We will remember them

One hundred years ago today, representatives of the Second German Reich—their armies exhausted, their Kaiser abdicated, their people starving, their cities roiling with revolution—agreed to surrender terms dictated by Allied leaders. At 0500 in a railroad car in the Compiègne forest, they signed the Armistice, which went into effect six hours later.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, guns fell silent across Europe, and after more than four years of total war, the nations stood in stunned relief.

World War I gave us chemical warfare (Germany first, then the rest to keep up with the Huns), genocide (Armenians, by Turks), aerial bombing of civilian targets (Germans on French and British cities), unrestricted (meaning: shooting at everything in the water) submarine warfare (Germany), introduction of tanks (Britain)—all the mod cons of Twentieth Century life. They’d be amplified by technological advancements in the next global conflagration, and then refined in the “smaller” wars of the past 60 years.

In my opinion, it was started and fought for reasons of empire—acquiring, defending, expanding what you had or thought you deserved to have. Military and political leaders were ignorant (woefully or willfully? I don’t know; maybe some of both) of what advances in technology were about to do to warfare, and they were criminally slow in realizing what was happening and what it was costing as the war wore on.

And after they’d all been in it for a couple of years, and had been depleting their treasuries, exhausting their citizens, consuming their resources, killing off their young men in their tens of thousands on a daily basis—well, a surreal stubbornness seemed to grip them all. Essentially, the argument was, “We’ve already spent this much and lost that much, now we have to stay in it until we win.”

Right up until almost the very end, the Germans were still marking out territories on maps of Western Europe that they intended to annex upon victory—parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg to which a noble and martial people like the Teutons were entitled.

Meanwhile the French and Brits had a slightly tighter grasp on the geopolitical possibilities before them, and were secretly negotiating to carve up pieces of the Middle East which they expected the Ottomans were going to lose control of. They were haggling between themselves, you understand, not with any of the peoples who actually, you know, lived in those areas. Oh, yeah, they were making promises, to Arabs, to Jews, to Kurds; but those were measures of expediency and not agreements between gentlemen such as the ones they made among themselves. Meaning—not anything they really expected to have to honor.

And so many, many of those imperial chickens have been coming home to roost ever since those shots echoed through Sarajevo. World War I reverberated throughout the Twentieth Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed off much of the ruling-class youth in the nations of Western Europe, it left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued.

But we’re even now feeling the effects of what was known at the time as the Great War. The nearly farcical assassination that started the war laid a pretty straight path to the collapse of the Russian government and the communist revolution. Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and more than 70 years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.

The viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more ruinous indemnities from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Just think about that for a minute: talk about sticking it to your defeated foe...) It was that whole sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that settlement. "Germany started it; the rest of us are victims." 

The Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary) set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade. And if they’re not actively committing acts of aggression against their neighbors at the moment, they will be doing so as soon as they think they can get away with it. This is not over.

The Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire along the lines that Britain and France had mapped out earlier in the war, picking up choice parcels of real estate in the Middle East. As with the Balkans, those arbitrary geographic divisions, ignorant or dismissive of ethnic, religious or other loyalties of the resident peoples, are still reverberating on the global stage.

Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost for more than 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being produced.

Well, by 1918, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian empires were all shattered, although the Soviet Union pretty well replaced the last one. (And since the break-up of the Soviet empire in the 1990s, we see Putin attempting to rebuild the tsarist holdings. If I were a Finn, a Latvian, an Estonian or a Lithuanian, I’d look at Ukraine and be nervous.) The British empire’s death knell was struck as well; it didn’t survive the second war. And France—well, a steady retreat as well.

For the United States, it marked our emergence as a major player on the world stage. Despite our best efforts to turn back the clock in the 20s and 30s (possibly one of the reasons for blocking the memories of our 18 months’ involvement in the carnage) and pretend that those dissipated Euros’ problems were no concern of ours, by the time we got through World War I, Part 2 (1941-1945, for us), it was clear that there was no turning back.

