death & crushed men under-tread. The war was fought in Europe, Asia (both the Near East & the Far East), & Africa; on every ocean & the seas off every continent; under the seas as the submarine matured as a killing machine; & in the air. Men were drafted into the fighting force; women were drafted into the work force; children were encouraged to grow up too fast. The best of men died alongside the worst of men; high explosives, bullets, poison, disease, hunger, the sea, thirst, exposure, & shock struck down the virtuous as well as the vicious.
The world had never seen madness as red as the World War; pray to the Almighty that we shall not see madness so red in our own lifetime. A century later, only the ignorant &/or the foolish would say we do not live in a world yet scarred by 1914-1918, haunted by the ghost of a war most of us prefer to pretend never happened. Western civilization barely survived the suicide attempt of 1914-1918, & might yet succumb to the wound. It all end—in triumph, in defeat, in exhaustion, in jubilation—on 11 November 1918, one hundred years ago today.
"In Memoriam: John McCrae"
by Alfred Gordon (1888-1959)
There was a singer who made song
divine
Of the green grapes of Proserpine
Love,
Born in full flower of the marvellous sea,
Was not more fair,
Sung of his voice.
Than she.
The hopeless acquiescence of all time
Once and for all was chanted in his rhyme.
Death-
Stripped equally of exultation and of dread
Grew even more pale :
White were the poppies which he sang.
Not red.
What marvel youth, with sorrow out of mind,
The perfect litany of all grief should find
In strains
So sorrowful and yet so heavily sweet ;
And perfect rest,
Twining with him the poppies in her hair,
For all youth's pains.
He whom we mourn this day, he too did make
A song of poppies, but he cried not Sleep, hut
Wake!
Red,
Red, red with blood his poppies were,
Not pale and wan
Lift up thy head !
Lift up thy head, who mournest him with me,
And what a wonder he hath wrought now see !
In one brief hour
The centuries' symbol of all sleep and death
Now and for ever with immortal breath
Doth flower!
No longer bound where breasts and white
limbs show,
They grow
"Between the crosses row on row."
Sleep? O poppies red,
Made by his song more holy than the rose,
'Tis we,
We shall not sleep !
For, lo !
His word upon our inmost heart
Is graven more deeply than by all the art
Of him
Throughout all time
Lord of all rhyme,
As from the glories of a colonnade
Man turns, of old, to shrines in cloistral shade.
And youth shall kneel there
By this present shrine,
Learning a more divine
Than Proserpine.
While though his body shall in France find
rest.
Yea, the same rest France to her own brave
yields,
His soul shall stray,
By an infallible way,
Not through Elysian, but to Flanders' fields.
"The Sentry"
by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
We'd found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,
And gave us hell; for shell on frantic shell
Hammered on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime,
Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour,
Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb.
What murk of air remained stank old, and sour
With fumes from whizz-bangs, and the smell of men
Who'd lived there years, and left their curse in the den,
If not their corpses....
There we herded from the blast
Of whizz-bangs, but one found our door at last.
Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles.
And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping
And sploshing in the flood, deluging muck—
The sentry's body; then, his rifle, handles
Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.
We dredged him up, for dead, until he whined.
"O sir, my eyes—I'm blind—I'm blind, I'm blind!"
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind; in time they'd get all right.
"I can't," he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids
Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there
In posting next for duty, and sending a scout
To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering about
To other posts under the shrieking air.
Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,
And one who would have drowned himself for good,—
I try not to remember these things now.
Let dread hark back for one word only: how
Half-listening to that sentry's moans and jumps,
And the wild chattering of his broken teeth,
Renewed most horribly whenever crumps
Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath—
Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout
"I see your lights!" But ours had long died out.
The Wayback Machine Tour of Armistice Day: Lest We Forget
Armistice Day '17 + 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
Christopher Mallman, "Channel Firing" from The Pity of War: Songs and Poems of Wartime Suffering (The Last Angry Man)
Commentary: The poem by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), written in April 1914, before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand & the July Crisis, set to music by Gerald Finzi's (1901-1956).
The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:
‘All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters…
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