Armistice Day: 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month

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Over here, in the U.S., we tend to forget the Great War - we call it World War I now. 93 years ago today a hugely devastating conflict ended; it began 97 years ago, in August 1914. The war left over 15 million people dead and 20 million more wounded.

When I was a kid, I remember U.S. veterans of this war asking for donations for poppies one could pin on one's lapel. I'm sure "Buddy Poppies" are still with us, but Great War veterans, living ones, are with us no longer. What should never go extinct, however, is the memory of those veterans and their great sacrifice.

Britain comes to a standstill on Armistice Day to observe a two-minute
silence to remember those who fought and died for the country


Tributes to the war dead have begun around the world as people observe two minutes' silence to mark Armistice Day.

Offices and schools in Britain fell quiet and people stopped in the streets at 11 o'clock this morning to remember those who have died in global conflicts.

War memorials in the UK's villages, towns and cities became the focal point for remembrance at the '11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month' - the time the peace agreement between Germany and the Allies took effect in 1918 after four years of fighting.
---
more at Daily Mail link above, with plenty of pictures, of course

Also in DM today:

The mother who lost five sons: On Armistice Day, the heartbreaking
story of the biggest loss by a British family in the Great War
 
My maternal GGF died in the Dardanelles WW1, GF died in the Russian Convoys, WW2. My Nanna didn't stop mourning him until the day she died.
I rushed down to the village Cenotaph today at 11.00 and observed 2 minutes silence with other villagers, local dignitaries etc.
This is the first Armistice day with no WW1 veterans, we have to carry it on for them.

I love this song commemorating WW1
[video=youtube;cZqN1glz4JY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZqN1glz4JY&feature=related[/video]
 
11-11-11, happy Veterans Day and thank you to all who served. WW1 was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Sadly, that was not the case.
 
Version by Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy: "The Green Fields of France"

[video=youtube;komRoWWQBTM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=komRoWWQBTM[/video]
 
Wilfrid Owen - who some think is the greatest war poet in the English language - was shot in the head and killed one week before the Armistice, on 04 November 1918, machine-gunned at the Sambre Canal in one of the last attacks on the German lines of the war. His sonnet below and his "Dulce et Decorum Est" are but the best of the many poems he completed before his death at age 25.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, --
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.


For his courage and leadership in the Joncourt action, he was awarded the Military Cross, an award which he had always sought in order to justify himself as a war poet, but the award was not gazetted until 15 February 1919. The citation followed on 30 July 1919:

2nd Lt, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, 5th Bn. Manch. R., T.F., attd. 2nd Bn. For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in the attack on the Fonsomme Line on October 1st/2nd, 1918. On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack. He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly.

http://bit.ly/rHxe0V
The bells had been ringing for one hour on November 11, 1918, in Shrewsbury, England, to celebrate the Armistice when the doorbell rang at Tom and Susan Owen's home, announcing the arrival of the telegram informing them their son was dead.

http://bit.ly/si4t00
 
A Dorset take on WW1


The Man He Killed

from “The Dynasts” by Thomas Hardy (1915)


“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

“But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ’list, perhaps,
Off-hand like—just as I—
Was out of work—had sold his traps—
No other reason why.

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”

and

[video=youtube;rOkTw0DlrRQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOkTw0DlrRQ[/video]
 
And speaking of Thomas Hardy, his "Drummer Hodge," below, actually concerns the Boer War, but we do call it "Veterans Day" here in the U.S., allowing for a celebration of the sacrifices of many wars, even ones fought by the English and the Boers. Below is Rupert Brooke's sonnet "The Soldier," a poem mightily informed by the Hardy poem; it's perhaps the best-known poem of the Great War: "...some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England."

Drummer Hodge

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined -- just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around:
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the drummer never knew --
Fresh from his Wessex home --
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally


The Soldier

IF I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
 
Walt Whitman lived in Washington D.C. 1863-65, and, there, served as a nurse during the American Civil War. While he wrote not a few poems about the war itself, I've always favored this selection from Specimen Days - a sort of prose poem, its subject as clear as its title, yet beyond it, too - the White House seen through a frosted lens, ghost-like, almost hallucinatory. We do not fight, of course, for the White House per se, but for what it embodies: for freedom, for democracy. The morning will bring focus, reality, the continuation of the War, and the dreams within his night's vision will awaken; the promise of equalilty will needs be proved again: "...the White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas, there in the soft and copious moon."

