This week much reflection has been accorded to the centenary of Armistice Day. On Sunday, communities across the world marked the occasion with Remembrance Day services. It was a point in history worth pausing for – a century since the guns fell silent in Europe.
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A little known fact about that day was that the Armistice was signed at 5am, agreed to come into effect at 11am, leaving six hours in which fighting often still raged, right up until the last minute.
On this final day of the awful conflict – the war that was supposed to end all wars – an estimated 11,000 people across the conflict zone died, either directly in combat, from their wounds or from the Spanish flu epidemic. Among British and Commonwealth soldiers, some 860 lost their lives on the last day of the conflict.
Countless others died in the aftermath of the war. Some were shot as deserters or cowards – there was no notion of post traumatic stress disorder back then. Others succumbed to injuries sustained on the battlefield. An unknown number took their own lives, unable to cope with the horrors they had witnessed which were indelibly etched on their broken minds.
Of course, the war to end all wars did nothing of the sort. Historians argue the end of World War I was the beginning of World War II.
The crippling terms of the ceasefire imposed on Germany – and those set down by the victors of the Versailles peace conference the following year – laid the groundwork for the rise of the Third Reich, as embittered veteran Adolf Hitler embarked on a course of revenge against those he believed had stabbed his country in the back.
Remembrance Day this year gave us all the opportunity to reflect on the absolute futility of war. The obvious warmth shown each by the leaders of Germany and France, which had been mortal foes in 1914-1918 and again in 1939, was a reminder of how peace serves humanity much better than armed conflict.
Yet still we see war exact its dreadful toll across the world.
These wars are not being waged on the same global scale as World War I or II but they’re as total as those earlier conflicts for the civilians caught up in them. Children are starving to death in Yemen because ports are blockaded, ethnic minorities are being cleansed in Myanmar.
Yes, we honour the fallen but we also pray the living never endure what they did.
