Armistice Day Quotes

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two. I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

The imperative of war is to kill, and thus all wars are exercises in sanctioned murder.

On September 9, the day after Prevost’s armistice ends, Napoleon launches and, at great cost, wins the Battle of Borodino, thus opening the way to Moscow. The casualties on that day exceed eighty thousand—a figure greater than the entire population, of Upper Canada.

The last day of the war provided chilling closure. The ending, in its ferocity, bloodiness, and uselessness, contained the entire war in microcosm. The fighting went on for the hollowest of reasons: no one knew how to stop it.

Compounding the horror, German officials committed an act of staggering insensitivity: they struck a commemorative medal with a depiction of the sinking ship on one side and on the other a smiling skeleton under the inscription “Business above all.

the human nature whose strong quality it brings out and reveals. To attribute any nobility to war itself is as much a confusion of thought as to attribute nobility to cancer or leprosy, because of the skill, devotion and self-sacrifice of those who give up their lives to its cure.

the western front on armistice morning, the commanders of seven judged the war essentially over upon receiving word of the signing and stopped; but the commanders of nine divisions decided that the war must go on until the last minute, with predictable results to the lives entrusted to them.

Who, in Europe, can take this bloodless colonial fracas seriously? On September 9, the day after Prevost’s armistice ends, Napoleon launches and, at great cost, wins the Battle of Borodino, thus opening the way to Moscow. The casualties on that day exceed eighty thousand—a figure greater than the entire population, of Upper Canada.

Black Jack did not object to sending his men into the French and British lines under American command, but he did not want them dispersed.

The first-day casualties on the Somme totaled 57,470.

Mustard gas was stubborn, clinging to the ground as long as three days. Heavier than air, it settled into craters and trenches where men had taken refuge. It ruined food supplies.

The American casualties continued to be staggering, in no small part because among the AEF’s junior officers enthusiasm generally outran their experience.

The Germans had more men killed and wounded at Verdun, 325,000, than all the 230,000 men deployed in the field at Stalingrad twenty-six years later.

Hitler would later claim that his evacuation from the front had ended the happiest chapter of his life. In the trenches he had escaped from an aimless existence.

France is fighting for ‘La Patrie’; England is fighting for commerce; Italy is fighting to get a slice of Austria, and America is fighting for souvenirs.

At the age of ten, on Armistice Day, Alex trekked miles from his home in Washington, D.C., to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia to attend a ceremony at the grave of the Unknown Soldier. Who was the man being honored? What religion? What race? No one knew. All anybody knew was that he was an American hero. And that was, it seemed, how it should be. This was true brotherhood.

One last unexploded mine remains, its exact location unknown and its hidden potency serving as something of a symbol of the Great War’s underlying power to influence events down to the present day.

The retaking of Mons, site of the first retreat, might be seen as poetic closure. It could also symbolize futility. The British Army was back where it had started on the western front—some 700,000 lives later.

After Hitler had viewed the granite memorial to the 1918 Armistice near the railway carriage, he ordered it to be destroyed. Spears was right to think that the French initially had ‘a conception of the old days of royalty when you just exchanged a couple of provinces, paid a certain amount of millions and then called it a day and started off the next time hoping you would be more lucky’, but they were soon to be vigorously disabused.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge. Wilson rejected even reasonable compromises, and Lodge refused to budge. Hence, the United States failed to enter the League. Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke in 1919,

Emotionally and politically, Syngman Rhee could not accept the armistice terms. They left his nation and people divided; they left a million South Koreans dead seemingly in vain. Americans who grew bitter at old Syngman Rhee during these days, when it seemed he might wreck the peace, should have been able to imagine what Abraham Lincoln would have felt, or done, had Britain and France imposed an armistice upon the United States in 1863, leaving it forcibly divided, perhaps forever.

the Germans had built redoubts both sturdy and comfortable, homes away from home. Behind the lines, German soldiers cultivated gardens of fresh vegetables and kept dairy cows. Some had started second families, fathering children with Frenchwomen.

If one were to stand on a street corner at 9 A.M. and watch the spirits of the British dead march by four abreast, the column would be 97 miles long and would take twenty hours, or until five the next morning, to pass. The French dead would take an additional fifty-one hours and the Germans another fifty-nine hours. Considering all the dead on the western front, this parade would last from 9 A.M. Monday to 4 P.M. Saturday and stretch 386 miles, roughly the distance from Paris halfway through Switzerland or from New York to Cleveland.

