Veterans Day 2011

11 – 11 – 11

Veterans Day, a k a Armistice Day: I awake at 1:30 in the morning under a waning full moon. I can’t get back to sleep, and I’m not sure why.

I’ve been reading a biography of Juliette Lowe, and I’ve just gotten to the part where she’s in England when Germany declares war and “the war to end all wars” begins.  World War I, the “Great War.”

That was in the summer of 1914, after the Archduke of Austria was assassinated. Austro-Hungarian forces invaded Serbia, Germany invaded France, Belgium and Luxembourg. The “great powers” of the time had colonies and alliances all over the world and soon the conflict was really global.

As I lie awake, I think of our grandfather Charlie, whom the outside world knew, by the end of his life, as Maj. Gen. Charles E. Kilbourne – holder of the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Croix de Guerre and Legion d’Honneur, all except the Medal of Honor garnered in the fields of France and Germany, where he led brigades of infantry and heavy artillery during 1918, losing an eye and storming a German machine gun nest in the middle of the night.

Nineteen eighteen. It is now, was in the dark hours of this morning, exactly 93 years since the guns fell silent across the war-ravaged heart of Europe. In its current museum exhibit, the Marshall Foundation in Lexington is featuring the diaries of a Bedford soldier named H.E. Simpson, who wrote of how they lay in the rat-infested trenches listening to the screams of dying men and mules – the mules that drew the caissons – and staggered out in disbelief on that winter morning to the Armistice.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. My grandfather said in the 1930s that no man who has experienced war would want it. He described the 30 minutes of waiting to go “over the top” to face the raking enemy artillery, and how “the underground beasts came to live with you. All night in the trenches you could hear them squeaking” – the rats that fed on bloated and frozen corpses in the smoke-filled, barbed-wire-entangled fields that Frederic Celine described as the “voyage to the bottom of the night.”

The esoteric philosophers say that the number 11 is a gate, and that multiple 11s show us the way to a new age. The Aquarian Age, some say. I lay there thinking of how this morning, under the still full moon, for the first time ever that fateful hour of that fateful day is quadrupled: 11/11/11/11, if you will. May it be a harbinger of a better world.

And I thought, finally, of all the European conflicts we have now largely forgotten. To me, our American Civil War was the precursor – in terms of weaponry – of the deadly havoc of World War I. But meanwhile, Europeans were perfecting the art on their side in the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Boer War. Who remembers now the “charge of the light brigade,” or that Paris fell to Germany more than once, or for that matter, in World War I, Gallipoli or who the players were in the Triple Entente or the Central Powers?

There is an infinite sadness to all of this, laced with the continuing denouement of colonialism, for which an unintended consequence is most of the wars still being fought on the planet today.

With its rapid-fire weapons, trench warfare, men on horseback and mule-drawn cannons – all overflown by fledgling aircraft – World War I is worth pausing over, to remember better. It was both a beginning and an end,  horrific, messy and all too human, a major crossroads in the annals of military strategy and personal suffering.

So on this Veterans Day let us salute all of those, whatever their allegiance, who went with courage, conviction and a belief in their cause, to die in Flanders’ fields and all over the world. May they rest in peace.  And may there truly, somehow, be Armistice.

The war to end all wars … 

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