Our national holidays’ names tend to change as society changes.
What was once Decoration Day — the day on which surviving family members groomed and flowered the graves of their deceased military loved ones — is now simply Memorial Day. Columbus Day has begun a slow and tortured transition to Indigenous People’s Day, in honor of those displaced by European immigration. And there’s a growing sentiment that we should at least consider changing Presidents Day — an abstraction, when so few us anymore can remember actually seeing Washington or Lincoln — to a national holiday as Election Day. That last one I think a winner, though in the current political climate unlikely to go anywhere.
There’s another holiday that we’re currently closing in on that, though observed with enthusiasm in many circles, has almost totally lost touch with its origins. Veterans Day is the descendant of Armistice Day — which is what we called it in my childhood — the commemoration of the signing of the armistice (not a peace treaty or a surrender, but an agreement to pause armed activity, like the one in Korea) between the Allies and the Germans to end World War I. It was famously solemnized in a railway car parked in a French forest at 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month. A message from the commanding general had reached the front lines that morning:
Official radio from Paris — 6:01 a.m., Nov 11, 1918. Marshal Foch to the Commander-in-Chief.
1. Hostilities will be stopped on the entire front beginning at 11 o’clock, November 11th (French hour).
2. The Allied troops will not go beyond the line reached at that hour on that date until further orders.
Signed — Marshal Foch — 5:45 a.m.
Thus ended the War to End All Wars, which wiped out virtually an entire generation of young men from Britain, Germany, France and Australia. The United States, which eventually committed 1.2 million troops, lost about 120,000, more than twice the number lost later in the much longer Vietnam War.
The U.S. entered the war only after multiple provocations — the sinking of the Lusitania being one — and at the urging of American bankers, who’d lent roughly $3 billion to the struggling allies and would not recoup it if they lost. The first Americans — only 190 of them — landed in France in June 1917 and marched to the grave of the Marquis de Lafayette, who’d been a key helper in the American Revolution. There, Lt. Col. Charles Stanton made his unforgettable declaration, “Nous voila, Lafayette!” We are here!
The war was one in which — as in many others, the American Civil War among them — defensive positions were dominant. The infantry and cavalry charges of the 19th century were met with massed artillery and, later, barbed wire entanglements and machine gun fire. The response was entrenchment and stasis, the remains of which are described in The End of the Line, by William Vollmann in the October issue of Smithsonian. The common soldiers suffered as much from trench life as from enemy activity.
By 100 years ago this week, the German armies were pressed all across their long front with the Allies. An attempted breakout (eerily like the Battle of the Bulge only 27 years later) had failed. More and more German strongpoints fell to and were successfully occupied by Allied troops. Both sides were exhausted by what both sides had once fervently embraced. Two German admirals, in a last-ditch attempt to reverse matters, planned an unauthorized sea engagement with the British Royal Navy. But their sailors mutinied — shades of the battleship Potemkin — and it was obvious the war was kaput. The monarchy collapsed, and on the 20th the German government replied to President Woodrow Wilson’s proposals for cessation of hostilities. Just before the signing of the armistice, the kaiser fled across the border to neutral Holland, where he spent the rest of his life, the Dutch government refusing to extradite him for prosecution.
The first Armistice commemoration was held at Buckingham Palace on Nov. 11, 1919, at the order of King George V. President Wilson set the day aside, as well, and Congress approved it as a national holiday in 1926, then renamed it Veterans Day in 1954, during the Korean War.
Could such a war happen again? World War II proved that it could, and Vollmann is pessimistic: “(I)n the next 800 or even 200 years (if human beings persist on this earth so long) there will be another one, at which time the iron ghosts of the trenches will come shrieking back.” Yuval Harari, however, in his latest book, Homo Deus, points out that nations now fear nuclear warfare as “a mad act of collective suicide.” Thus, “in 2012 … war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000 … and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”
As we commemorate on Nov. 11 the cost of what was won for all of us on the battlefields of the 20th century, we may come to realize that the most dangerous threat to human existence has always been the innate perversity of human nature.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