Even in former days, Korea was known as the 'hermit kingdom' for its stubborn resistance to outsiders. And if you wanted to create a totally isolated and hermetic society, northern Korea in the years after the 1953 'armistice' would have been the place to start. It was bounded on two sides by the sea, and to the south by the impregnable and uncrossable DMZ, which divided it from South Korea. Its northern frontier consisted of a long stretch of China and a short stretch of Siberia; in other words its only contiguous neighbors were Mao and Stalin. (The next-nearest neighbor was Japan, historic enemy of the Koreans and the cruel colonial occupier until 1945.) Add to that the fact that almost every work of man had been reduced to shards by the Korean War. Air-force general Curtis LeMay later boasted that 'we burned down every town in North Korea,' and that he grounded his bombers only when there were no more targets to hit anywhere north of the 38th parallel. Pyongyang was an ashen moonscape. It was Year Zero. Kim Il Sung could create a laboratory, with controlled conditions, where he alone would be the engineer of the human soul.

War is always a negative-sum outcome. It subtracts, removes, empties. No one who has witnessed combat can, with any honesty, describe it another way. “We know more about war than we know about peace,” said five-star general Omar Bradley in an Armistice Day address a few years after the end of World War II, “more about killing than we know about living.” Think of it like this. For every soldier’s grave in places such as Arlington or Anzio or Normandy, there are more forgotten burial sites for civilians—parents, children, newlyweds, and newborns—claimed in some way by the same fighting.

The artillery officer had mastered the technique of firing accurately in the dark by registering the guns beforehand, that is, determining the variance in each gun for barometric pressure, wind speed, and direction. The artillery could thus fire unceasingly both day and night prior to an attack.

As they ate, they would listen to the latest news from Paris, as well as from the BBC in London. None of it was good. Not ever. On the night of May 15, they listened in shock to details of Holland surrendering to the Nazis. By May 28, Belgium had formally surrendered too, though they had long since been overrun. They listened in silent horror to report after report of German forces blazing and murdering their way through northern France and moving steadily toward their beloved Paris. They couldn’t imagine the Germans actually seizing the capital, but on the night of June 10, the BBC reported that the French government had begun evacuating Paris. Four days later, they wept upon hearing reports of the Nazis entering and occupying the capital. Soon the French were signing an armistice with Hitler. Prime Minister Reynaud was stepping down.

Sergeant Powell would never understand what compelled Henry Gunther to rise up and charge the enemy. Gunther had never been seduced by dreams of battlefield glory. He had lost his sergeant’s stripes and been broken to private for urging a friend, in a censored letter, to stay out of the war. His pointless gesture might have been a last desperate effort to eradicate the stain. Whatever the impulse, Gunther kept advancing, bayonet fixed. The German gunners reluctantly fired a five-round burst. Gunther was struck in the left temple and died instantly. The time was 10:59 A.M. General Pershing’s order of the day would record Henry

Today, we come together to honour the brave Canadians in uniform who have served our country throughout our history. They’ve built peace. They’ve defended democracy. And they’ve enabled countless people to live in freedom – at home and around the world. Remembrance Day was first held in 1919 on the first anniversary of the armistice agreement that ended the First World War. A century later, our respect and admiration for Canada’s fallen and veterans has not wavered. We owe them and their families an immeasurable debt of gratitude. We honour all those who have served, including the many First Nations, Métis, and Inuit veterans and current service members. Today, we pay tribute to our veterans, to those who have been injured in the line of duty, and to all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. They stood for liberty, and sacrificed their future for the future of others. Their selflessness and courage continue to inspire Canadians who serve today. At 11:00 a.m., I encourage everyone to observe the two minutes of silence in recognition of the brave Canadians who fought for us. Today, we thank our service members, past and present, for all they have done to keep us and people around the world safe. They represent the very best of what it means to be Canadian. Lest we forget.

