The End of the Great War: 100 Years

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     One hundred years ago on this day, World War I ended. The Great War ended at the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. It was dubbed the war to end all wars. It was called the Great War because of the vast numbers of soldiers involved from so many countries.
     It was also called the Great War because the industrial age had brought mechanization and science to warfare to make this brutal undertaking more brutal and miserable as we were able to more efficiently kill each other. The concept of a second Great War was inconceivable. It seemed for a moment that the leaders of the world actually believed we had to find a way to live peacefully. They even thought it was possible and took steps toward that by creating the League of Nations to resolve disputes between countries without resorting to warfare which the rightfully assumed would even get more brutal.
     The war began on July 28, 1914 and lasted more than four years until November 11, 1918. In that time 8.5 million soldiers were killed and another 22.2 million were wounded. 10 million civilian were killed. As I read this last statistic, I wondered if the Armenian’s who died in the Genocide are in that count.
     Chemical weapons, mustard gas, were used for the first time as was the first battle tanks. It was the first-time airplanes were used. The trench warfare in France made for the miserable conditions we are reminded of in film and books such as All Quiet on the Western Front.     The US Congress declared November 11, Armistice Day, to be a day of National Observance in 1926. In 1938, they made it a national holiday. In 1954, Armistice Day was renamed Veteran’s Day. I am not a Veteran. There is some regret for not having served, but at this point in my life, it is what it is. I know I was not put in harm’s way but again I never experience the comradery and esprit du corps that being in harm’s way can forge in a group of young men. I honor and revere anyone who served in war or peace.
     I believe in honoring Veteran’s and having a Veteran’s Day. But, I have a longing for Armistice Day, a day to commemorate the end of the first modern world war, and, maybe more importantly, a day to commemorate what people, for a brief time in history, thought and believed would be or should have been the end of all war.
     Kurt Vonnegut put it best in his novel Breakfast of Champions:

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two. 

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. 

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. 

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

     We no longer have “men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.” We did not listen. Will we ever…