A column about history, culture, policy, and things in between.
This Saturday we commemorate Veterans Day. The names I always think of on this day are Bud, Andy, Gene, and Cournel, my father, father-in-law, and two unlces respectively. All of them served in World War Two, and thankfully they all came back to Kohler, Wisconsin and Frankenmuth, Michigan. Three of them are gone now, heroes to our country and certainly to me.
I will never reflect on Veterans Day without thinking of these four men, or without the image of the opening scenes of the movie Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg's stunning, panoramic sweep of the American cemetery at Normandy, and the enormous, overarching flags lofting in the caress of the Channel-fed breezes, silently express a level of human emotion for which even Shakespeare might have been inadequate.
What we today mark as Veterans Day was originally called Armistice Day, so named for the cease-fire of Novemebr 11, 1918, which ended World War One. In 1954, wanting to more clearly recognize the millions of Veterans from World War Two and Korea, Dwight Eisenhjower and Congress changed its name to Veterans Day.
World War One was the first "modern" war. It witnessed the advent of the machine-gun, long range artillery, submarines, air power, and at its very end, the introduction of the tank, a weapon that would revolutionize warfare. In the early days of the Twentieth Century, America was still largely agrarian and utterly absent from the world stage. Led into the war by President Woodrow Wilson, it was in effect our geo-political "coming out party".
The carnage of this war was unprecedented. In Paris and London, trains of wounded were unloaded at night to keep the horrific scenes and casualty lists from the pubic. Sigfreid Sassoon, a highly decorated British officer, wrote of his war experience in his achingly beautiful Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. In it he describes a generation of young men, who "shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side, slowly trudged away from life's broad wealds of light". France was pulverized; England was exhausted and bankrupt. Germany was both, and what was even worse to the Teutonic psyche, she was defeated. And as silence fell over the apocolyptic ruin, an Austrian Corporal named Adolf Hitler lay wounded in a military hospital, psychosis already creeping into his fevered mind.
Quiet fell in the immortal words of Winston Churchill, "near the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month". But while solaced by the end of the bloodshed, he was also deeply troubled. A global statesman of towering intellect, the stretch of his vision was measured in decades. His journal entry from that night reflects a heart made heavy by what he foretold:
"As Big Ben tolled I noted it was near the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. I looked out my window and saw the drizzle of empires falling through the air, and knew that victory had been purchased at a price as to be indistinguishable from defeat. Scarcely anything which I had been taught to believe had lasted. And everything I had thought to be impossible had happened".
He went on from there, and on that night as millions legitimately rejoiced, he foresaw the great political and cultural vacuum that would be created by the war's aftermath.
World War One ended in 1918, and into Churchill's feared vacuum would step that Austrian Corporal. Just twenty-one short years after the first Armistice Day, Hitler would plunge civilization into World War Two. And Churchill would be there to meet him. Standing alone, and armed only with his indomitable will and soaring prose, he would rally the free world to resist and ultimately defeat the Fuhrer of Germany.
And for standing up to Hitler and his ilk, I say a heartfelt "thank-you" to Bud and Andy and Gene and Cournel. I say that same thank you to all who have served. And I say that same thank you to all who serve today.
To paraphrase Isaiah: As for me and my house, we will never forget you.