The Soviets were content to give Hitler the green light for an assault on Poland because they saw ways of capitalizing on it. German forces invaded Poland on September 1, and as expected, Britain and France issued an ultimatum that two days later led them to declare war on Germany.17 The Kremlin had wanted to coordinate with Berlin regarding plans for the attack on Poland, but given the shocking speed of the German advance, it had no time. Poland was already in the throes of defeat on September 17 when the Red Army ignobly invaded from the east. Stalin relished finally getting into Poland, for the initial Bolshevik crusade to bring revolution to Berlin, Paris, and beyond had ended at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920. At that time Polish forces had stopped and encircled the Red Army, taken more than 100,000 prisoners, and begun driving out the invaders until an armistice was reached in October. Poland celebrated the great battle as the “Miracle on the Vistula,” but now in 1939 the Red Army was back. Poland, Stalin said in early September, had “enslaved” Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and other Slavs, and when it fell, the world would have “one less bourgeois fascist state. Would it be so bad,” he asked his cronies rhetorically, “if we, through the destruction of Poland, extended the socialist system to new territories and nations?”18

This is not to say that he was not qualified, though he concealed his beginnings as a scullion, to lend a hand like anyone else. It required some exceptional circumstance nevertheless to induce him one day to carve the turkeys himself. I was out, but I heard afterwards that he carved them with a sacerdotal majesty, surrounded, at a respectful distance from the service-table, by a ring of waiters who, endeavouring thereby not so much to learn the art as to curry favour with him, stood gaping in open-mouthed admiration. The manager, however, as he plunged his knife with solemn deliberation into the flanks of his victims, from which he no more deflected his eyes, filled with a sense of his high function, than if he were expecting to read some augury therein, was totally oblivious of their presence. The hierophant was not even conscious of my absence. When he heard of it, he was distressed: “What, you didn’t see me carving the turkeys myself?” I replied that having failed, so far, to see Rome, Venice, Siena, the Prado, the Dresden gallery, the Indies, Sarah in Phèdre, I had learned to resign myself, and that I would add his carving of turkeys to my list. The comparison with the dramatic art (Sarah in Phèdre) was the only one that he seemed to understand, for he had learned through me that on days of gala performances the elder Coquelin had accepted beginners’ roles, even those of characters who had only a single line or none at all. “All the same, I’m sorry for your sake. When shall I be carving again? It will need some great event, it will need a war.” (It needed the armistice, in fact.) From that day onwards, the calendar was changed, and time was reckoned thus: “That was the day after the day I carved the turkeys myself.” “It was exactly a week after the manager carved the turkeys himself.” And so this prosectomy furnished, like the Nativity of Christ or the Hegira, the starting point for a calendar different from the rest, but neither so extensively adopted nor so long observed.

November eleventh is Armistice Day, not Veterans’ Day,

After it turned so cold, it snowed enormous quantities of snow. I have no recollection of the number of inches or the temperature recorded, but it was much colder than in the Twin Cities, which we thought were semi-tropical by our standards.

Ne'er Fade Away by Stewart Stafford The hillside piper's requiem, Guides old soldier's bones, To slain brothers of his youth, No longer a marching memory. His scars, Valhalla's roadmap, His medals, coins for Charon, His conquests, the beacon fire, His blood scours the path ahead. This churned earth is now home, Weeping craters, foxholes beatified, Barbed wire hands joined in praying, The minefield of life cleared for us all. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

The eleventh day of the eleventh month has always seemed to me to be special. Even if the reason for it fell apart as the years went on, it was a symbol of something close to the high part of the heart. Perhaps a life that stretches through two or three wars takes its first war rather seriously, but I still think we should have kept the name "Armistice Day." Its implications were a little more profound, a little more hopeful.

Knowing that masks donned in time could protect against gas, they began loading shells with sneezing powder, which seeped through the masks’ filters.