For some reason, Americans pretty much blow off the First World War. Perhaps because mass media didn’t keep it roiling through society in the 20s and 30s the way it did World War II in the 50s. A few novels, a movie or two, and that’s it. By the time the Bonus Army marched on Washington to be routed by Douglas MacArthur on orders of Herbert Hoover (Republican presidents really don’t like being reminded of societal obligations or of the actual cost of wars) in 1932, it was safe to send in current soldiers with fixed bayonets to storm the camps of the veterans of that war.

But we still preferred to dismiss it from our collective memory. Aside from emulating Britain and France in retrieving remains of an unidentifiable soldier from the cemeteries of Northern France and interring them at the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery (Britain’s Unknown lies in Westminster Abbey; France’s beneath the Arc de Triomphe), we scurried back and declined to join the League of Nations. America first, eh?

Our involvement did have some positive effects on our society, however, although most people are unaware of the connection. In a pattern that was followed more fully in the second war, the US government had to call on all its citizens to mount the effort, even for that period of months. That included women and blacks. Turns out that once you’ve demanded that all your people step up to the plate for a total war, it’s hard to pat them on the shoulder and send them back to the kitchen or the rear of the bus forevermore.

The Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote, was ratified in 1920. Equal rights for African Americans took longer. But a major step forward came in 1948 when Harry S Truman, God bless him, issued Executive Order 9981, ordering the desegregation of US armed forces.

Truman had been an artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Force, serving in the Vosges in 1918.

This weekend in Europe, there are public and private commemorations of the Armistice that was signed in Compiègne 100 years ago. Yesterday, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron unveiled a memorial there; Pierre Trudeau paid tribute to Canadian soldiers at Vimy Ridge. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly represented us at a ceremony at the Aisne-Marne US military cemetery near the battlefield of Belleau Wood; Commander Bone Spurs declined to venture out in the rain to honor the fallen. (Well, he is umbrella-challenged…)

It’s fortuitous that the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice falls on Remembrance Sunday in Britain. The Royals and Commonwealth dignitaries will lay wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. There are no longer any survivors from 1918, but veterans from World War II and subsequent wars will march (or be wheeled) past. There will be two minutes of silence precisely at 1100, and then half-muffled church bells around the country will toll for the fallen.

(Throughout the past four years, the Brits have done an amazing job of honoring the war that broke the back of their empire. Starting in August 2014, with the Lights Out campaign and the Blood-Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London, it progressed to a poignant series of public and private commemorations of the centenary of the opening of the catastrophic Battle of the Somme in 2016 that included a performance art piece called We’re Here Because We’re Here of men in WWI uniforms appearing at train stations across the country just as they would have done on their way to Somme. And then there was the statue of the soldier sculpted from Flanders mud, who melted under rain at Trafalgar Square a hundred years on from the Battle of Passchendaele. Finally, for the past week there has been a light and sound installation in and around the Tower of 10,000 torches lit each night by the Warders, accompanied by a new choral work.)

Also today there will be a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe at which I hope to God that moral and physical coward 45 doesn’t shove any of the world leaders out of his way as he impatiently waits for his meeting with Putin. At least he’s not here desecrating Arlington.

Ah, well, perhaps I take these things too seriously. I’ve spent too much time walking the battlefields and graveyards of Northern France and Belgium internalizing the loss they represent. I can think of no more evocative musical piece to commemorate this centenary than “Flowers of the Forest,” the powerful centuries-old lament for Scots slain by Englishmen. But because Highland regiments formed the backbone of the British army in so many wars, it has been transmuted to a universal tune that accompanies the bodies of British soldiers home to their final rest.

It has had rather a workout in recent years, in Afghanistan and Iraq. But here it appears against the background of memorials to the losses of the Somme. And if for no other reason, renders me a sobbing wreck.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them

We must remember them.