"...to end all..."

Earlier today - 11 am GMT, which would be 5 am here, if Google's time-zone translator is correct - we hit the 100th anniversary of the official end of hostilities in World War I.

Would that it had actually been "The War to End All Wars," as it was described. (Also called "The Great War" at the time - the "I" designation, of course, didn't happen until after the world was once again plunged in a mass conflagration).

I am dismayed, but not too surprised, at the lack of historical knowledge many Americans have about the war. I know more than many, and I feel like I don't have a good grasp on the causes (which seem mostly have been territorial, or old grudges between nations) or everything that happened.

I think part of it is that we entered the war late (I have been told, by people who know more history than I do, that there were demonstrations in many cities opposing our entry. And I'm not all that sure how much good we did....)

But I do know it was hellish, and for the ordinary guys in the trenches it was Hell, and I know about the Christmas Truce, and "The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" and a lot of the "War Poetry" that was written about that time. And how it was kind of the last gasp of the Napoleonic method...but I still feel confused as to the details.

I remember a few years back - maybe 10 or 12 - I walked into my Biostats class to find the students arguing as to whether Nov. 11 was Memorial Day or Veterans' Day. I sighed - even at that point I sometimes felt so much older than my students - and siad "It's Veterans' Day; Memorial Day is in May, but this day used to be remembered for something else; are any of you familiar with 'On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month'?"

No one was.

Now, granted: I grew up with a mother who majored in History before she switched over to Botany, and I had pretty good history (or Social Studies, and sometimes I wonder if the switch to Social Studies from History and Geography was the start of people not learning as much) classes.

But, I don't know. I....kind of feel like we have a responsibility as individuals to learn these kinds of things, to know about what happened before we were here. I know there's history I don't know and all but....this seems kind of important.

I do have some personal (family) links to WWI. A great-uncle (whom I never met; he died - of pneumonia, probably exacerbated by lung damage suffered from gas attacks "over there") fought in the trenches in France; my great-grandmother kept a scrapbook of news clippings and she even had a very crudely made propaganda flier that had been dropped on the US troops from German planes - my great-uncle Burt had picked one up and mailed it back for everyone's amusement (At that point the Germans were losing already; the fliers were supposed to reduce the soldiers' morale but apparently in my great-uncle's case, it did the reverse). Burt came back home but, as I said, he was apparently never that healthy afterward. He did run a butcher's shop but died younger than he might have....

My grandfather on my dad's side was an experimental flyer - he did his training out of what is now Love Field, as it turns out - and was slated to go to France. But I found out last Christmas, reading his memoirs - he got off the train in New York City to prepare to ship out and found everyone partying. Yes, he arrived on November 11, 1918, and was saved, by the mere accident of his training taking longer than it might have (he had one narrow-escape plane crash that laid him up for a while), missed any risk "over there."

So yes, I have a personal connection with knowing a bit of the history of that time, but I also think - as we were involved, as the land-divisions after the war may in some way have fueled resentments that led to the second Great War, and the fact that humans don't change all that much over time, I think there IS value in knowing that sort of history.


I know I linked this a couple years ago, but here is Leonard Cohen reading "In Flanders' Fields," probably the best-known and most-striking WWI poem:



But another one I remember well, having studied it in a few English classes, which is less about "Take up our cause with the foe" and more "War is Hell," is "Dulce et Decorum Est" this one read by Christopher Eccleston :



I almost feel the need to issue a content warning on that; the description of the man suffering after a poison-gas attack is pretty harrowing. But then, that's the point of the poem: war is hell.


I guess it's not so much the lack-of-knowledge or ignorance in my fellow humans that bothers me; it's what I perceive as an incuriousness, a not-caring they don't know and a not-wanting-to-know.