The Warburg family is the most important ally of the Rothschilds, and the history of this family is at least equally interesting. The book The Warburgs shows that the bloodline of this family dates back to the year 1001.[28] Whilst fleeing from the Muslims, they established themselves in Spain. There they were pursued by Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and moved to Lombardy. According to the annals of the city of Warburg, in 1559, Simon von Cassel was entitled to establish himself in this city in Westphalia, and he changed his surname to Warburg. The city register proves that he was a banker and a trader. The real banking tradition was beginning to take shape when three generations later Jacob Samuel Warburg immigrated to Altona in 1668. His grandson Markus Gumprich Warburg moved to Hamburg in 1774, where his two sons founded the well-known bank Warburg & Co. in 1798. With the passage of time, this bank did business throughout the entire world. By 1814, Warburg & Co had business relations with the Rothschilds in London. According to Joseph Wechsberg in his book The Merchant Bankers, the Warburgs regarded themselves equal to the Rothschild, Oppenheimer and Mendelsohn families.[29] These families regularly met in Paris, London and Berlin. It was an unwritten rule that these families let their descendants marry amongst themselves. The Warburgs married, just like the Rothschilds, within houses (bloodlines). That’s how this family got themselves involved with the prosperous banking family Gunzberg from St. Petersburg, with the Rosenbergs from Kiev, with the Oppenheims and Goldschmidts from Germany, with the Oppenheimers from South Africa and with the Schiffs from the United States.[30] The best-known Warburgs were Max Warburg (1867-1946), Paul Warburg (1868-1932) and Felix Warburg (1871-1937). Max Warburg served his apprenticeship with the Rothschilds in London, where he asserted himself as an expert in the field of international finances. Furthermore, he occupied himself intensively with politics and, since 1903, regularly met with the German minister of finance. Max Warburg advised, at the request of monarch Bernhard von Bülow, the German emperor on financial affairs. Additionally, he was head of the secret service. Five days after the armistice of November 11, 1918 he was delegated by the German government as a peace negotiator at a peace committee in Versailles. Max Warburg was also one of the directors of the Deutsche Reichsbank and had financial importances in the war between Japan and Russia and in the Moroccan crisis of 1911. Felix Warburg was familiarized with the diamond trade by his uncle, the well-known banker Oppenheim. He married Frieda Schiff and settled in New York. By marrying Schiff’s daughter he became partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Paul Warburg became acquainted with the youngest daughter of banker Salomon Loeb, Nina. It didn’t take long before they married. Paul Warburg left Germany and also became a partner with Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York. During the First World War he was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, and in that position he had a controlling influence on the development of American financial policies. As a financial expert, he was often consulted by the government. The Warburgs invested millions of dollars in various projects which all served one purpose: one absolute world government. That’s how the war of Japan against Russia (1904-1905) was financed by the Warburgs bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co.[31] The purpose of this war was destroying the csardom. As said before, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James P. Warburg said: “We shall have a world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government

May 14, 1948. Within a day of proclaiming its statehood, Israel was invaded by neighboring Arab states with the help of Arab Palestinians who were already fighting Jewish Palestinians.243 This began the First Arab-Israeli War.244 By 1949, Israel had defeated the Arab coalition, and the resulting armistices gave Israel control over most of the land of the Mandate.245 Only the Gaza Strip and so-called West Bank remained in Arab hands. The West Bank was occupied by Jordanian military forces, and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egyptian forces until the Six-Day War in 1967, when those territories also came under Israeli control.246 Jordan continued to formally claim control over the West Bank until 1988, when King Hussein granted the request of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to renounce any Jordanian claims to the West Bank, after which the PLO became the sole Arab claimant of that territory.247 It is important to note that from 1967 until today, neither the PLO, the current Palestinian Authority (PA), nor any other Arab Palestinian political entity has exercised sovereign control over the West Bank. Further, prior to Israel’s acquisition of the territory in 1967, dating back to the rule of the Ottoman Turks, there had never been a lawfully recognized Arab Palestinian sovereign over the territory in the former Mandate for Palestine.248 Today, one can hardly talk about the Middle East without bringing up war, terror, and unrest. The region has become synonymous with geopolitical instability and territorial conflicts, specifically with regard to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian issue. Despite the fact that Arab Palestinians have no greater historical claim to the territories for which they are fighting than do Jewish inhabitants of the land of Palestine, the majority of the international community continues to demand that Israel relinquish control of these territories to allow the establishment of an independent Arab state ruled by a political entity whose ultimate goal is the utter destruction of Israel.249

Was Philip Dexter upset?" "He's telephoned the office every day." She was pleased about that. "Who else was upset?" "Everybody. Roosevelt orderded an hour of silence while you were on the table. Like Armistice Day.

Passchendaele ended in breathtaking losses. More than 310,000 British, 85,000 Frenchmen, and 260,000 Germans, a total of 655,000, had fallen in a battle fought over a field five miles wide.

Country boys turned out to be the fittest, producing 4.8 percent more able-bodied draftees per 100,000 than city boys. Whites were 1.2 percent more physically qualified than blacks and native-born Americans 3.5 percent more than those foreign-born.

Pétain’s mission was to quell the rebellion and continue prosecution of the war.

The key was to exploit contradictory British and French objectives. The BEF’s priority was to hold on to the French ports through which its manpower and resupply flowed. The French saw Paris as the keystone holding up their nation. In effect, the two Allies’ priorities pointed in opposite directions, one toward the sea, the other toward the French heartland.

the millions of shells, rather than destroying German defenses, had churned the ground between the attackers and the defenders into a boot-sucking bog.

