Everyone suddenly burst out singing;And I was filled with such delightAs prisoned birds must find in freedom,Winging wildly across the whiteOrchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;And beauty came like the setting sun:My heart was shaken with tears; and horrorDrifted away … O, but EveryoneWas a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.(“Everyone Sang”, Siegfried Sassoon, 1918)
As a historian of the First World War, today is a pretty big day in the Calendar of Days Worth Remembering. Though we in the US use the day to thank living veterans of wars, it also important, I think, to realize why we have a holiday today at all…
The First World War changed life for nearly everyone, in some way. Soldiers from India and Africa were brought to Europe, encountering their colonial leaders face-to-face for the first time; revolutions overturned centuries-old governments. Humanity got penicillin, plastic surgery, the wristwatch, the passport, and the spork (no seriously. The American Army developed it as a way of saving metal). The landscape of Europe remains scarred in some places with the remnants of trenches that stretched across the entire continent, from the edge of the North Sea in Belgium to the very edge of neutral Switzerland.
That’s one of those facts that people like to throw around. It’s a big, sprawling fact that doesn’t begin to tell you what it was like to live in those trenches. Side-by-side with other human bodies, who didn’t bathe, or change any article of their clothing for weeks. Who had to sleep in caves carved into the sides of those trenches, and, as a result, were always tired. Who often only had canned food and crackers to eat, because the cooking posts were behind the lines. Cooks would strap these huge barrel-like things filled with soup or oatmeal onto their backs and walked them up to the men…and snipers took special pride in shooting the barrel, so that when the cooks arrived in the trenches, the barrel was empty.
Similarly, we’ve all heard about the enormous casualty figures from the First World War…the horrifically short-sighted battle plans, the endlessly repetitive attacks that never obtained their objectives…But what we can’t reclaim just how big the whole thing was…To say that the were 54 combatant nations were involved, that war was fought in Asia, in Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa, in the sky, on and beneath the sea still doesn’t convey the sheer number of people who fought, who nursed, who made munitions, who provided care, and who protested the war on moral or political grounds. Telling you about the size or scope of a battle can’t convey what it was like to be in the middle of that utter, total chaos of a battle. We can’t imagine what it was like to be that scared. We physically cannot imagine the noise of it, especially on that last day.
Official communications had gone out the day before, so all officers, and most of the men knew that the war was going to officially end at 11am on the 11th of November in 1918. As a result, more shells were fired that morning than had been fired for the entire month previously. Casualty numbers were higher on November 11 than they had been for three months.
And then…the war was over.
But for those at home, the losses that had been endured were endless. Some 17 million people had died. In France, that amounted to roughly one man a minute. In England, the government officially banned the wearing of mourning clothes, out of fear that home front morale would collapse at the sight of so much loss. And even though church bells rang out in nearly every combatant nation, it couldn’t drown out those memories.
Even today, there are reminders of that war. Memorials abound in the combatant nations, and dot the farmlands of France and Belgium. There are nine villages in France that literally ceased to exist during the war because they were so heavily bombed–but they remain on maps and in ordinance surveys as a way to commemorate their memory. The ground still yields unexploded shells and grenades that have to be collected and defused by specially-trained volunteers. In Belgium, the Last Post is played every evening at the Menin Gate, where some 3 million Allied soldiers passed during the course of the war.
So, even while we’re thanking our veterans today, it’s worth taking a moment and remembering the day the world literally came to a stop–and for just a moment, was silent.
If you’d like to learn some more about the First World War, stop by the library, and check out:
The Greatest Day in History: Nicholas Best has compiled the recollections of some of the war’s more noteworthy participants from November 11, 1918. Among the voices in this book are Agatha Christie, Harry Truman, Marlene Dietrich, Douglas MacArthur, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi. It not only gives the reader an idea of just how many lives were shaped by the war, and profoundly changed by its ending, but just how varied a war it was, in terms of experience and reaction.
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World: All of Margaret MacMillan’s books on the First World War are expertly researched and beautifully engaging, but this particular book does a sensational job at showing just how makeshift the process of crafting the Treaty of Versailles truly war. The strong personalities that sought to bring an end to the war, from Woodrow Wilson to George Clemenceau to Lawrence of Arabia are all here, and each of their voices can be heard throughout the text, making a tale of diplomatic history into something fascinating and vital.
The Guns of August: Barbara Tuchman was one ofhte first female historians to intervene into the history of the First World War…and history was infinitely the better for it. Her book, detailing the opening weeks of the First World War, is one of the most accessible, personal, and sympathetic works of military history you can find, and it really challenges a lot of the over-simplified explanations for the outbreak of war that we are taught in school.
World War One: The African Front: Edward Paice is one of those rare historians who can tell completely factual story that reads like fiction. Granted, a lot of the story of the First World War in Africa seems too fantastic to be believed, so he is perfectly suited to write this story. For those who already know about the Western Front, or want to explore other, less discussed aspects of this war, this book is the perfect place to begin.