ARMISTICE DAY

by William H. Benson

November 9, 2000

     The Great War introduced to the world the trench–an end-to-end grave, international in length.  Deep gashes in the idyllic French countryside, the trenches became the scenes of repeated mass attacks and mass slaughters, and then when the rains came, the trenches turned into rat-infested muddy swamps.  Inside them life was exceedingly miserable.

     “Over the top!” a battlefront commander would shout to his men, and then they would climb up and out of the trench, dash into the no-man’s land, throw their grenades, and then struggle through the barbed-wire.  Enemy machine gun fire mowed them down and made successful charges virtually impossible.  The trench system of warfare became a human meatgrinder.

     Men had to look deep inside themselves for the courage to climb up and out of the trench and then charge at the enemy, knowing full well that death was more than just a potential but almost a definite thing.

     The casualties escalated exponentially.  Some 8,538,315 men were killed during those four years in the trenches.  Also, of the 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus, the total deaths approached 10,000,000, and this does not even include the civilians killed.  This ten million plus figure dwarfs even the number lost in the Holocaust decades later.

     The war ended, and then the ongoing trauma set in which quickly yielded to disillusionment.  The realization of what had occurred fell hard among the more thoughtful Europeans.  “How could this have been allowed to happen?” was a frequent question they asked, for diplomacy with its safeguards had failed; rather, it was the politicians who had utterly failed.  And it was they who then pointed their fingers at the convenient nearby scapegoats–the Communists or the Jews, rather than shoulder the burden of their own guilt of their own failure.

     Europe was supposed to have the most advanced and the most civilized of the world’s nations.  The same countries that had produced opera, Mozart and Beethoven, the stage, the cathedrals, and the centuries-old traditions of royalty had in four short years slid deep into a morass, into a barbarism where young men were not asked to pursue the arts and the sciences and the trades, but instead were asked to die in muddy trenches on Flanders Fields.

     So little was accomplished in those trenches, other than sew the seeds of a second World War, for the peace treaty failed to solve the problem of Germany.  When he read the peace treaty, the German Marshal Foch burst out, “This isn’t peace!  This is a truce for twenty years!”  The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919.  Twenty years and sixty-seven days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Hitler’s Germany.

     More than any other conflict in human history, the Great War illustrates the wastefulness of war as a social process.  The chief difficulty of violence is its uncontrollability.  Both world wars of the twentieth century have demonstrated man’s willingness to go as far as he physically could on the path to self-destruction.  Once man enters the world of force and the world of the irrational, his ability to impose rational limits on his actions becomes increasingly precarious.    

     For those men stuck knee-deep in water and mud inside those trenches during those first few days of November 1918, the future looked very bleak.  Winter was approaching.  It would soon be their turn to do their duty and go over the top.  Then, they heard the good news that the nations’ leaders on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 had agreed to stop the fighting.

     “But now the thing was over.  An uncanny silence enveloped the trenches.  Cautiously, unbelievingly, the men raised themselves above their trenches, shell holes, and dugouts, and stared at the opposing lines.  Soon they became very excited, and often regrettably drunk; and, as the once-hostile armies merged, the men exchanged cigarettes, wine, embraces, and souvenirs.  Then came the stern, inevitable order forbidding fraternization with the former enemy.”  

     Armistice Day had arrived.