On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 the Great War ended. On battlefields throughout Europe corpses rotted, as did much of the claim and spirit of civilization of The West.

To understand the impact of the war on the great colonial powers it’s instructive, and horrifying, to look at the raw and bloody price we of The West paid for this conflict. The British, for example, had 850,000 solders killed, and another 1.6 million wounded of 45 million people. An entire generation of young men lay under the fields.

From time to time, and always on the November 11^th, I like to look up a poem I stumbled on when I was younger that I find particularly moving… ‘Armistice’ by Paul Dehn. Read it once, it’s quite a bore. Read it a few times and you’ll want to empty your stomach (and considering the subject, that’s not such a bad thing).

Armistice

Paul Dehn 

It is finished. The enormous dust-cloud over Europe 
Lifts like a million swallows’ and a light, 
Drifting in craters, touches the quiet dead. 
Now, at the bugle’s hour, before the blood 
Cakes in a clean wind on their marble faces, 
Making them monuments; before the sun, 
Hung like a medal on the smoky noon, 
Whitens the bone that feeds the earth; before 
Wheat-ear springs green, again, in the green spring
And they are break in the bodies of the young: 
Be strong to remember how the bread died, screaming; 
Gangrene was corn, and monuments went mad.

Unlike the folks who have ‘War Never Solved Anything’ bumper stickers plastering their cars I believe that war actually has a pretty strong historical record of solving any number of disagreements. But, and particularly since I’ve had children, my inclination to solve problems in this manner has certainly been reduced.

I mean by this that it’s easy to talk of sacrifice, but Christ I can’t imagine what I would do if it were my son, Wills, who fed the wheat. I would encourage his service, and I believe that we will need to be willing to suffer deaths to maintain both the United States and what I consider civilization, but if he died screaming, I’m not at all sure I could live with it. Or if I did that I would be at all the same again.

And I can’t imagine sitting here how the 20 some odd million parent of the 10 million WWI battle deaths of the war handled their loss. And Armistice Day is as good as day as any to reflect on that.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.