The problem had been evident from the moment the first Tommy tried to pull himself out of the trench by gripping a rotted sandbag and had fallen back to the bottom. The rain collapsed the sides of trenches, and men had to be heaved over the parapet bodily. Tanks sank, their treads unable to gain traction. As the men finally advanced, they were sucked into mud-filled craters, where many drowned.

Soon after, the Germans attacked and conquered Denmark and Norway and by May 1940 Hitler's troops crushed Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg and invaded France. The English fled at Dunkirk, France was defeated. Paris was formally declared an "open city" and surrendered on June 16, 1940. Paul Reynaud, the premier of France, fled to Bordeaux and requested an armistice on the following day.

Like most young officers who were not nervously or physically broken by it, I enjoyed the War, or rather let me hasten to say, that part of it that was hectically lived out of gunshot. I was entirely thoughtless and prejudiced; accepted everything that came; reviling those whom the majority reviled; hating those I had never seen simply because everyone else did so; doing towards those I did not hate acts which were considered glorious and noble. After the Armistice, in an existence of inactivity and disintegration, I began to believe that this same attitude of mind which endowed glory and nobility to the acts which helped to make the World War was the very mental attitude that had made such a thing possible. This may appear mere sophistry, and a far jump from the logic of hunting to kill. Personally, I feel that the animals we hunt to kill are so near us in sense-feeling and joy of life, that it distresses me to see, for instance, an otter swimming slower and slower in shallow water between two lines of sportsmen barring the way up or down river. My feeling is then to join myself with the fatigued beast, and help him break a way to freedom. This feeling is of course thwarted, and my feelings are concealed: the feelings that a little creature is being bullied, shortly to be broken before my eyes, and, silent with cowardice, I do nothing to help him. My friends may say, ‘If you feel like that, why do you go otter-hunting?’ If I were candid I would reply that I went otter-hunting to see a certain girl, and talk to her, and try and convince her that I was a nice person, but very lonely. (12–14)

It was the fire of justice that was burning through Townhouse now. The fire of justice that appeases the injured spirit and sets the record straight. The third blow was an uppercut that put me flat on the pavement. It was a thing of beauty, I tell you. Townhouse took two steps back, heaving a little from the exertion, the sweat running down his forehead. Then he took another step back like he needed to, like he was worried that if he were any closer, he would hit me again and again, and might not be able to stop. I gave him the friendly wave of one crying uncle. Then being careful to take my time so the blood wouldn’t rush from my head, I got back on my feet. —That’s the stuff, I said with a smile, after spitting some blood on the sidewalk. —Now we’re square, said Townhouse. —Now we’re square, I agreed, and I stuck out my hand. Townhouse stared at it for a moment. Then he took it in a firm grip and looked me eye to eye—like we were the presidents of two nations who had just signed an armistice after generations of discord. At that moment, we were both towering over the boys, and they knew it. You could tell from the expressions of respect on the faces of Otis and the teens, and the expression of dejection on the face of Maurice. I felt bad for him. Not man enough to be a man, or child enough to be a child, not black enough to be black, or white enough to be white, Maurice just couldn’t seem to find his place in the world. It made me want to tussle his hair and assure him that one day everything was going to be all right. But it was time to move along. Letting go of Townhouse’s hand, I gave him a tip of the hat. —See you round, pardner, I said. —Sure, said Townhouse. I’d felt pretty good when I settled the scores with the cowboy and Ackerly, knowing that I was playing some small role in balancing the scales of justice. But those feelings were nothing compared to the satisfaction I felt after letting Townhouse settle his score with me. Sister Agnes had always said that good deeds can be habit forming. And I guess she was right, because having given Sally’s jam to the kids at St. Nick’s, as I was about to leave Townhouse’s stoop I found myself turning back. —Hey, Maurice, I called. He looked up with the same expression of dejection, but with a touch of uncertainty too. —See that baby-blue Studebaker over there? —Yeah? —She’s all yours. Then I tossed him the keys. I would have loved to see the look on his face when he caught them. But I had already turned away and was striding down the middle of 126th Street with the sun at my back, thinking: Harrison Hewett, here I come.

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount, from a speech on Armistice Day, 1948

Gen. Omar Bradley said on Armistice Day 1948: ‘We live in an age of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.

like the French, with their guillotines of the past century, their bloody “June Days” of last summer. Mazzini would negotiate with the French; he had already secured a temporary armistice. Besides, Garibaldi was needed to defend against King Ferdinand’s Neapolitan army, which crossed the border into the Papal States at Frascati as soon as the French withdrew.

