Trump is absolutely right to attend the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day

Whatever you think of President Trump’s decision to cancel the military parade in Washington, D.C., you should welcome his attendance at the centenary of the Nov., 11, 1918, armistice that ended the First World War. There, Trump will honor the more than 115,000 Americans who died in the war and the many others who served there. The president will also honor our allies by recognizing what cost that bloody conflict imposed.

It’s an important moment, because human losses in the First World War losses were massive. Between 1914 and 1918, France saw nearly 1.4 million of its citizens killed and Britain lost more than 1.1 million. Russia, an allied power until its peace treaty with Germany in 1917, suffered 1.8 million dead. The enemies: the German Empire and its Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman imperial partners collectively suffered more than 4 million dead and of course saw their empires dissolved.

And while these numbers pale into comparison with the total human losses in the Second World War 20 years later, they did illuminate a new public perception of warfare. In and before 1914, war was widely seen as a glorious endeavor. By 1918, it was widely regarded for what it is: hell.

In his book on the 1916 battle of the Somme, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore documents the annihilation of entire battalions in short moments. And he adds many harrowing personal accounts from the battlefield.

“There were more corpses than [living] men. But there were worse sights than corpses. Limbs and [legless and armless] trunks, here and there a detached head, forming splashes of red against the green leaves and as in advertisement of the horror of our way of life and death and of our crucifixion of youth, one tree held in its branches a leg with its of flesh hanging down over a spray of leaf.”

Exposure to these vivid renderings and to the depleted stock of male youth also shifted European public opinion away from prior notions of unquestioning obedience to state authority. This is perhaps best evidenced by the British Army soldier Wilfred Owen’s anti-war poem, Dulce et Decorum Est. The concluding stanza of that poem is worth our eternal reading.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

The Latin phrase at the end: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”



Ultimately, as with the war that would follow 20 years later, the economic compression and encirclement that Germany saw during the Great War led to its eventual undoing. In no small part was that victory down to the American divisions fighting as rocks on the Marne and in the 100 days offensive. Still, on this Armistice Day anniversary, I’ll remember my British great-grandfather, Sidney Brewer. Having served in combat with the British Army during the war, he once told my parents about his experience on that day the peace was finally signed. His words — as in the video below — about the loss of two of his friends, just before the peace came into effect, offer a harrowing example of war’s brutality. And yes, that’s me at the end of the video.