Armistice Day

[hummingwolf]

Somewhere beyond the mist and the misery on that November morning, six men met in a railcar to end a war. News of the truce moved through the trenches on the trembling lips of soldiers waiting for the screams of flying shells to cease before they believed what they were told. Some heard it first from their captains who distributed strips of paper that read: "Cease firing on all fronts. 11/11/11. Gen. John J. Pershing." Others would never know. They were the unlucky ones killed in the fragile hours before 11 A.M., before the fighting abruptly stopped. The silence, so unfamiliar, was almost as unsettling as the sounds, as if a giant hand suddenly lay across this land of rotting flesh to hush the din of battle. Silence. Prayers. Tears. Then came the roar of cheering and the popping of bonfires piled high with captured ammunition and anything that could burn. The madness was ending, or so it seemed. And fear was giving way to hope.

"One minute we was killing people," a soldier later said, "and then the world was at peace for the first time in four years. It seemed like five minutes of silence and then one of us said, 'Why don't we go home?'"

"I shall never forget the sensation," wrote an officer who climbed out of the trenches when he saw rockets signaling the cease-fire. Onto the open, unprotected ground, he walked toward the front lines of battle. The sun shining on his vulnerability, he moved tentatively, as if the earth beneath each foot might cave in. First he saw German helmets and caps vaulting into a distant haze and then beyond a ridge he saw German soldiers dancing a universal jig of joy. "We stood in a dazed silence unable to believe that at last the fighting was over."

--From "Armistice Day 1918", the Prologue to Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 by Ann Hagedorn


U.S.-centered links of interest:
Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress
Military and Veterans Records at the National Archives

Comments

[rhiannasilel.livejournal.com]

My grandfather was a WWI vet so this kind of means a lot to me. I never met him since he died several years before I was ever born but I've always found some mystique about the fact that he was in the War to End All Wars.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

One of my grandfathers fought in WWI too. Somewhere there's a photograph of him and his sons on Veteran's Day, all of them dressed in their old uniforms (the younger generation were all veterans of either WWII or Korea, though my Dad never saw any fighting).

[rhiannasilel.livejournal.com]

My Dad's technically a Korea vet, too, but he never went to Korea. He was stationed in Hawaii and Kwajalein Island for the Air Force.