11-11-11

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, along the trench line from the English Channel to the Swiss Border, the guns that had first sounded in August, 1914, fell silent. The greatest human conflict up to that time, that set in motion the fall of empires and the creation of new nations, had come to a pause.

The silence of the guns was not because one side or the other had won or lost. There was no surrender. It was only an armistice - a temporary agreement to stop fighting. It was a truce, not a surrender.

Even that truce almost didn't happen. In late October, the German Naval Command, without authority to do so,  organized a final great sea battle with the Royal Navy. They were only prevented when sailor's mutinies broke out in Wilhelmshavn and Kiel. The mutiny grew into a revolution that overthrew the Kaiser and established a republic.

During subsequent peace negotiations, the Western allies treated Germany as a defeated power. John Maynard Keynes, who viewed the punitive provisions of the Versailles treaties as disastrous, wrote a short book, The Economic Consequences Of The Peace, that foretold many of the events that led to the renewal of conflict in 1939.

Still, we continued to celebrate Armistice Day as a day of hope that war would be no more. The custom began of wearing a poppy on Armistice Day, a custom visible at yesterday's session of the British Parliament during the interrogation of James Murdoch.

The wearing of poppies was inspired by the poem, "In Flanders Field:"

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.