The Silence of the Guns

The guns fell silent one hundred yeas ago today at this moment, one minute after John Gunther was killed, ending the First World War. It was, at the time, the bloodiest war in history.

Armistice Day was first commemorated a year later.

Field Marshal Foch turned out to be correct when he said that the resultant peace was just a twenty-year armistice.

One hundred years. Everyone who was in the war, everyone who had any first-hand recollection of the war is gone. My grandfather had two infant sons in 1917 that he called his "weather-stripping," because they kept him out of the draft. They're gone, too.

There's a tangible difference between learning history from those who were there and from books. When my English class read 1984, the elderly teacher had been a teenaged girl during the First World War. She told us that before a movie rolled, somebody would stand up before the audience and tell why it was so necessary to send their young men to fight the Kaiser-- the "two minute hate" had been a real thing.

The sad thing is that there is a sense that the lessons of that war are fading. That we're heading back towards a time when the only ways that disputes between nations were resolved was by trade wars and shooting wars. Leaders are starting to take up smoking in powder magazines.

Anyway, as I'm sure that I've ranted before, anyone who is running a "Veterans Day Sale" should have one testicle crushed with a mallet.