The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

November 11, 2013

Today is Armistice Day, commemorating the end of World War I, the “war to end all wars”. The Great War ended 96 years ago today.

Like Confucius, I believe that the essence of truly human life consists in observing rituals and some of those rituals mark actual, individual events or persons. Like Armistice Day. I don’t find that trying to commemorate abstractions or generalities like “veteran-ness” or “presidents” has the same hold on our emotions as remembering actual events or people. Would “Civil Rights Leaders Day” have the same impact as “Martin Luther King’s Birthday”? I don’t think so and I don’t recall a push for it as an alternative when the day was set aside as a holiday.

So, today I’ll continue to reflect on the end of World War I, why it was fought, and the many errors in the peace that followed that caused it to fail to end all wars.

4 comments… add one
  • sam Link

    In Flanders fields the poppies blow
    Between the crosses, row on row,
    That mark our place: and in the sky
    The larks still bravely singing fly
    Scarce heard amid the guns below.

    We are the dead: Short days ago,
    We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
    Loved and were loved: and now we lie
    In Flanders fields!

    Take up our quarrel with the foe
    To you, from failing hands, we throw
    The torch: be yours to hold it high
    If ye break faith with us who die,
    We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
    In Flanders fields.

    Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
    Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
    Where have all the flowers gone?
    Young girls have picked them everyone.
    Oh, when will they ever learn?
    Oh, when will they ever learn?

    Where have all the young girls gone, long time passing?
    Where have all the young girls gone, long time ago?
    Where have all the young girls gone?
    Gone for husbands everyone.
    Oh, when will they ever learn?
    Oh, when will they ever learn?

    Where have all the husbands gone, long time passing?
    Where have all the husbands gone, long time ago?
    Where have all the husbands gone?
    Gone for soldiers everyone
    Oh, when will they ever learn?
    Oh, when will they ever learn?

    Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
    Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?
    Where have all the soldiers gone?
    Gone to graveyards, everyone.
    Oh, when will they ever learn?
    Oh, when will they ever learn?

    Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
    Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
    Where have all the graveyards gone?
    Gone to flowers, everyone.
    Oh, when will they ever learn?
    Oh, when will they ever learn?

    Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
    Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
    Where have all the flowers gone?
    Young girls have picked them everyone.
    Oh, when will they ever learn?
    Oh, when will they ever learn?

  • PD Shaw Link

    We visited the National WWI Museum in Kansas City last month. Very worth the stop, if simply for the grand Art Deco (Egyptian Revival) architecture, with heavily symbolic statues and friezes. Once inside, entry to the museum is across a wide glass bridge over a field of poppies. Well done exhibits and films, with perhaps too much attention on America’s involvement.

  • sam Link

    I was thinking about the First World War the other day, well, specifically about Thomas Mann’s book, The Magic Mountain. The book concerns a young man, Hans Castorp, of no particular mark or moment. An ordinary young man. He goes to visit his cousin, Joachim, who has tuberculosis, at the mountain sanitarium where Joachim is staying. Hans intends only a short visit, but is himself diagnosed with tuberculosis and ends up staying there for seven years. There’s no way to summarize what transpires for Hans on that mountain, that “magic mountain”. Suffice to say that the mountain is magic because the residents of the sanitarium seem to exist in place outside of space and time. In the book we’re told of a song that Joachim taught Hans when they were children. The novel ends with the First World War and a picture of Hans’s participation, singing to himself that song of his childhood in the inferno. From outside of space and time to a space of blood and fire and perhaps little or no time. Here are the closing lines of the closing chapter, The Thunderbolt. I find them inexpressibly moving.

    They fling themselves down before the projectiles that come howling on, then they leap up again and hurry forward; they exult, in their young, breaking voices as they run, to discover themselves still unhit. Or they are hit, they fall, fighting the air with their arms, shot through the forehead, the heart, the belly. They lie, their faces in the mire, and are motionless. They lie, their backs elevated by the knapsack, the crowns of their heads pressed into the mud, and clutch and claw in the air. But the wood emits new swarms, who fling themselves down, who spring up, who, shrieking or silent, blunder forward over the fallen. Ah, this young blood, with its knapsacks and bayonets, its mud-befouled boots and clothing! We look at it, our humanistic-æsthetic eye pictures it among scenes far other than these: we see these youths watering horses on a sunny arm of the sea; roving with the beloved one along the strand, the lover’s lips to the ear of the yielding bride; in happiest rivalry bending the bow. Alas, no, here they lie, their noses in fiery filth. They are glad to be here—albeit with boundless anguish, with unspeakable sickness for home; and this, of itself, is a noble and a shaming thing—but no good reason for bringing them to such a pass.

    There is our friend, there is Hans Castorp! We recognize him at a distance, by the little beard he assumed while sitting at the “bad” Russian table. Like all the others, he is wet through and glowing. He is running, his feet heavy with mould, the bayonet swinging in his hand. Look! He treads on the hand of a fallen comrade; with his hobnailed boot he treads the hand deep into the slimy, branch-strewn ground. But it is he. What, singing? As one sings, unaware, staring stark ahead, yes, thus he spends his hurrying breath, to sing half soundlessly:

    “And loving words I’ve carven Upon its branches fair—”

    He stumbles, No, he has flung himself down, a hell-hound is coming howling, a huge explosive shell, a disgusting sugar-loaf from the infernal regions. He lies with his face in the cool mire, legs sprawled out, feet twisted, heels turned down. The product of a perverted science, laden with death, slopes earthward thirty paces in front of him and buries its nose in the ground; explodes inside there, with hideous expense of power, and raises up a fountain high as a house, of mud, fire, iron, molten metal, scattered fragments of humanity. Where it fell, two youths had lain, friends who in their need flung themselves down together—now they are scattered, commingled and gone. Shame of our shadow-safety! Away! No more!

    —But our friend? Was he hit? He thought so, for the moment. A great clod of earth struck him on the shin, it hurt, but he smiles at it. Up he gets, and staggers on, limping on his earth-bound feet, all unconsciously singing:

    “Its waving branches whispered A mess—age in my ear—”

    and thus, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, vanishes out ot our sight. Farewell, honest Hans Castorp, farewell, Life’s delicate child! Your tale is told. We have told it to the end, and it was neither short nor long, but hermetic. We have told it for its own sake, not for yours, for you were simple. But after all, it was your story, it befell you, you must have more in you than we thought; we will not disclaim the pedagogic weakness we conceived for you in the telling; which could even lead us to press a finger delicately to our eyes at the thought that we shall see you no more, hear you no more for ever. Farewell—and if thou livest or diest! Thy prospects are poor. The desperate dance, in which thy fortunes are caught up, will last yet many a sinful year; we should not care to set a high stake on thy life by the time it ends. We even confess that it is without great concern we leave the question open. Adventures of the flesh and in the spirit, while enhancing thy simplicity, granted thee to know in the spirit what in the flesh thou scarcely couldst have done. Moments there were, when out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee, as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?

  • PD Shaw Link

    An account of the last days of the author William Hope Hodgson:

    “That day, 19 April [1918], William Hope Hodgson was reported missing in action to his C.O. The following day, under continuous fire, the C.O. went to check himself to determine the fate of his F.O.O.’s. He eventually found a French officer who showed him a helmet with the name Lt. W. Hope Hodgson on it—and reported that a British Artillery Officer and a Signaler had suffered a direct hit by a German artillery shell on 19 April and had both been blown nearly completely apart. What little remained was buried on the spot—at the foot of the eastern slop of Mont Kemmel in Belgium.”

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