Centennial of 1918 Armistice

November 11, 2018 is the centennial of Armistice Day, 100 years after the signing of the agreement that led to the ending of the War to End All Wars (World War I). At the time it was a momentous event that brought a horrific war to an end. This is often overshadowed by what came next and brought about the Second World War, but there is no reason that the First World War should be forgotten, nor what brought that conflict to a close. The Armistice of November 11, 1918 is a pivotal point in history and is the origin of what we call Veterans Day today. After all, why should those who died in that war be the only ones to be honored when other wars had been fought and would be fought in the future? Perhaps the best answer to that is “Know your history”. People should know where our traditions come from and why they are important enough to have their own commemorative day. 

Nobody alive today fought in the war, and any alive today who had lived through the war were far too young to remember anything of it except what others would tell them. Often what they were told are reflections that their elders wished them to understand. Some of it dealing with the horrors the war promulgated, some talking about heroism of those involved, and those who can tell people how the war affected people in the United States. These stories are then handed down to the next generation by word of mouth, journals, and historians that have done their research and document their findings. The folklorist in me of course loves to hear and read about personal stories; what their experiences were like no matter how good, bad, or far-fetched they seem. No story is irrelevant. What did the people think they were doing when being sent across the Atlantic to a strange battlefield?

The history and personal experiences of those involved are important things that should never be forgotten. The history books will lay out the major figures who lead their countries or the armies in the field. We hear talk of major battles like those of Verdun, the First and Second Battles of Ypres, Lorraine, and Ardennes; how they affected the strategic actions of armies and how they shaped the attitudes of leaders, soldiers, and then the common everyday people. Names of places and numbers of soldiers involved can give a good idea of how important each country felt the outcome of this war was. But then, this is statistics, names and numbers. The true human side of things is best understood by other sources.

One of these other sources is oral history that is passed down from one generation to the next. A father can tell his children what life was like out on the battlefield. There are horrors of all kinds to talk about, instances of creating new friendships and stronger bonds, or stories of heroism and overcoming struggles against impossible odds. Personal accounts and memories might not be seen as the most factually reliable, but the basic understanding of human experience is what one best gleans from those sources. We don’t have just statistics, we have names and faces to plant on the maps of the battlefields. We have the human experience of soldiers who were stuck in No Man’s Land and the people who hid in trenches as shells exploded over their heads. Friends who died next to them or dragged them to safety under hails of fire are described. Then there was just those days where nothing really happened and the soldiers simply had to follow their routines while waiting for their next action.

Along with stories passed down orally are the journals that were kept by many of the soldiers on both sides. Like the stories passed down by word of mouth they are the personal stories of soldiers, but are more static, stamping that perspective in time and subject to less variation as time goes on. Being personal and written down, a lot more information can be preserved for future readers. It also has greater potential to reach much larger audiences outside of the immediate sphere of the ones who wrote them. In this instance the stories are already gathered and those particular accounts don’t need to be obtained face to face unless one wishes clarification. The war being over, the clarification we can get is really only from those things written down, unless some story was orally transmitted by that writer to the next generation. One could also add the works of fiction writers like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front that gives good descriptions of conditions, attitudes, and perspectives of the German army, having experienced them himself on the western battlefields.

All of these sources have their parts to play in remembrance of events during the War to End All Wars; but there is another place to find a kind of personal take on what the war was like and what it meant to those involved. These were the Trench Poets; the men who delved into the emotions to explain the true experience of those in the field and on the front lines. Siegfried Sassoon with talk of the dreariness of the soldiers who suffered through battle only to find more suffering on the horizon, Wilfred Owen describing the experience of being gassed, or John McCrae’s ghosts of Flanders fields all have their own take on human life and death on the battlefield. The words of these poets have been immortalized in the canons of literature for future generations to see.

Several of them would die in the war, for they were often on the battlefields themselves; experiencing firsthand what other soldiers were going through. Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorely were among them. Most did survive and continued to write past the days of the Armistice. To them we owe a great debt of gratitude along with the journal writers, tellers of personal stories, and what the historians have given.

One of these poets wrote about the Armistice and what it meant. These are the words for the poem by Robert Graves’ “Armistice Day”.

Armistice Day, 1918 by Robert Graves

What all this hubbub and yelling,

Commotion and scamper of feet,

With ear-splitting clatter of kettles and cans,

Wild laughter down Mafeking Street?

O, those are the kids whom we fought for

(You might think they'd been scoffing our rum)

With flags that they waved when we marched off to war

In the rapture of bugle and drum.

Now they'll hang Kaiser Bill from a lamp-post,

Von Tirpitz they'll hang from a tree...

We've been promised a "Land Fit for Heroes'...

What heroes we heroes must be!

And the guns that we took from the Fritzes,

 That we paid for with rivers of blood,

Look, they're hauling them down to Old Battersea Bridge

Where they'll topple them, souse, in the mud!

But their's old men and women in corners

With tears falling fast on their cheeks,

There's the armless and legless and sightless--

It's seldom that one of them speaks.

And there's flappers gone drunk and indecent

Their skirts kilted up to the thigh,

The constables lifting no hand in reproof

And the chaplain averting his eye...

When the days of rejoicing are over,

When the flags are stowed safely away,

They will dream of another 'War to End All Wars'

And another wild Armistice day.

But the boys who were killed in the trenches,

Who fought with no rage or no rant,

We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud

Low down with the worm and the ant.

Despite this attitude by some, the Armistice was celebrated throughout Europe and America , bringing to an end the War to End All Wars. Graves clearly doubted the grand notions of perpetual peace, but ending hostilities was good news to all those who had taken part.

It has now been a hundred years since the signing of the Armistice. Other wars would arise, but this event brought an end to the first war of its kind to be experienced by so many countries. Each country learned something different as a result of the conflict, but on this day in 1918 there was a great sigh of relief. The next actions of the nations would be to make sure such a conflict would never happen again. Those following actions failed to secure peace eternal, but this day clearly stamped an idea that peace was never completely out of reach.