One Hundred Years After the Armistice That Paused the Carnage

This day marks the one hundredth anniversary of the armistice that paused, for about twenty years, the senseless slaughter of World War One.  It was called “the War to End All Wars,” and would that only to have been true, it might have been worth it all – but it did not and so it was not.  The most prosperous culture in the world, one that certainly should have known better, descended into madness and almost destroyed itself in quick time.  Scores of millions died, all over the world, in the two-part war that only ended in 1945 and whose effects are very much with us today.

As I wrote last year, in the primitive film of 1914 we can clearly see the pompous, murderously-incompetent, half-decrepit generals and the effete, smarmy, oily politicos all parading about in herky-jerky motion, full of themselves, festooned like peacocks with their gaudy European plumes and sashes, leading the world into war for their own petty, obscure, and erratic purposes.  It was all so absurd, so comical if not so unspeakably sad, so utterly infuriating, so unimaginably tragic.

When the war began in 1914, certainly few, if any, however foolish they might have been, could have imagined the horrific carnage that was about to come.  But soon they suffered full well the harsh reality of it all and no doubt most, if they could go back in time, would have none of it.  Yet after almost three years of this madness, revealed to the world in newspapers, in film, in photographs, and in letters, in June of 1917 the Americans crossed an ocean to join in.  They disembarked in France to cheering crowds, smiling while shouting back, it is said, “Lafayette we are here.”  Then over one hundred thousand of them died, and to this day we don’t really know why.

For years afterward mothers and fathers roamed battlefields looking for sons who never returned.  Nonpareil writer Jan Morris evokes the profound sadness of inconsolable loss: 

In one of the lonely cemeteries in which, buried where they died, the Anzacs lay lost among the Gallipoli ravines, the parents of one young soldier wrote their own epitaph to their son, killed so far away, so bravely we need not doubt, in so obscure a purpose: “God Took Our Norman, It Was His Will, Forget Him, No, We Never Will.”

Canadian physician John McCrae, serving as a front-line field surgeon in France, wrote a short poem after the burial of one of his friends killed in battle.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row, [....]
We are the dead, short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

McCrae never returned home either, dying himself later in the war.  He was buried near where he fell.

Western culture paused in the slow suicide it had begun just a few years earlier, one hundred years ago today, and we still bring out the poppies to pretend it all stopped just then.

R Balsamo