Armistice Day

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

Operation AXIOM: The 102nd Anniversary of the Armistice of Compiègne
One hundred two 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. Empires lay in ruins. Revolution was in the air. The world that had existed before the summer of 1914 was shattered utterly, torn asunder by unfathomable bloodshed.

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 ended—in triumph, in defeat, in exhaustion, in jubilation—on 11 November 1918, one hundred two years ago today.

"Prelude: The Troops"
by Siegfried Sassoon, M.C. (1886-1967)

Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom
Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night, must now renew
Their desolation in the truce of dawn,
Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.

Yet these, who cling to life with stubborn hands,
Can grin through storms of death and find a gap
In the clawed, cruel tangles of his defence.
They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy
Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all
Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky
That hastens over them where they endure
Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,
And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.

O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead,
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.

"The Last Post"
by Robert Graves (1895-1985)

The bugler sent a call of high romance—
Lights out! Lights out!—to the deserted square:
On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer.
God, if it's this for me next time in France
Spare me the phantom bugle as I lie
Dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns,
Dead in a row with the other shattered ones,
Lying so stiff and still under the sky—
Jolly young Fusiliers, too good to die.
The music ceased, and the red sunset flare
Was blood about his head as he stood there.

The Wayback Machine Tour of Armistice Day: Lest We Forget
I will never forgive myself for failing to mark properly Armistice Day in 2019. There was an episode of "The Explorers' Club," & that was fitting, but there ought to have been both.

Armistice Day '18 + 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
A. E. Housman (poem) & George Butterworth (music), "The Lads in Their Hundreds" from The Pity of War: Songs and Poems of Wartime Suffering (Mike Papa Whiskey)

Commentary: George Butterworth, M.C. (1885-1916) was considered one of the most promising English composers of his generation. He was mentioned in despatches & awarded the Military Cross (M.C.) for gallantry in combat as an officer in the Durham Light Infantry. He was killed in the Battle of the Somme & his body was never recovered; his name is inscribed on the Thiepval Memorial.

The poem "The Lads in Their Hundreds" is from Housman's 1896 collection, A Shropshire Lad; Butterworth set it to music in 1911-1912.

"The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,
There's men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,
The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,
And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old…

"They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old."