Lest We Forget

Forgive the indulgence, but let me repost what I wrote a year ago, although this time I am off the road, not on:

I will be on the road this weekend, so let me comment on Armistice Day two days early.  Of course, we don't celebrate Armistice Day anymore.  I think that is a shame.  This is not to say the the current holiday, Veterans Day, is a bad one (quite the contrary), but remembering the First World War as a separate event would aid our historical memory. 

Winston Churchill opens his history of the Second World War thusly:

I must regard these volumes as a continuation of the story of the first World War which I set out in The World Crisis, The Eastern Front, and The Aftermath.  Together, if the present work is completed, they will cover an account of another Thirty Years War. 

Churchill saw the the two wars an inextricably linked, indeed, almost seamless.  It is fair to say that the First World War, with its contribution to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and its hand in the rise of Hitler in Germany, set the tone for the entire 20th Century.  The horror of the war explains much, in my opinion, of present day European politics.  The war decimated a continent and, it can be argued, destroyed in Europe faith in what we call Western Civilization.  I think it is no coincidence that Churchill ultimately saw the United States as the great defender of that civilization. 

What was the cost in lives of the First World War?  According to John Keegan, by war's end two million Frenchman had died, leaving 630,000 war widows.  The conscript classes of 1912-1915, the youngest French soldiers, lost between 27 and 30 percent.  A similar number of Germans died in the war.  Keegan points out that as a percentage, no nation lost more than Serbia.  Out of a pre-war population of five million, 125,000 died in combat, but another 650,000 civilians died of starvation and privation, for a total of about 15% of the population. Roughly one million British soldiers died in the war.  In my trip to the UK this past summer it was noticed that in every village there is a WWI memorial.   The United States, a late entry into the war, suffered just over 100,000 deaths.   

Keegan sums up the war's effect:

[I]t damaged a civilisation, the rational and liberal civilisation of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage done, world civilisation also.  Pre-war Europe, imperial though it was in its relation with most of the world beyond the continent, offered respect to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law and representative government.  Post-war Europe rapidly relinquished confidence in such principles.  They were lost altogether in Russia after 1917, in Italy after 1922, in Germany in 1933, in Spain after 1936...Within fifteen years of the war's end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected the liberalism and constitutionalism which had inspired European politics since the eclipse of monarchy in 1789, was almost everywhere on the rise.

One of the grieving British parents was Rudyard Kipling, whose son died in the war.  He penned the poem Recessional years before the war, but it has become part of British Remembrance Day celebrations.   It used to be on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, bells would ring out.  It is still the case in some places. In America, where I suspect we will hear few bells, we could do worse than remember Kipling's words:

Recessional June 22, 1897

GOD of our fathers, known of old—
Lord of our far-flung battle-line—
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,	5
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies—
The captains and the kings depart—
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.	10
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
Far-call'd our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday	15
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—	20
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust	25
In reeking tube and iron shard—
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard—
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!	30