Today is Veterans' Day, which used to be called Armistice Day, the commemoration of the end of hostilities in World War I. (I remember several years ago walking into Biostats on this day and having several students mid-argument as to whether it was Veterans' Day or Memorial Day. None of them had hear the old "The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" thing, which I remembered learning as a child. But then again, my grandmother had a brother who fought "over there" in the infantry, and who was gassed, and who came back here and then succumbed to pneumonia well before I was born - so I never got to meet him)
In the British Commonwealth countries, much more is made of Remembrance Day (as they call it) and it's a lot more like our Memorial Day - a day devoted to remembering specifically those who died in war. (Veterans' Day, here, much more is now about thanking living vets. I noticed that the local steakhouse place is doing a free dinner for any veteran today, which I consider a good thing). It seems that the UK, especially, commemorates and remembers WWI much more than the US does. I suppose that's because they were in it longer and lost far more men. (And even more so in some small towns in France and Belgium).
As I've said before, World War I seems like such a strange and senseless war to me - it's not like there was a clash of ideologies so much as some people wanting more territory, and another, dying empire wanting to prop itself up, and some paranoia, perhaps, among the rulers of a couple nations, and various ententes and agreements led to other countries getting dragged in....and while it may have been somewhat of a Glorious War for the aristocrats who got to charge around on horses and commandeer chateaux, for the ordinary foot soldier, it seems like it was pretty awful and pointless.
I remember some years ago reading a moderately horrifying story in, I think it was Smithsonian magazine, about early attempts to repair or cover up facial damage caused by war wounds....in some cases, the men wound up wearing what were effectively tin masks, which looked okay if a little "off" in the black and white photos of the time but up close were perhaps even more unsettling than seeing the scars directly. Apparently this was also the beginnings of plastic surgery, and some men did manage to have many of their wounds repaired - though I'm sure early plastic surgery was harrowing to go through.
Added: Here's an interesting visual story about the things British soldiers carried over the years in different conflicts. I wonder if there's a comparable version for US soldiers, from the Revolutionary War up to today....I know there is a lot done here with Civil War history, perhaps to the American South it is somewhat analogous to what WWI was to parts of France and Belgium, in the sense that every small town sent young men and lots of them were lost....we have a Confederate Memorial statue in front of the courthouse here.
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This is also the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I do not know why I don't remember this better. I was a college student at the time, I had a television. (I remember watching, slightly shocked, the aftermath of the big earthquake in California that happened during the World Series). I guess I remember some of the news footage, of people jumping up and down and dancing because the wall was falling.
I do remember, later on, seeing people carrying chunks of the wall they had bashed off. Can you imagine? The thing that kept your city separated, that maybe kept you from being able to easily visit relatives, the thing that at the worst times would get you shot for trying to cross - just crumbling. And you've got a piece of it. I wonder how many pieces of the wall are still out there, held on to by people who were there, as a memory.
The scars are still there; from what I've read there's still inequality between East and West in a lot of ways, and that what used to be East Germany (and East Berlin) is still materially poorer and in worse condition. But I'm betting the thought of that didn't matter in 1989, when people in East Berlin got a hint that they would soon have more freedom.
And not too much later on, things changed so immensely. What I had learned in school as The Soviet Union fell apart and was replaced by a bunch of new countries (which, in a lot of cases, were actually old countries re-emerging) to learn. And I admit, as a kid who grew up during the tail end of the Cold War and who knew more than she probably should have about "minutes to midnight" and all that as a teen (I was a pretty tense teen, once I started actually paying attention to the news), I kind of breathed a sigh of relief, thinking, "well, at least now we're unlikely to be annihilated by nuclear bombs."
(And sadly, sometimes, it looks like the current leader of Russia really wants to re-assemble the old Soviet Union, and do stuff Soviet-style and all that. And in my bleaker moments of looking at world politics I wonder if we're close to some kind of Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment again, though perhaps not with the same countries involved as 100 years ago. And of course, there's the ugly and horrid re-emergence of anti-Semitism in some European countries, a scant 70 years after the previous inhumanities. I guess a couple generations is all it takes for us to forget the lessons of history?)
1 comment:
I sometimes hear people refer to the fall of the Berlin wall as one of those events that "everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when it happened" but I don't. I wasn't paying much attention to the news in those days. I had kids and a job and a lot of stress and it just didn't seem worth 30 minutes of my time to see what was going on in the rest of the world. But I vaguely remember hearing about it somehow or other and thinking how surreal it was because the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union had been in existence for all my life and surely would continue forever. But what, exactly, was I doing. No idea.
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