Ninety years ago, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent in a war little remembered by Americans but that's still seared into the psyche of Europe. 

The First World War has held a very special sick fascination for me since high school and, yet, I have yet to finish a book about it.  I can't seem to get past 1916.  I get through Verdun and the Somme and the mutinies in the French Army, and I just don't have the will to finish it.  The horror of that war just overwhelms me--the fetid mud and rats of the trenches.  Men trying to master their panic and don gas masks with trembling fingers before the heavy gas--chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas--oozed down into their trenches.  Relentless pounding artillery fire.  No Man's Land: a tiny strip of land across the length of Europe where earth and unburied corpses had been churned into a  ghastly, horrific moonscape by years of artillery and rain. 

Above all, the endless prideful futility of sending waves of human beings "over the top" and into the horizontal sleet of metal expelled by machine guns and massed fire from (by today's standards) high-powered large caliber rifles.  Contrary to myth, the generals on both sides knew perfectly well that small arms that were accurate to 800 yards and artillery that could throw masses of explosives and shrapnel for miles and with obscene accuracy  had changed the very meaning of "war."  Their answer, however, even before the war, was simply to incorporate acceptance of the likelihood of previously unimaginable casualties into their war-fighting doctrine as a cost of doing business.  Their armies were trained in that doctrine, their war plans were based upon it and none of them had any real idea of what it would mean if those plans were implemented. 

The armies that fought that war are almost unimaginable to us today.  Every nation in continental Europe had a large standing army of mostly conscripts and an "invisible army" of forced reservists, men who had completed their duty as conscripts but were still required to attend periodic drills, each assigned to a specific unit in the event of war. 

These men were citizens of states that had become drunk on hyper-nationalism and militarism.  They had absorbed that nationalism in their schools and had been indoctrinated into the militarism during their active duty stints.  Those states were locked into alliances that institutionalized old grievances.   They viewed war as just another tool in the nation-state's toolkit for accomplishing national goals and the leaders in each state were determined not to flinch away from using it if the occasion arose. 

Back during the Cold War, political scientists often cast a worried eye at the way those alliances and the unstoppable mobilization and war plans on each side had turned a minor crisis--fueled by the uniquely persistent perniciousness of Serbian nationalism--had lead to an inferno that consumed entire empires and twenty million lives.  They looked at those plans and bethought themselves of the competing plans governing the use of nuclear weapons by the two superpowers and worried. 

We lucked our way past that disaster, but we didn't learn.  And, so it was that in 2002, as Bush and Cheney were rushing to war with Iraq, I was directed to the website of a group I had heard about, but previously ignored--the Project for a New American Century. I noticed with interest that the members of this curious association were all in, or closely associated with, the Bush Administration.  I read their statement of principles and was appalled.  The first thing I thought of was the blind militaristic hyper-nationalism of the Kaiser and the Third Republic.  Long before 9/11, these people had been advocating war on Iraq as a simple exercise in militaristic dick-swinging.  There as no thought of any cost in blood, treasure, prestige or power we might have to pay. 

It did not escape my attention that few of these men had military experience and none were war veterans. 

So back to 11:00 at 11/11/18.  As Europe counted its uncountable dead, and America came to grips with how it could have piled up 300,000 dead or wounded in only nine months of combat, we made the day that war ended a holiday, a day to mourn the dead of the War to End All Wars, and give thanks that it wouldn't happen again.  In 1954, we expanded it into a day to honor the veterans of the two wars that came after the War to End All Wars, and all the ones that came before and would come after. 

It is, as a better man than I once said, altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.  We still have veterans coming back from our current wars--some in coffins or with physical and psychic wounds they will bear for life--despite the best efforts of the people who started those wars and botched both of them to keep them out of sight and out of mind. 

But just today, and maybe ten years from now, spare a thought for the men buried in Flanders' fields where the poppies grow.  There is little to show for their death.  Old grievances gave way to news ones and led to worse horrors still.  The British Empire's days were numbered as of 11/11/18.  The hero of the Third Republic became the traitorous puppet of the hated Boche.  German and Russian Empires dissolved into revolution and totalitarianism and the empire of the Hapsburgs was consigned, at long last, to the proverbial ashheap.  America actively refused to take a leading role in making something better of the world and turned inward, to its later sorrow. 

The only real lesson taught by the twenty million dead of World War I is that hyper-nationalism and militarism are the mother and father of death and disaster.  Remember them today, please, because we keep forgetting that lesson.