Second Officer Lightoller also served in the Royal Navy during the first war. He returned to White Star after the Armistice and was made Chief Officer of the lumbering Celtic. For a while he had hopes of a transfer to the crack Olympic, but was passed over. He retired from the sea in the early 20’s and tried his hand (not too successfully) at everything from writing columns to raising chickens. But the sea still ran in his blood. He designed and sailed his own yacht Sundowner and had a final taste of peril in 1940. He took Sundowner over to Dunkirk with the great fleet of “little ships,” and rescued 131 British soldiers. At his best in the midst of disaster, he cheerfully wrote his brother-in-law several days later, “We’ve got our tails well up and are going to win no matter when or how.

Armistice Day isn't to do with peace. It's to do with war and remembering one's dead. A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for.

The war is over. They just signed the armistice. Eleven o'clock this morning, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

The people around him, his family, his friends, aroused a feeling of shame and rage within him. He had seen them on the road, them and people like them: he recalled the cars full of officers running away with their beautiful yellow trunks and their painted women, civil servants abandoning their posts, panic-stricken politicians dropping files of secret papers along the road, young girls, who had diligently wept the day the armistice was signed, being comforted in the arms of the Germans. “And to think that no one will know, that there will be such a conspiracy of lies that all this will be transformed into yet another glorious page in the history of France. We’ll do everything we can to find acts of devotion and heroism for the official records. Good God! To see what I’ve seen! Closed doors where you knock in vain to get a glass of water and refugees who pillaged houses; everywhere, everywhere you look, chaos, cowardice, vanity and ignorance! What a wonderful race we are!

On day one, he made it very clear that the Korean War had never formally ended, the 1953 armistice was just a cease-fire agreement, and North Korea could, and would, invade the South if given the opportunity.

Instead of accolades, what many Negro soldiers got after the Armistice was an order to stay behind in France and bury thousands of bodies.

The armistice that ended the First World War had given birth to an uneasy peace. The disillusioned youth who survived the first global conflict had their brief period of rebellion before the Great Depression burdened the population with an economic crisis so devastating that it crippled the world’s markets, engendering mass unemployment that in turn led to social discontent and distrust in government.

Wilhelm was bombastic, overbearing, and contemptuous of what he perceived as softness in others. He described Czar Nicholas as “fit only to live in a country house and grow turnips.

On weekends his idea of rest was to read military history aloud to his daughters.

Moltke began to tamper with Schlieffen’s plan. Instead of investing 90 percent of the German Army in the French campaign, as required, he began chipping away at it. Russia was mobilizing more swiftly than anticipated; thus he sent 15 percent of the army to defend East Prussia. Moltke did not want the French to retake Alsace-Lorraine; hence another 25 percent of his troops were diverted to that sector. Consequently, only 60 percent of the intended force was thrown against France through Belgium, well below what Schlieffen’s pincer envisioned.

Turkey, fearing attack by Russia, took Germany’s side and declared war against the czar by bombarding the port of Odessa.

All that Lanz experienced—the burial of comrades as if they were animals, the abandonment of the wounded, the decimation of the once beautiful pageant of men on horseback, the shooting of a defenseless man—began raising questions in his mind. “Were these things improper or immoral?” he asked himself. “Again and again I had to return a negative answer. [I and my] comrades had become,” he concluded, “no longer human beings, but simply blood-thirsty brutes; for otherwise [we] would be very bad soldiers”—and likely dead ones. Once he had accepted this truth, a seed was planted in Lanz’s brain. He had to find a way to no longer face these moral quandaries.

Revel in the fulsome flattery, dear fool! It does not stop war from being a filthy trick.

The concussive force of grenades rattled men’s brains to the point of madness.

The New York Herald reported that a German soldier had been seen carrying a bagful of ears. Another newspaper accused Germany of melting down the enemy dead to manufacture soap.

On December 18, he asked each side to set forth its terms for ending the war. The Allies demanded conditions certain to be unacceptable: withdrawal from all occupied territory and virtual dismemberment of the German and Austrian empires. The Germans wanted the iron ore fields in Lorraine, economic control over Belgium, and the Belgian Congo and Poland as German protectorates. Both sides told Wilson, in effect, no thank you, since each expected to win the war.

But harder heads saw another advantage in taking sides in a distant struggle: Britain and France owed massive debts to American companies. If the Allies went under, these firms could go broke.

