The 11th of November, specifically at 11AM is a sacred time that has taken on a religious observance among the victorious of World War One. A time to officially remember those who died in that war and the many others since, often with the observation of silence for a minute of more. It is when a nation is supposed to fall silent, stand still and dip it’s head for those who died in the service of King, President, Empire Or Government. It is to remember the millions who died in war that ended ancient dynasties and gave rise to new ones, a war that was supposed to be so terrible that it should have ended all wars. Instead in it’s aftermath we have seen a century plus of conflicts and carnage emerge because of it.
By November 1918, the Russian empire was no more, allowing for the German and Austro-Hungarian attention to switch West and Southwards. Both empires themselves starved and suffering beneath the weight of attrition. By then the United States was now fighting in the war, it was a desperate situation for the Central Powers. Peace was negotiated, and an armistice was reached. After four horrible years, there would be peace.
With days of preliminary negotiations, the Kaiser vacating his throne on 9th November, the new German Republic signed the Armistice with the Allied representatives in a railway carriage at 5am on the 11th November.
War makes communication unreliable at the best of times and in an age where new technology was used alongside ancient methods, the word spread both fast and slow.
British Prime Minister released his official communique at 10:20am that day to the people of Great Britain, ““The armistice was signed at five o’clock this morning, and hostilities are to cease on all fronts at 11 a.m. to-day.”
The news reached the front line with a mixed reaction, joy, relief, exhaustion, wariness, disbelief and in some cases anger. Those who had sacrificed and lost close ones felt a need to justify such hardship with total victory, while others were happy that it was all over. Some had matured into adulthood while serving in war, it was all they had known. Others had been mutilated in mind and body that such news could never reach them.
Despite being informed of the Armistice and when hostilities were to end, fighting raged up until that hour. An urgency to claim more ground before the war officially ended led to the needless death of more soldiers. Canadian force at Mons were ordered to fight hard by their General Sir Arthur Currie, who had received the news about the Armistice at 6am that morning. Instead of giving his men a safer uneasy peace for five hours, he sent them into the Hell of war.
Canadian Private George Lawrence Price was the last known Allied casualty of the war, when a German sniper took his life just two minutes before the end of hostilities was to be observed. What was to be gained from his death is only known in the minds of warmongers.
Many others died after the Armistice from the injuries they had been inflicted in the hours, days and weeks prior. The war slowly consuming thousands despite the signatures of ‘great men’ on a piece of paper,
The war was not limited to just Europe, those in Africa and the Middle East slowly ceased hostilities, and navigated the complex nature of colonial rule alongside the emergence of new Nation States, where old enemies suddenly became uneasy comrades against locals and bandits. A tradition that would happen on a greater scale at the end of World War Two, when thousands of Japanese soldiers remained on active duty serving the Allies to preserve colonial possessions at the expense of independent movements and the promises they had received. Such is imperialism.
The lesson the Great War is that it never should have happened, the death of an imperial regent led to the mass murder of millions. An event of hubris and arrogant ignorance which led to vile men pushing their hands across the map, ignoring terrain, modern warfare or the well-being of those involved. It was a war that began with Statesmen and Regents signatures and just as magically it ended with inked names on paper.
It is a war that in its final moments of death led to the birth of the deadly infections of Bolshevism, Fascism, Hitlerism, variations of national Communism and the ‘Spanish Flu’. It would be the cause of World War Two, the realities of the ongoing wars in the Middle East, much of Africa and Asia since. Genocides occurred during, and many others would happen afterwards. It was a war that did not end on 11-11-11-18. With names like Sykes-Picout, Balfour and so on tainting the future of the world, to the point that we would see the fingerprints of such signatures in murder armies such as ISIS.
Inside the nations that identify as “free” the end of the war reigned in greater surveillance powers, more taxation, a debt economy to be paid for by each generation thereafter, collectivised prohibitions, censorship, aerial policing that culminated into dropping bombs from aircraft onto civilians and an exceptionalism based on the notion that variations of democracy as the victor in the Great War thus should be worshipped as the most moral ideology.
Many died, suffered and experienced tremendous loss due to the Great War. A miserable mark in human history that has gone on to leave other moments and periods of horror. Lest we not forget those who died. But also the legacy of the war itself and each war after. Young men volunteered or were press ganged to serve, enslaved and eager to go fight across the world. Millions died, not all of them soldiers or men. It was a war that claimed many civilians as well. Lest we not forget them. In that moment of symbolic remembrance, don’t forget the history that spiralled from the assassins bullet when it took the Archduke’s life in 1914, by 1918 several millions more had fallen and humanity was worse for it. Lest we Forget.
