The Long, Long Trail -- Thoughts on the Evolution of the Identity of Armistice Day

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen cold
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow'd from the candle's guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head....
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

-The Dugout, by Siegfreid Sassoon, from The War Poems, 1919

First off, Happy Armistice Day, everyone! I know most Americans are probably thinking, "Merc, where has your head gone? It's Veteran's Day, you ninny!"

And you'd be right. Today is, technically, Veteran's Day. Has been since 1954. But in 1919, per an order from then-president Woodrow Wilson, today was Armistice Day, because on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, peace was declared between the allied powers of England, Russia, France, and Italy and the Central Powers of Germany, Austria, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. On the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour, people around the country would gather to celebrate the end of the war that was supposed to end all wars, the last gasp of a dying style of warfare and the first breath of the beginning of another.

Never again would the enemy be a man you could forget your differences with and play a game of soccer in no-man's land with, as with the Christmas Truce of 1914. Weapons could shoot further, more accurately, and with increased effect. You were removed from the man you were killing with shells and gas and later, napalm and missiles, weapons that would be fired from far off so that the effect was never seen by the man doing the firing. It became a common tactic to make your enemy into something less than human -- Jerry, gook, Victor Charlie -- so it was even easier to kill him.

Armistice Day used to be a day to celebrate peace -- that's what the original act to make it a national holiday stated. "A day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as 'Armistice Day'."

In 1953, someone decided we needed a day to celebrate veterans, and another act of Congress changed Armistice Day into Veterans Day. I agree that veterans have a right to be celebrated, for the sacrifices they make are great and worthy of remembrance, but did they have to take the one day out of the year that was designated to remembering the cause of peace?

You're probably wondering why I'm writing about this on a blog dedicated to writing. World War One was the Great War -- it inspired a generation of writers, Fitzgerald, Remarque and Hemingway among them, and dozens of poets who brought to life in words that remain with us today the horrors of what war could do. Sassoon, Owen, Brooke, and other less famous names wrote about what they saw daily in the trenches, and told thier families it shouldn't happen again.

"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin...
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
the old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori," Wilfred Owen wrote bitterly in one of the most famous war poems of that era, "Dulce Et Decorum Est," or "It is Sweet and Right." Owen could find nothing sweet and right about war, and neither could many of his comrades. World War One was supposed to end all wars because it was brutal and too many good, young man died uselessly, trying to move lines yards at a time instead of miles.

So today, while you are celebrating the men and women who gave their lives, their fortunes, and thier sacred honor, to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence, to the cause of America, please take a moment to remember the Armistice, and remember that the goal of all wars should ultimately be peace, and the removal of the need for more conflict.

I'm going to end this post with one of my favorite poems by my favorite hometown poet, Carl Sandberg. I think it deals very well with the cause of peace, and the necessity of it. It is entitled simply "Grass."

PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass;
I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.