The Eleventh Hour: In Honor of our Veterans

In the United States we observe Veterans Day on November 11^th (next Monday as I write this) and Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.

Why November 11^th?

World War I ended in Europe on November 11, 1918, with the signing of an ‘armistice’ or ceasefire agreement which specified that fighting would cease ‘at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.’

This became a national holiday in the victorious Allied countries and has evolved into a general day of remembrance honoring all veterans who have served in wars since then.

The armistice document was signed in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne about 50 miles north of Paris in Picardy, where the trenches separated the Allied and German forces. The carriage was the Allied commander Marshal Foch’s headquarters.

Although the Armistice was a temporary agreement extended several times and the war was not officially ended until the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, it was in effect an instrument of surrender by Germany and contained harsh unilateral conditions such as the immediate release of Allied POWs but not German POWs.

World War I remains a mystery to me: the issues at stake at the beginning were trivial in comparison to the consequences by the end. It was, I think, an extremely avoidable war, a series of unforced errors, into which the protagonists stumbled in 1914, through a tragic combination of misunderstanding, poor communication, stubbornness, pride, and prejudice.

Europeans had been hacking each other to pieces for hundreds of years and perhaps they just felt it was time for another general bloodletting.

The war finished in 1918 having consumed between 15 million and 20 million lives and ending the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires, but settled nothing.

At the start of the war it was described, without irony, as ‘the war that will end war’ by the novelist HG Wells, and that phrase and ‘the war to end all wars,’ came into popular usage and belief.

But twenty-two years later it was the turn of the French to surrender to the Germans in the very same railway carriage. Now, that’s real irony.

Sadly, although World War I (or the ‘Great War’ as it was known at the time) was the most destructive in human history to that date, the worst was yet to come. An H1N1 flu virus emerged in Kansas and was spread via American troops to Europe, and thence it escaped to the world. This pandemic (incorrectly called ‘Spanish flu’) infected at least a quarter of the world’s population between 1918 and 1920 and is generally estimated to have killed 40 to 50 million people—at least twice as many as the war itself, and twice as many as Covid 19 100 years later.

Next Monday, at the 11^th hour, please pause for just a moment to remember not just those who died in World War I, but all who died in all wars since then. Freedom is not free. Whether the wars were ‘good’ wars or not, or avoidable or not, or truly settled anything or ended anything or not, they very definitely ended everything for the young men and women who did not return.