Summary: Tomorrow is Armistice Day; 100 years ago tomorrow the Great War came to an end with a cease-fire between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany. A century later, much of the world as we know it has been ineluctably shaped by the events of those four years which represented the death agonies of the 19th century and the birth pangs of the 20th. We, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long post-World War II peace, live in a world largely shaped by the events of 1914-1918 and by those of 1939-1945. Even now, we owe an incalculable debt to those who fought and died, whose bones are part of the soil over which they fought. From the rising of the sun to its going down, we will remember them.
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Cathedral City - November 10, 2018. One hundred years ago tomorrow the Great War ended, with an armistice signed aboard a railroad car assigned to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on a siding at Rethondes in the Forest of Compiègne in the Oise Département, in France. Representatives of the Allied and Associated Powers and representatives of what became the Weimar Republic of Germany signed the armistice document during the predawn hours between 5:12 and 5:20 a.m.
As is now well known, the armistice between The Allied and Associated Powers and Germany would go into effect with a cease-fire at 11:00 a.m. that day, the Famous Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month.
The armistice of Compiègne represented the last in a series of armistices which had taken the other Central Powers, one by one, out of the Great War, starting with Bulgaria on September 29, 1918, the Ottoman Empire on October 30, 1918, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on November 3, 1918.
Germany, the last of the Central Powers to sign an armistice, had suffered the most immediate and far-reaching of the political consequences that befell the Central Powers as a result of the Great War. Germany, at that time a Confederation of various quasi-sovereign states, suffered a more or less complete breakdown of its political structure. The 27 constituent units of the Reich included four kingdoms, including Prussia – by far the dominant constituent of the Empire, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, the three “Free Hanseatic Cities” of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, and the occupied, formerly French territory of Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen).
As a result of the collapse of the Empire in early November, 1918, only the three Free Hanseatic Cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck emerged at the end of the War with anything even resembling their original quasi-republican forms of government. In the rest of the Reich, Kaisers, Kings, Grand Dukes, Dukes, and Princes had fled or abdicated, leaving the pinchbeck panoply of the German monarchies in dust and shambles around them.
The collapse of Imperial Germany led by stages first to the Weimar Republic, then to the Third Reich, and now, after a second world war, to a new, reunified Germany that has actually incarnated the promise of freedom and democracy represented by the Weimar Republic. Indeed, for more than 60 years, the Bundesrepublik, with its stubbornly Atlanticist statesmen and stateswomen, has been one of the strongest bulwarks of the Atlantic Alliance. The Bundesrepublik has also been one of the strongest and most dependable proponents of a united Europe.
Yet, the history of Europe is not the history of Germany alone. When the Great War ended, it had exacted a fearsome price from the Allies as much as it had from the Central Powers. As Winston Churchill described the end of the Great War in the United Kingdom, “[v]ictory ha[d] been bought at a price so dear as to be indistinguishable from defeat.” In both the U.K. and in France, virtually an entire generation had marched off to war in 1914 singing songs of battle and imagining that they would be home by Christmas. Yet that optimistic generation that had marched off to war in August, 1914 never came home.
That optimistic generation, reared in the self-confidence of the 19th century, became the first casualties of the industrial scale war that has come to be so much the hallmark of our calamitous 20th and 21st centuries. Writing in The World Crisis, Winston Churchill had described “the old world in its sunset[, so] fair to see.” “Nations and Empires, crowned with princes and potentates, rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace.” Within four years, from the awful assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on that price-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, right through to the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, 1918, countless Europeans had lost their lives, many of them in squalid trenches far from the accumulated treasures of the long peace. If the events of Sarajevo were the death knell for the 19th century, the events of the Great War may with equal felicity be described as the birth pangs of the 20th.
But as much as the events of the Great War may be described as the birth pangs of the 20th century, they may also be described as the necessary predicates of the 21st.
For truthfully, we live in a world order that is very much shaped by the events of the Second World War, which in their turn were ineluctably shaped by the events of the Great War. If Germany today is a necessary bulwark of the Atlantic Alliance, it is because of the vision of German statesmen like Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, whose respective commitments to building a united Europe and to laying long-lead foundations for the reunification of the German nation have very much made Europe what is today.
Additionally, we cannot speak of the United States as the world’s “indispensable” nation without acknowledging how the Great War played so large a part in accelerating America’s industrial development and advancing the United States in status from a regional power to an undisputed Great Power. If, in 1914, the United States was considered the preeminent power in the Americas, by 1918 she had become one of the four to five preeminent powers in the world. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the foundations for the post World War II pax Americana were laid at Château Thierry, at Belleau Wood, and in the Meuse-Argonne.
In short, as we commemorate the Centennial of the armistice at Compiègne tomorrow, we, in our 21st century world, lapped in the accumulated treasures of a long post-World War II peace, must not forget the debt we owe to our dead, many of whose bones have become part of the soil on which they fought. They were the attendants at the birth of the 20th century in which we still, numbers on the calendar notwithstanding, live. Those of us of a certain age, who may be old enough to remember the 50th anniversary of the Armistice, should know and appreciate the meaning of the Eleventh hour of the Eleventh day of the Eleventh month.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
-Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen, St. 4, 1914
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