Our government seemed to expect the same of them as of white men. Poor Negroes! They are hopelessly inferior. . . . If you need combat soldiers, and especially if you need them in a hurry, don’t put your time upon Negroes.

artillery pieces were lined up, only more of them, 4,000 in all, a gun every six yards stretching for fifteen miles. The enemy would be pounded with shells, only more of them, 4.5 million this time.

MacArthur strode before his men, armed only with a riding crop, a cigarette holder clamped jauntily between his teeth, without the slightest suggestion in bearing or movement that he was under fire.

He expected results, he said, “no matter how many men were killed.

Major General Charles Summerall, spotted a gateway to glory. Rather than merely “assisting,” he would take advantage of the flexibility Pershing’s order provided and violate a commandment of battlefield tactics. He intended to send elements of his 1st Division, under the equally fiery Brigadier General Frank Parker, through ground currently held by the 42nd and 77th Divisions in order to beat these rivals to Sedan. The chaos that ensued was illustrated when General MacArthur was temporarily arrested by men of Parker’s division as a suspected German spy.

The pandemic may have originated in the American military post at Fort Riley, Kansas, where a dust storm whipping about tons of incinerated manure had sent hundreds of coughing, stumbling doughboys diagnosed with influenza into the post hospital, where many died. Soon after, American troopships disembarked at Brest and Saint-Nazaire, and French poilus began to fall ill, then British soldiers. Then, as the malady rolled across France, German troops were stricken. The fatality rate was appalling. In the AEF, roughly one out of every three soldiers with influenza died, far worse odds than a man faced in battle.

No comparable mortality had been experienced since the bubonic plague nearly five hundred years before, and modern medical science stood impotent before the pestilence.

Before them stood a small, erect man who fixed them with a withering gaze, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. After cool introductions, Foch opened the proceedings with a question that left the Germans agape. “Ask these gentlemen what they want,” he said to his interpreter. When the Germans had recovered, Erzberger answered that they understood they had been sent to discuss armistice terms. Foch stunned them again: “Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make.

The railroad car stood in the midst of French villages that the war had effaced from the earth. The Germans were confronting an Allied leader who had learned of the death in battle of his only son and his daughter’s husband in a single day. Foch remained cold to all entreaties, reflecting not only his own fixedness but orders from his equally unforgiving superior, Prime Minister Clemenceau.

Conciliation now would only lead to future war. A negotiated peace rather than a peace dictated by the Allies “would jeopardize the moral position they now hold and possibly lose the chance actually to secure world peace on terms that would assure its permanence.” Black Jack had powerful allies back home. The New York Times published a statement issued by former president Theodore Roosevelt that read, “I hope the President will instantly send back word that we demand unconditional surrender and that we refuse to compound felony by discussing terms with the felons.

This knowledge, however, served the purposes of peace rather than war. The German general staff grasped that the tide of Americans, now just shy of 2 million men in France, could push into Lorraine and overrun Metz, then the Saar, thus scattering Germany’s armies. The Germans pressed for peace at this time, before their military was completely shattered, to avoid leaving their homeland unprotected against rioters and revolutionists.

In France, the war created 600,000 widows and left nearly one million children fatherless. In England three men were killed in World War I for every man killed in World War II.

tens of thousands of women to spinsterhood. In the American Expeditionary Forces, the 26,000 men killed in the Meuse-Argonne represented the greatest loss in a single battle to that point in the nation’s history.

maintain overseas cemeteries, Pershing became the first chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, serving from 1923 until his death in 1948.

divisions in the Meuse-Argonne sector that continued fighting to 11 A.M. ran as high as four and a half times more than those in the seven divisions that halted after the signing.

Thus the total Armistice Day casualties were nearly 10 percent higher than those on D-Day.

A great many of the Army officers were very fine in the way that they took care of their men. But there were certain very glaring instances of the opposite condition, and especially among these theorists, these men who were looking upon this whole thing as, perhaps, one looks upon a game of chess, or a game of football, and who were removed from actual contact with the troops.

The initial conclusion of the subcommittee was that “needless slaughter” took place on November 11, 1918. However, this finding was beaten back by vocal House members as a slur upon the nation’s wartime leadership. The report that was finally approved found no one culpable for the Armistice Day bloodshed. Throughout

Had Marshal Foch accepted Matthias Erzberger’s plea to stop the fighting on November 8 while negotiations were under way, likely, 6,750 lives would have been spared and nearly 15,000 maimed, crippled, burned, blinded, and otherwise injured men would instead have gone home whole. All this sacrifice was made over scraps of land that the Germans, under the armistice, were compelled to surrender within two weeks.

