Armistice Day 90 Years On

Not long ago, I wrote about the War to End Wars (which didn't), the war to make the world safe for democracy (debatable given the later events of the 20th Century), the Great War (until a greater came along). Actually that post started out being about 9/11 and other things, and so only tangentially counts as a World War I post, but as I noted there, three uncles and a great uncle (at least) fought in that war, and one of Tam's grandfathers, the great uncle losing the sight of one eye in a gas attack and fighting in Belleau Wood (he was one of the rare Marines in a family mostly associated with the Army).

Five minutes from now as I write we come to the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Once those coordinates (and the added, "eveventh hour," when the armistice kicked in), meant a great deal to a lot of people. Not since Appomattox had Americans endured such a war, but theirs was mild compared to most Europeans. Today it's no longer "Armistice Day" in America, but "Veterans' Day," which seems to include all veterans of all wars. The Brits and Canadians I think, and perhaps the Aussies and other Commonwealth types, still call it "Remembrance Day," which may be a tad more evocative. I still like Armistice Day, the day the guns fell silent, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month when the Great War ended.

The war to end wars didn't; we're at war right now in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war to make the world safe for democracy didn't: ask a Russian. The Great War wasn't so great: the horrors of World War II have almost eradicated the Great War from our memory. I'm glad that November 11 survives as a holiday, even if it's a minor one. September 11 has replaced November 11 in our memory: far fewer died, but we were there to witness it.

In a scrapbook kept by my mother is a handkerchief stitched with the words "Paris 1918," which she noted was given her by her brother Herb. Herb was one of the black sheep of the family, with rather too many wives (we think three, that we know of) for a good Irish Catholic boy, a certain tendency to change his name and other quirks, but a man who served in both World War I (Navy) and World War II (Army). Even his military service has a cloud or two, especially the navy one, but the handkerchief seems to have been one of my mother's treasures.

I've already linked to my earlier post about WWI, but I think since most people don't click on links I'd like to simply repeat my earlier meditation on the poetry of and about the still Great War:

Back in 1915, after the battle of Ypres (pronounced by British soldiers not as ee-pr but as Wipers, an endearing sign of Englishmen's eternal refusal to learn French) the Canadian soldier John McCrae looked at similar rows of graves and famously wrote:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row...

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Such words, from the War to End Wars (it didn't, actually) can still inspire (and are, or at least were, iconic in Canadian patriotic rhetoric when it existed), but we should also remember the other observation by another poet (Wilfrid Owen) of the same war:

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,
Obscene as cancer, 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.

And a modern evocation of the same theme from 1976 in Australian Eric Bogle's Green Fields of France (also known as Willie McBride or No Man's Land and sung a lot in Irish pubs)

And I can't help but wonder, young Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?"
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?


Since we're doing the "British poets of World War I" (and a Canadian and a modern Australian to boot) seminar I should mention that one of my Dad's favorite poems was one that I think has been more or less neglected lately, Rupert Brooke's

IF I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


That has little to do with the war as such, but my Dad liked to quote it as a poem many soldiers empathized with (it is in fact titled just "The Soldier"). And it's my blog and I can write what I want. Brooke did die in that war, not in combat but of a mosquito bite -- on his way to Gallipoli. His corner of a foreign field that is forever England is on the Greek island of Skyros.

A long time ago: this is the 90th anniversary. The last I heard, the US had one living veteran of WWI. Not sure what the rest of the world has. They'd all be centenarians. In Flanders fields, I assume, the poppies still grow between the crosses row on row, but another war has left more crosses in the European low countries. Europe seems to have learned its lessons. Perhaps the rest of us can.

Wars end, but never forever. We mark the end of the "Great" War, but greaters have followed it. Remember.

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