What we call Veterans Day was originally designed to celebrate the end of the Great War….on the 11th hour or the 11th day of the 11th month….

We Americans have lost the meaning behind the day and the celebrations….it is more about a “White Sale” or deep discounts on a new truck than the people that fought our many wars.

The legacy and the cost of that war is all but forgotten…..so on this Veterans Day of 2019 I would like to offer a remembrance of World War One……

World War I was the first industrial war: poison gases, flamethrowers, aerial bombing, submarines, and machine guns intensified the scale of war wreckage and war dead, setting the norm for 20^th and 21^st century wars. By government policy, British war dead were not sent home lest the public turn against the war. Instead they were buried in vast graveyards near battle sites in France and Belgium. Even today Belgian and French farmers plowing fields in places of intense, interminable fighting and mass death on the Western Front unearth an estimated ½ million pounds of war debris and soldiers’ bones each year. (During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Pentagon policy prohibited media coverage of US war dead arriving at Dover Air Base in Delaware until the ban was lifted, with conditions, in 2015. Many regarded the ban, like the Word War 1 British policy, as hiding the human cost of war that could turn the public against the war.)

From the unyielding ugliness and butchery of World War I emerged soldier poets, notable among them Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, whose unsparing style and content separated them from the tradition of glorifying war. These soldier poets, living in a trench war fraught with dead bodies and rats that fattened on them and with rear guard commanders who sent battalions of teenage boys into the slaughter of machine gun fire, rebuked their country’s warmongering politicians and industrial profiteers. (Likewise today, the majority of veterans of US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – in stark contrast to politicians of both parties – agree that the wars they fought wasted human lives and achieved no human progress.)

November 11: Remembering the Tragedy and Legacy of World War I

Take a few moments out of your busy day and remember all that has been given by our veterans….

A poem that describes the horror of WW1

“Lego Ergo Scribo”