The White House by Moonlight

February 24th.—A SPELL of fine soft weather. I wander about a good deal, sometimes at night under the moon. To-night took a long look at the President’s house. The white portico—the palace-like, tall, round columns, spotless as snow—the walls also—the tender and soft moonlight, flooding the pale marble, and making peculiar faint languishing shades, not shadows—everywhere a soft transparent hazy, thin, blue moon-lace, hanging in the air—the brilliant and extra-plentiful clusters of gas, on and around the facade, columns, portico, &c.—everything so white, so marbly pure and dazzling, yet soft—the White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas, there in the soft and copious moon—the gorgeous front, in the trees, under the lustrous flooding moon, full of reality, full of illusion—the forms of the trees, leafless, silent, in trunk and myriad-angles of branches, under the stars and sky—the White House of the land, and of beauty and night—sentries at the gates, and by the portico, silent, pacing there in blue overcoats—stopping you not at all, but eyeing you with sharp eyes, whichever way you move.
 
Heartbreakingly, horses were also conscripted

Homeward by Cicely Fox Smith

Behind a trench in Flanders the sun was dropping low,
With tramp, and creak and jingle I heard the gun-teams go;
And something seemed to 'mind me, a-dreaming as I lay,
Of my own old Hampshire village at the quiet end of day.

Brown thatch and gardens blooming with lily and with rose,
And the cool shining river so pleasant where he flows,
White fields of oats and barley, and elderflower like foam,
And the sky gold with sunset, and the horses going home!

(Home, lad, home, all among the corn and clover!
Home, lad, home when the time for work is over!
Oh there's rest for horse and man when the longest day is done
And they go home together at setting of the sun!)

Old Captain, Prince and Blossom, I see them all so plain,
With tasseled ear-caps nodding along the leafy lane,
There's a bird somewhere calling, and the swallow flying low,
And the lads sitting sideways, and singing as they go.

Well gone is many a lad now, and many a horse gone too,
Off all those lads and horses in those old fields I knew;
There's Dick that died at Cuinchy and Prince beside the guns
On the red road of glory, a mile or two from Mons!

Dead lads and shadowy horses — I see them just the same,
I see them and I know them, and name them each by name,
Going down to shining waters when all the West's a-glow,
And the lads sitting sideways and singing as they go.

(Home, lad, home . . . with the sunset on their faces!
Home, lad, home . . . to those quiet happy places!
There's rest for horse and man when the hardest fight is done,
And they go home together at setting of the sun!)
 
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
 
Lives During Wartime, Vol. 3

By HOME FIRES READERS

Last week, the editors of Home Fires invited readers to send their recollections and photographs of members of the United States Armed Forces in acknowledgment of Veterans Day. Below is a selection of those remembrances submitted by friends and family of veterans, and from veterans themselves.

TWO EXCERPTS:

Robert Burlison

Robert in the poem is Robert Burlison, of Edmeston, N.Y., Company E, 397th Infantry Regiment, 100th Division, who died in France in January 1945 and is buried in the American Cemetery at Epinal, France. I owe my life to him.

EPINAL

It seems unfair, considering all,
That I am here in this place now
With eighty summers on my brow
And you are there in Epinal
Among our comrades sleeping there,
That I can hear the robins sing
And see the almond tree in spring
And you are there. It isn’t fair.

Flowers, if you grow in Epinal,
Grow near where Robert lies.
I will dream that he has eyes
And sees some fairness after all.

