89 years ago a great tragedy came whimpering to a close, and though guns fired and men died right up to that moment for a war that had effectively been won back in September, the guns along the Western Front finally fell silent.
And there in the silence, the first in over four years, men emerged from their trenches and oddly, each side thought it had won, though the Germans were still in the field on foreign soil and thinking they had won an honorable peace, clearly it was they who came up on the short end of this stick.
But that wouldn’t be clear for a few months yet and it was today, at this moment that along a 500 mile front, millions who up to that morning had been locked in a desperate fight to the death, became fleetingly, friends.
In a final act of madness in a mad war, before that 11th hour though on that 11th day, American commanders were still ordering their soldiers over the top. 3500 American boys were killed, wounded or went missing on a day when just hours later, their surviving comrades would be dancing jigs, trading cigarettes and having a slug or two with their erstwhile German adversaries.
This brings us to that special streak of madness Americans seem to have when put in positions of authority. Kill a few thousand boys when the war is about to end? Not a problem. It was necessary to destroy the village to save it. Peace with Honor. Freedom is on the March in Iraq. It’s difficult to explain the madness when it is as present in victory as it is in defeat. But it’s not difficult to appreciate the sheer love of authority Americans have when they possess it and how they abuse it- seemingly always and with few exceptions.
And young men die because they dare not challenge that authority, even at the cost of their lives they will not sit down and say "you go over the top, General, I am done."
Of course, every one of the millions of dead, an entire generation lost in Europe- was a needless sacrifice to the incompetence and venality of their ruling classes- some installed by birth, others by "democratic" means and all just as ruthlessly oblivious to their own stupidity that created this slaughter as they were to the basic illegitimacy of their own authority to create such madness.
And it was on this day back in 1918 when for a brief time, both the worst and best examples of human complexity were on display. The needlessly, at the last moment, dead and shortly following that, the joyful recognition that "aww shucks, you Germans (Or Americans or British or French) ain’t so bad after all.
And so it goes. Folly after folly, generation after generation, it never changes. Those who think they are more than human through their hubris and ineptitude and for reasons of their own- reasons that almost never stand up to sane scrutiny, slaughter those who are nothing but human.
If we should remember anything from the lessons of this day we should remember this- those who would be our "leaders" consider us nothing but abstractions and dead or alive, we make no difference to them. If the real fight for freedom folks like us have engaged in throughout history is anything it is this- to be free from the machinations of those who consider themselves superior to us, once and for all.