Armistice Day Held Lessons for Us All

At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, a cease-fire was declared to end World War I. For 35 years Americans commemorated this as a holiday, Armistice Day.

On June 1, 1954, in the depth of the Cold War, at a time when the infamy of the Axis powers was blithely transferred to the Soviets, in an age when negotiated solutions to global problems smelled of appeasement, during the watch of America as world policeman, Armistice Day became Veterans Day. It was felt that World War I was no longer relevant, at least not as relevant as giving the living veterans of the armed services some recognition equal to the honor bestowed on the dead each Memorial Day. And celebrating an armistice seemed a bit spineless.

Veterans Day is still linked (and confused) with Memorial Day. It becomes sort of a fall re-run, another holiday whose purpose has been largely forgotten. I propose that history has brought us around again to a point where we’re more open to observing Nov. 11 as a remembrance of armistice--of peace.

It’s not that I am opposed to the observations that salute Americans who went to war. I find that many of them rise almost to the level of poetry: the embrace of veterans in reunion, the salute of the disabled as a parade moves by, a lone figure lingering in the sea of crosses at Arlington National Cemetery, a trembling finger tracing the names of the dead on the Vietnam War Memorial.

But these images have been distorted by politicians who appropriate the somber dignity of those two days to blather about some pet ideology or program. Their speeches often are staged at veterans’ cemeteries, in front of the attentive crosses, as if the dead by their very silence give their assent to the nonsense that echoes over them.

It was politicians who created Veterans Day, looking for some totem that would be more in the spirit of sacrifice then considered necessary for Pax Americana. It came about in an age obsessed with World War II as the model for interpreting the present and forecasting the future. Today, in terms of speculating about potential conflict with the Soviets, World War I seems the more suitable model. It is in the trenches of Verdun, not in Munich or even Hiroshima, where the pattern for World War III can be found.

World War I was partly the result of an arms race, partly the result of regional frictions among the major powers (in what we now consider the Third World), and partly the result of a system of alliances designed to contain the ambitions of “the enemy.” The war itself was a horrifying shock; most of the participants expected only a six-week campaign. Instead, what emerged was a war shaped more by poorly understood technology (machine guns, poison gas, super artillery, airplanes) than by strategy, a war of attrition where an opponent was “bled white”--the victor being determined by body count. The war produced hideous casualties: the Germans suffered 64% killed or wounded, the French 73%, the Russians 76%, the Austrians 90%. Many of those who fell in “no man’s land” (the territory between the combatants where the fighting took place) were never found, their bodies too pulverized for recognition, collection or burial.

The war ended without a clear victor (although Germany would have been a clear loser, had it continued). In one way or another all of the combatants were losers. The men who crawled from the trenches at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 emerged not as heroes, not as victors, but as survivors. They embraced their opponents, they danced, they celebrated turning the clock back from the midnight of Europe’s annihilation.

The armistice was worth celebrating then; it is worth remembering today, when the nuclear clock is within seconds of striking midnight for us all. It is worth remembering a war that was initiated by rational, well-intentioned leaders, each motivated by his concept of national security, each confident in his generals, each mesmerized by the military possibilities of the new century’s technological wizardry. It is worth asking that the leaders who succeeded those unintended architects of carnage pause with us on Nov. 11 and contemplate the past and the future together.