Submitted by Philip C. Ellsworth, Cedaredge, Colo.

~~~~~~~~~

John Palmieri and Michael Vouri

My Vietnam buddy John Palmieri and I are shown together at the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, Tex., last summer It was an amazing reunion. From June 1968 to June 1969 John was on the flightline at Binh Thuy Air Base, while I was an O-1 Bird Dog crew chief at Cao Lanh in the Mekong Delta. We were the best of friends. In January 1969, John’s good friend, Pete, was killed instantly by the first round of a mortar attack. John was standing next to him, and while the concussion threw him into a bunker, numbing him for nearly 24 hours, he did not receive a scratch, which has left him emotionally scarred to this day. The following day my pilot was shot down and killed and a few months later I contracted dengue fever, losing 20 pounds. We ended up sitting together flying home, counting the hours to touchdown in the world. When we parted at Travis AFB, CA on June 15, 1969, we swore to stay in touch. We did: 42 years later. After a couple of hours, it was as if we’d never been apart. Some of it was painful, as we’d never expressed our conflicted emotions — not as 20 year-olds. We gained perspective and I hope a truer sense of peace with ourselves and those turbulent days.

Submitted by Michael Vouri


Much more with pictures at link:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/lives-during-wartime-vol-3/
 
In Flanders fields the poppies blow

snip

"In Flanders Fields" was the first poem I ever memorized just to know it and keep it always - eighth grade I think it was.

This was the second (I was quite the World War I fan in junior high):

"I Have a Rendezvous with Death"
Alan Seeger

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Alan Seeger, an American, was killed in action at Belloy-en-Santerre on July 4, 1916; he was 28.
 
Four short ones by the English poet Siegfried Sassoon, who, after fighting valiantly and leading his men in the war's early years, decided he wanted out - he grew to feel that war was insane, particularly this war - and declared himself a conscientious objector, refusing to serve further. Eventually Sassoon, after a stint in a mental asylum in Scotland, returned to France. Soon after, he was shot in the head. He lived though, and in his bitterness and in his dark humor produced these small masterpieces about the Great War:

Base Details

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath
I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You'd see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. "Poor young chap,"
I'd say -- "I used to know his father well;
Yes, we've lost heavily in this last scrap."
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I'd toddle safely home and die -- in bed.


The General

‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
. . . .
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
Blighters

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
‘We’re sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!’

I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, sweet Home’,
And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.


The Hero

'Jack fell as he'd have wished,' the mother said,
And folded up the letter that she'd read.
'The Colonel writes so nicely.' Something broke
In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.
She half looked up. 'We mothers are so proud
Of our dead soldiers.' Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.
He'd told the poor old dear some gallant lies
That she would nourish all her days, no doubt
For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes
Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,
Because he'd been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how 'Jack', cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried
To get sent home, and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care
Except that lonely woman with white hair.
 
And another Siegfried Sassoon


Aftermath by Siegfried Sassoon

Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz--
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.
 
Philip Larkin's great Great War poem about the first days of the conflict, when it was felt by most that it would all be over by Christmas: "never such innocence again."

"MCMXIV"

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;

And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats' restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
 
An excerpt from Inside an enemy trench, by Siegfried Sassoon

Rest of article at link



Mametz Wood was a menacing wall of gloom, and now an outburst of rapid thudding explosions began from that direction. There was a sap [a narrow communication trench] from the quadrangle to the wood, and along this the Germans were bombing. In all this confusion I formed the obvious notion that we ought to be deepening the trench. Daylight would be on us at once, and we were along a slope exposed to enfilade fire from the wood. I told Fernby to make the men dig for all they were worth, and went to the right with Kendle. The Germans had left a lot of shovels, but we were making no use of them. Two tough-looking privates were disputing the ownership of a pair of field-glasses, so I pulled out my pistol and urged them, with ferocious objurations, to chuck all that fooling and dig.

I seemed to be getting pretty handy with my pistol, I thought, for the conditions in quadrangle trench were giving me a sort of angry impetus. In some places it was only a foot deep, and already men were lying wounded and killed by sniping. There were high-booted German bodies, too, and in the blear beginning of daylight they seemed as much the victims of a catastrophe as the men who had attacked them.

As I stepped over one of the Germans an impulse made me lift him up from the miserable ditch. Propped against the bank, his blond face was undisfigured, except by the mud which I wiped from his eyes and mouth with my coat sleeve. He'd evidently been killed while digging, for his tunic was knotted loosely about his shoulders. He didn't look to be more than 18. Hoisting him a little higher, I thought what a gentle face he had, and remembered that this was the first time I'd ever touched one of our enemies with my hands. Perhaps I had some dim sense of the futility which had put an end to this good-looking youth. Anyway I hadn't expected the battle of the Somme to be quite like this.
 
William Butler Yeats, from Wild Swans at Coole (1919): "A lonely impulse of delight"

An Irish Airman foresees his Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
 
"The Streets of Laredo," by Louis MacNeice (1941). During the London Blitz, the city was bombed for 57 consecutive nights starting in September 1940.

[video=youtube;PV0j73SUpXs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV0j73SUpXs[/video]
 
A huge thankyou to the men and women who've fought for our country.
May God bless.
 
[video=youtube;MIIOGka3LKI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIIOGka3LKI[/video]
 

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