FROM THE PAGES OF HISTORY – ARMISTICE DAY (NOV 11)
The war came to an end with the signing of the Armistice Agreement 1918 on the 11th day of the 11th month of the year at 11 am among persons from both sides, representing the Allied and Central powers in a in a railway carriage in the French forest of Compiègne. The first British Poppy Day, came to be observed from the third anniversary of Armistice Day, 1921.
Year after year on November 11 across Europe and England, heads bow in silent remembrance and prayers to mourn all those fallen soldiers who died in the trenches by the tens of thousands during the First World War, better known as the Great War.
The war came to an end with the signing of the Armistice Agreement 1918 on the 11 th day of the 11 month of the year at 11 am among persons from both sides, representing the Allied and Central powers in a in a railway carriage in the French forest of Compiègne.
By the end of the war, Britain had suffered some 900,000 dead and over two million wounded. Germany toll was twice as many as these figures. At least 10-15 per cent of those who joined up were killed; many would carry the scars of the horrors and the devastation for the rest of their lives.
Indeed, twenty years after the end of the war, estimates of the casualties in Britain recognised some 12,000 amputees, 10,000 blind or visually impaired and 11,000 hearing impaired. 31,000 men also suffered from shell shock.
Peter Doyle, a military historian and author and currently Secretary of the All Party Parliamentary War Heritage Group, and a Professor of History at London South Bank University, writes:
This very first Armistice Day naturally followed the crumbling fortunes of the Central Powers, with Germany’s weaker allies feeling the pinch of shortages and the push of the Allied offensives.
Bulgaria had been the first to capitulate, on September 29 ; the Ottoman Empire followed on October 30; Austria-Hungary on 3 November; and finally, Germany herself on November 11, at exactly 11am, just four months short of four years since it all began on June 28, 1914.
In France and Flanders, with the war over, people returned to find their towns destroyed, their farms devastated. The Imperial War Graves Commission, formed in 1917, worked tirelessly to bring order to the chaos of the battlefields and was responsible, in this region alone, for the protection of over half a million graves in more than 1,200 cemeteries. In each cemetery, each grave marked by a uniform headstone, each bearing the badge of the units within which the men and women had served – equal in death.
This very first Armistice Day naturally followed the crumbling fortunes of the Central Powers, with Germany’s weaker allies feeling the pinch of shortages and the push of the Allied offensives.
And then there were those who had no known grave. For the Ypres Salient, in Belgium, a monumental stone gateway was constructed at the Menin Gate, in the brick ramparts of the city. Its panels listed the names of 54,395 servicemen who died in the Salient, but whose bodies were never recovered.
On the Somme, with its vast death toll, an immense geometric edifice of brick and stone was constructed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to mark ‘the Missing of the Somme’.
It was to these cemeteries, graves and memorials that visitors came in numbers in the early years of Peace.
Armistice Day 1921 saw the establishment of the first British Poppy day. The origin of the Remembrance Poppy springs from the words of John McCrae’s 1915 poem In Flanders Fields.
Here is the text of that Poem:
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders Fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place. While in the Sky
The larks still bravely singing, fly
Unheard, amid the guns below.
We are the dead, Short days ago
We lived, felt dawns, saw sunsets glow;
Loved and were loved – but now we lie
In Flanders Field
Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you from falling hands we throw
The torch, Be yours to bear it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep tho’ poppies blow
In Flanders Field.
Seasoned soldiers tend to have a more stoical and matter-of-fact approach when duty calls; perhaps it is their training that makes them that way. And when death comes, they don’t flinch. They just keep fighting till their last breath.
However, for many a young soldier, going to the front and into battle, war seems more of an adventure. Nobody thinks they’re going to die. The foremost thing on everyone’s mind was to get home and talk about the number of enemy soldiers they’d killed.
But death came swiftly in the trenches across Europe, particularly in France, Belgium and Flanders, the Dutch-speaking province in northern Belgium, with Brussels as its capital.
Today, Brussels is better known as the headquarters of the European Union. The people of Flanders and the language they speak is commonly referred to as Flemish.
A sizeable number of soldiers from Great Britain, were volunteers, barely 17-18, answering the call to serve King and country. Mercilessly cut down by the fusillade of machine-gun fire or the newly employed Chlorine gas, the war ended all too soon for these youngsters. Most of them could not be brought back to the homeland and had to be buried where they were.
Perhaps no other novel of that time recaptures the horrifying brutalities of war and its utterly dehumanising impact on the people involved from both sides than the best-selling, 1928 novel All Quiet on the Western Front by German author Erich Maria Remarque.
The novel was termed as anti-German, and banned in Germany with the rise of the Nazi Party. … The Nazis felt the novel was anti-war and unpatriotic, and claimed that its realistic portrayal of trench warfare made Germans look ‘weak’.
Before that war novels would romanticise what war was like, emphasising ideas such as glory, honour, patriotic duty, and adventure.
All Quiet on the Western Front sets out to portray war as it was actually experienced, replacing the romantic picture of glory and heroism with a decidedly unromantic vision of fear, and butchery.
Remarque’s .depiction completely altered mankind’s notions of military conflict with its catastrophic levels of carnage and violence, its battles that lasted for months, and its gruesome new technological advancements (e.g., machine guns, poison gas, trenches).
The author’s depiction of conditions inside the trenches at Ypres and elsewhere along the Western front, could sicken the hearts of the bravest of men.
The stench of death overpowering and everywhere. The relentless onslaught by the enemy made it practically impossible to bury the dead, their corpses in grotesque poses beside their living comrades, trying to put up a brave front in a hopeless situation, the trenches often had drain water in them not to mention the presence of rats and vermin. Such was life – and death.
At the end of the novel, almost every major character is dead, epitomising the war’s devastating effect on the generation of young men who were forced to fight it.
In the end when the novel’s main protagonist is killed, Remarque sums it up as “After years of fighting, Paul is finally killed in October of 1918, on an extraordinarily quiet, peaceful day. The army report that day contains only one phrase: “All quiet on the Western Front.” As Paul dies, his face is calm, “as though almost glad the end had come.”