The ground over which the bulk of the battles raged was only about eighty-five miles wide, a relatively modest battleground but a rather large cemetery, considering the 3,258,610 killed there and the 7,745,920 wounded, for total losses of 11,004,530 men.

Waving his arm over the carnage, the German remarked that the American attack that morning had been a “foolish affair.” He himself had known for weeks that the war was coming to an end and had taken no unnecessary risks with the lives of his men.

The last deaths of the Great War on the western front occurred at midnight on the twelfth in Hamont, a Belgian town near the Dutch border. Retreating German troops, believing they were the last to leave the city, mined the Hamont railroad station. But one final train filled with German soldiers arrived from Antwerp. The mine went off with a roar that flung railway cars into the air like matchboxes. Hundreds of German soldiers thus died thirteen hours after the armistice went into effect.

It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more,” Hitler recalled. “Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blankets and pillow.” The shock of defeat had blinded him again. A Berlin psychiatrist who treated Hitler, Dr. Edmund Forster, concluded that his blindness had returned because the patient was “a psychopath with hysterical symptoms.

constant companions throughout the project: Stanley Weintraub’s A Stillness Heard Round the World, A. J. P. Taylor’s The First World War, John Keegan’s The First World War, and Malcolm Brown’s The Western Front.

An American pilot flying a Spad VII swooped low and dropped a bomb over their position. Walter was hit and badly wounded. He clutched at Bücher’s sleeve. “I won’t die now that there’s an armistice, will I?” he pleaded. Bücher attempted to reassure the youth. As he spoke, gas shells began laying a poisonous cloud over the lines. Bücher pulled a mask over Walter’s head, then over his own. Through the goggles he could make out shapes emerging from the odorous haze as the black Americans continued their attempt to breach the line. Bücher stole a glance at his watch. It was two minutes to eleven.

German resistance continued to present a hodgepodge of fanaticism amid disorder. A British patrol entering a deserted village east of Valenciennes in the northern sector came across a wounded German lieutenant propped up against the wall of a house. He told them, in flawless English, that his men had abandoned the town two hours before and he hoped a British field surgeon might treat him. Given this information, the leader of the patrol began marching some two hundred men into the village square. As they arrived, machine guns appeared to sprout from every window and a church tower. More than a hundred dead Tommies piled up in the square.

No one’s exploits in the division had glowed more incandescently than those of Douglas MacArthur. He was that rarity, a courageous exhibitionist, a fearless showoff, a man who had done it all and wanted the world to know.

The most convincing proof of the Americans’ successful rite of passage came from across the lines. The Germans had previously regarded the Americans as little more than an armed mob. After Belleau Wood, the corps commander who had faced the attackers arrived at a reappraisal: “The 2nd American Division can be rated a very good Division. . . . The various attacks of the marines were carried out smartly and ruthlessly. The morale effect of our fire did not materially check the advance of the infantry. The nerves of the Americans are still unshaken.

General Pershing now had what he wanted: proof that the AEF was the equal of its allies and the enemy. British generals, however, were less than awed by the American success at Saint-Mihiel. Since the Germans had intended to abandon the salient anyway, the Yanks, as one Briton put it, had not so much defeated the Germans as relieved them.

For the entire AEF, the campaigns at Cantigny, Belleau Wood, Château-Thierry, and the Ourcq started to approach the bloodletting of past western front battles, with 67,000 men fallen.

Barely across the Ourcq, Donovan’s battalion began taking fire from three sides. One bullet grazed Wild Bill’s thigh; another tore off the heel of his boot. A shell fragment would surely have killed him had it not struck the respirator of his gas mask. Donovan’s adjutant, Lieutenant Oliver Ames, ran forward and flung himself down alongside the major, joined by a mess cook, John Kayes. A sniper’s bullet whizzed past Donovan and struck Ames in the head, killing him instantly. Kayes was fatally riddled by machine-gun fire. Donovan reached out toward the men and was shot through the hand. Two days later, still deployed along the Ourcq, Donovan, with Kilmer at his side, crept to the northern edge of a wood for a better view of the enemy’s position. Suddenly he realized that Kilmer was not with him. He retraced his steps and found the sergeant sprawled on the ground, a bullet through his brain.