Armistice Day
101 years ago today the Great War
came to an end. At the eleventh hour of
the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns went silent. A peace treaty was yet to be worked out,
though the terms of the armistice made it clear that the Allies would dictate
the terms of the peace. Many historians
count the ensuing Versailles treaty as a failure; the harsh terms of peace
imposed on Germany helped stoke German resentment and the rise of Hitler. In the fall of 1939, twenty-one years after
the Armistice, war engulfed Europe again; another world war, so terrible that
men renamed the Great War. Now it’s
merely World War 1 in our history books.
But though the Versailles treaty
failed, the Armistice itself can be considered a success. The killing stopped. Armistice Day (also called Remembrance Day)
was celebrated in America, throughout the British Empire, and in many other
countries.
Europeans woke up to a new age. The Great War confirmed some important ideas
of modernism. For example, science and
technology dramatically changed war fighting—machine guns, airplanes, poison
gas, barbed wire, submarines, advanced artillery and other inventions made old
military methods obsolete. Millions of
young French, German and British men died in the carnage of the Western
Front. The Russian, Ottoman, and
Austrian-Hungarian Empires all collapsed, which seemed to confirm the modern
confidence in democracy. That’s how
President Wilson interpreted Allied victory; the world had been made “safe for
democracy.”
With
the same stroke, however, the Great War undermined a crucial feature of the
modern age. Modernists believe in
progress; not just scientific progress but social and moral progress.
When
I lecture on modernism to 21st century students, it’s hard to get
them to appreciate the confidence of the late 19th century. I urge them to read the novels of Jules
Verne, which celebrated scientific progress, and J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, which exemplified the
modernism belief in education and good will.
In France, the psychologist Émile Coué taught autosuggestion: “Every day, in every way, I am getting
better.”
For many Europeans, the Great War shattered such modern confidence. Yes, modern technology had produced amazingly
powerful weapons, new means of killing.
But if humanity is not actually any wiser or more loving than our
ancestors, perhaps we should fear our inventions. Apparently, the best military minds of
Britain, France, and Germany could think of no better response to the machine
gun than sending millions of men into the fire.
America came late to the war, and when we went “over there,” we quickly
made sure it was “over, over there.” (Three
full years of bloodletting had weakened Germany, and when the great German
offensive of early 1918 failed, German hopes were crushed. With the Americans arriving in huge numbers,
Germany submitted.) In many Americans,
modern confidence rolled on, mostly untroubled by the Great War. It took the horrors of World War 2—death
camps and the terror of the A-bomb—to cure Americans of modern confidence.
From the start, there were two sides to Armistice Day. As “Remembrance Day,” the holiday
commemorated the soldiers, sailors and airmen who died in the Great War. As “Armistice Day,” it celebrated the end of
the fighting. But World War 2 proved the
world was not made safe for democracy, and the peace that came on Armistice Day
lasted only twenty years. The armistice
side of the holiday faded from public consciousness. In 1954, Congress changed Armistice Day to
Veterans Day, a day to honor service men and women from World War 2 and the
Korean War as well as veterans from the Great War.
And so it remains. On November 11 we are called to honor veterans
from a long list of wars: Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq, and
other conflicts. Officially, Veterans
Day honors not just those injured or killed (Memorial Day does that), but every
person who serves and achieves honorable discharge.
Veterans Day is a fine thing, but we
lose something in forgetting Armistice Day.
W have lost, I think, the ability to be shocked by war. The Great War, with its insane strategies and
millions of corpses, shocked Europe. A
generation found itself shorn of the confidence of the modern age. Europeans did not know what to believe. Nihilism called to some, radicalism to
others. But they could not return to
blithe confidence.
Armistice Day celebrated hope, a
temporary hope, a hope that could not last.
It was Wilson’s hope, the belief that with this final great victory over
tyranny, democracy would rule the world.
Interestingly, after the collapse of communism in Russia, a version of
Wilsonian hope sprang up again. Finally, some thinkers wrote, liberal
capitalism and democracy have won. The
cold war, the war of ideology, is over.
For a moment we felt the relief of Armistice Day.
Not quite twelve years after the
fall of the Berlin Wall—9/11. Oh, how we
long for a new armistice day.
