Armistice Day

Today is Veterans' Day, originally known as Armistice Day. While the holiday now honors all war veterans, it is important to remember what it originally commemorated. At 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918 (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), the guns fell silent on the Western Front, and World War I came to a close.

While World War II certainly was more horrific in terms of the numbers of people killed, I think World War I is appropriately regarded as the greatest cataclysm of the 20th Century. Because of it, Bolshevism came to Russia, Nazism came to Germany, and a century long period of peace and stability in Europe was replaced by three quarters of a century of conflict and uncertainty.

I wanted to remind people of this fact, because I'm surprised how little attention is paid to World War I and its fallout outside of the community of professional historians. That fact was driven home to me in a telephone conversation that I had yesterday with a guy in Toronto. We were working on a business transaction, and when he was reminded that today was a legal holiday in the U.S., he noted that this shouldn't cause us any problems, because it wasn't a holiday in Ontario. That surprised me, because the valor of Canadian troops at a place called Vimy Ridge during the Nivelle Offensive of 1917 was one of the key experiences in forging Canadians' national identity. At one time, Vimy Ridge was almost as central to what it meant to be a Canadian as Gallipoli was to what it meant to be an Australian.

Americans are forgetful as well. The United States entered the war late, when the allies were near exhaustion. The French wanted to split the American Expeditionary Force up among existing French and British units, but General Pershing refused. They would fight under their own flag, and fight they did. By the Summer of 1918, the Americans had proven themselves to be quite ferocious. During the Battle of Chateau Thierry, elite Prussian storm troops got behind a group of American soldiers. The Americans turned on them, fixed bayonets, and by the time the dust settled, there were only three Germans left alive.

"How did you do it?" asked a Prussian officer. "We are storm troops."

"Storm hell!" the American responded. "I come from Kansas, where we have tornadoes."

When Marshal Foch began the offensive that would win the war in 1918, he selected the units in which he had the most faith to lead it. Those troops were the French Foreign Legion, two divisions of the United States Army, and the United States Marine Corps.

So, think of all who served our country today, but spare a special thought for the men of The Great War. The horror they lived through, the valor they demonstrated, and the sacrifice they made should always remain in our memories.