Armistice Is Declared, 1918

Armistice Is Declared, November 11, 1918

lso known as Remembrance Day, and observed as such by countries across the globe, the eleventh of November marks the anniversary of the ceasing of hostilities between the Allied and Central Powers during the First World War. The war itself was a conflict unparalleled in human history up to that point by its global scale, weaponization of technology, cost of lives and admitted futility of purpose. A generation was decimated by its effects and they would go down in history mourned as “lions lead by donkeys”—a phrase popularized afterwards to refer to the incompetent leadership that supposedly lead to the slaughter one of the most promising generations Christendom had yet seen.

The 2014 Remembrance Day poppy installation at the Tower of London titled Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red: 888,246 ceramic poppies progressively filled the Tower’s famous moat between July and November 2014 in commemoration of the start of WWI. Each poppy represented a British military fatality during the war.

While debatably undeserving its notoriety for being the most wasteful of all wars, World War One has certainly become synonymous with inefficacy, with being the penultimate crescendo of centuries of imperial and moral decay and the setting up on the global stage a Second World War from which global politics has never righted itself. Amongst all the gloom, relativism and censure that the memory of the conflict evokes, it is notable and right that its solitary, annual day of remembrance has become one that is deeply personal.

A 1915 postcard honoring the Allied soldiers

Unlike the Second World War or other more glorified endeavors that have their battle anniversaries and victory days celebrated with great fanfare, World War One is acknowledged and commemorated on the day the killing stopped—victory being a hollow word for what was achieved after four years of industrial scale butchery and a death toll upwards of twenty million. After grueling negotiations, an armistice was at last agreed upon for the 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month in the year 1918. The fighting and the killing continued until the very last moment.

Gravestone of Henry Gunther who died the day the Armistice agreement was signed

The “Victory Edition” of The Sun on Monday, November 11, 1918

Beautifully, in a gut-wrenching way, World War One’s single glorious legacy is that of its almost inexhaustible catalogue of stories bearing witness to the human spirit. Longstanding feuds, reactionary causes and ideological consequences aside, when the struggle is remembered—if remembered at all—the most common associations are the displays of individual compassion and common valor.

American soldiers of the 64th Regiment, 7th Infantry Division celebrate the news of the Armistice, November 11, 1918

Americans should not soon forget the backwoods resourcefulness and courage of Sergeant Alvin York, or the second-generational heroism of Quintin Roosevelt, the trench chaplains or the doctors and nurses who advanced the art of healing on one battlefield after another. Nor those Americans who volunteered in the Lafayette Escadrille or joined the RAF before America’s declared involvement. Eventually, once war was declared, our country lost the lives of over 100,000 of her sons during the last year of the conflict.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottowa, Canada, Remembrance Day 2017

Scattered now across Europe, Australia, Africa and even Asia are touching memorials to the fathers, the sons and the civilians sacrificed over the course of the war’s four years. The aftermath held no such unity. To quote Dr. Bill Potter:

“The repercussions of the war among “intellectuals” and purveyors of cultural mores in Europe, reflected in their art and philosophies a wholesale abandonment of Biblical ethics, moral restraints, and hope in the future. An unrestrained moral turpitude and relativism, born in the evolutionary theories of the previous century, reached their climax in the post-war era. They quickly sifted down to popular culture and produced equally unrestrained offshoots of reaction and nationalistic paganisms represented in the Fascists of Italy and Nazis of Germany, not to speak of the revolutionary excesses of the Bolsheviks in Russia. In modern parlance, The First World War was the tipping point of world-wide change, and not for the better.”

The New York Times front page on November 11, 1918

Enshrined in its mythos are images of no man’s land and an endless labyrinth of trenches stretching across soil that once was fertile and prosperous and called home by those who then died and were interred in it. Yet there are also the symbolic poppies: first blooming thing to erupt from a blood soaked earth. The contrast of ever more sinister methods of destruction too—the gas and the flamethrowers and the introduction of aircraft—side by side with stories of Christmas Truces and the fellowship men on either side shared repeatedly as their personal differences were not so stark as in the following war; Protestant Germans still sang the same hymns in the same tunes as Anglican Englishman, only in a different language, and the German war slogan decreed “God with us”.

WWI Prussian belt buckle reading “GOTT MIT UNS”—God with us

In 1919, a year after the war, American President Woodrow Wilson—who had run and was re-elected on the platform of staying out of the conflict only to later renege on his stance—gave a memorial speech that did little to warm his disgruntled citizenry for the losses incurred during the war, nor the post-war fad pushed by European politicians for a League of Nations. In it he declared: “Never before have men crossed the seas to a foreign land, to fight for a cause which they did not pretend was peculiarly their own, but knew was the cause of humanity and of mankind”. World War One was supposed to be “the war to end all wars” and the humanist dream of educating all evil, cruelty and avarice out human nature soared high after it until it crashed twenty years later with the inevitable and ghastly commencement of the Second World War. It was something many a disillusioned soldier foresaw and dreaded while in the trenches of the first.

An artist’s depiction of the signing of the Armistice agreement on November 11, 1918

Whatever its causes, and however besmirched its legacy, on Remembrance Day it is not the conflict that is honored but the men, fathers and sons all, who gave their lives in the cause of their homelands, their principles and their God. They were a noble generation, reared on the Victorian faith of the likes of Spurgeon and Kuyper, belonging to the generation that sacrificed themselves on the Titanic and claimed the North and South Poles for God’s dominion. When called upon to perform their duty, they did not flinch or falter. Their memorials may be grim, but according to one of the most touching products of their environment—the beloved war poets—they would have you remember them another way. Lieutenant Wilfred Owen served England in the trenches of France and Flanders until his death seven days before the armistice was declared. He left us this:

“I, too, saw God through mud—
The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.”

“Merry it was to laugh there—
Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.”

“I, too, have dropped off fear—
Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear
Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;”

“I have made fellowships—
Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,”

“But Joy, whose ribbon slips,—
But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.”

“I have perceived much beauty
In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight;
Heard music in the silentness of duty;
Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.”

“Nevertheless, except you share
With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare,
And heaven but as the highway for a shell,”

“You shall not hear their mirth:
You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears: You are not worth their merriment.”

Poppy petals rain down in front of the Menin Gate WWI Memorial in Ypres, Belgium

Image Credits: 1 Tower Memorial (wikipedia.org) 2 Postcard (wikipedia.org) 3 Gravestone (wikipedia.org) 4 The Sun (wikipedia.org) 5 American Soldiers (wikipedia.org) 6 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Ottowa, Canada (wikipedia.org) 7 The New York Times (wikipedia.org) 8 “Gott mit uns” (wikipedia.org) 9 Signing (wikipedia.org) 10 Poppies in Ypres, Belgium (wikipedia.org)