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November
11, 2002, 8:30 a.m. |
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ovember
11 has been celebrated in the United States as Veteran's Day since 1954.
The date was made a national holiday in 1938, known then as Armistice
Day, 20 years since the ceasefire on the Western Front that ended the
fighting in World War I. The 1938 legislation declared it "a day
to be dedicated to the cause of world peace" — but by November
of 1939, the world had been plunged back into war. The lessons of 1918
had been forgotten; the seeds sown in that earlier conflict had sprouted.
Its junior officers would now command vast armies populated by a new generation
in a much greater conflict, to resolve the issues left unresolved, or
made worse, by that earlier tragic war.
I have always been a World War I buff. The conflict has poignancy that is inescapable. Every war generates tales of heroism and barbarity, of justice and irony, good fortune and bad, World War I no less, maybe more, than others. But the sense pathos comes from the feeling that, in the greater picture, it was all so senseless. Wars can be fought for many causes, just or unjust, great or small. The Great War of 1914-1918 was said to be fought to Make the World Safe for Democracy, or to End All Wars. It did neither. It was a war that many had expected to come, but few thought would arrive quite the way it did. It was supposed to be brief and limited, but grew lengthy and costly. It began as Bismarck had predicted, from " some damned foolish thing in the Balkans," and escalated into a four-year bloodbath that ended only when the original parties had bludgeoned each other into exhaustion. The limited war aims of 1914 were abandoned as the casualty lists lengthened. Negotiated peace became impossible. Sacrifice built on sacrifice. Political unrest and revolutions broke out. Governments fell, on both the winning and losing sides. And the 20th-century world that was spawned from the war was set on a course for horrors to come.
November 11, 1918 was an end, but only the end of the beginning. The Great War initiated the 30-year suicide of Europe, a tragedy whose causes are still difficult to understand. The European powers were the common inheritors of a culture millennia in the making. They were the leaders in science, culture, and economics. They had assembled the greatest military forces in the history of mankind. They were at the cutting edge of history, and they threw it away. And why? From the other end of the century looking backwards it is hard to understand what drove their animosity. The distinctions between Georgian England and Wilhelmine Germany may have seen great at the time, but are hardly comparable to Anglo-German differences 20 years later. The tsarist autocracy set the standard for brutality in its day, but the tsar was a minor leaguer compared the Lenin and Stalin. World War I introduced new magnitudes of death, both on and off the battlefield. Before 1914, the "Terror" during the French Revolution, in which between 15,000 and 40,000 people were killed, was generally regarded as the bloodiest, most savage act of state policy in European history. The killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during the Great War dramatically changed the scale of what was conceivable — and the 20th-century totalitarian states would engage in even more massive systematic slaughter of innocents.
With Europe's self-destruction came also the emergence of the United States on the world stage. In 1917, American power was projected abroad in a manner unseen in its history. Our country emerged with the potential to become the leading global military and economic force. But the horrors of the wartime experience, the postwar machinations of the European colonialists, and a resurgent American nativism, led our country to turn its back on the world, and on its new, unsought, and unwanted responsibilities. The United States nursed isolation in the years that followed, as the threat grew overseas. Pearl Harbor brought the consequences of inaction into clear focus.
The war that ended in 1918 was the first stage in a decades-long struggle of freedom versus subjugation. It set in motion the events that gave rise to the two greatest ideological challenges to liberal democracy; it fomented the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and brought about the conditions for the rise of Italian fascism, German Nazism, and Japanese militarism. The latter challenges were met and defeated in a lengthy, costly, bloody global struggle. The communist menace was faced down in a decades long "Cold War" that occasionally became uncomfortably hot in places like Korea and Vietnam. Residue of that misbegotten century persists in places like Cuba and North Korea, and it lives in the minds of Muslim radicals, who trace the origins of their discontent with the West to the 1920 Treaty of Serves, which ended the war against Ottoman Turkey and established the modern Middle East. But in each of these struggles the United States has emerged stronger, and the cause of freedom more secure.
This is the significance of November 11. It marked the end of a phase of an unfolding tragedy that none foresaw, and which would take decades to unravel, and perhaps is still being resolved. It is a reminder of events whose effects have touched all of our lives, amplified across many years and several generations. And it commemorates a victory that could never have been achieved without American fighting men. 4.7 million Americans served in the Great War. Census figures from 1990 showed 62,198 World War I veterans still living. Today fewer than 3,000 probably remain — in other words, 95 percent of those living 12 years ago are gone. The trend is the same in all the combatant countries. Rare now is the obituary that reaches back to the Great War — notably, one last May, when Alec Campbell, final survivor of the Australians who served at Gallipoli, passed away at the age of 103. Soon the last of all the warriors from that distant time will join the departed legions. The war will slip fully into the hands of history.
Today marks the 84th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting on the Western Front. We honor all of our veterans today, but please take a moment to remember the few who remain who served the Allies and the cause of freedom so many years ago. And if you are fortunate enough to know a World War I veteran, seek him out. Shake his hand. Honor him. He was born into a world whose virtues we are only now beginning to recapture. He has seen changes during his lifetime that we can hardly comprehend. And he has made it this far, which by itself should be cause for our admiration and respect. He was present at the first Armistice Day; help him celebrate one more.
— James S. Robbins is a national-security analyst & NRO contributor.