Nov. 11: Do you know what today is?

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the great powers agreed to an armistice on the Western Front, thus ending the First World War in Europe. "Doughboys," as the American soldiers were called, were latecomers to the trenches, arriving en masse with the American Expeditionary Force in the late spring of 1917, and engaging in their first major combat operations alongside French "poilus" and the British "Tommies" in the spring of the following year at Cantigny, were German machine guns, gas, and artillery exacted almost 100,000 casualties. The Americans would go on to fight throughout the summer and fall, losing over 50,000 soldiers to enemy hostile fire and another 50,000 to disease. Infected wounds, t.b. contracted as a result of weakened immune systems among gas victims, and the Spanish flu took the biggest toll.

The American Expeditionary Force did not "win" the First World War, however, the American troop buildup helped break German moral. To what end? We don't know for sure. We can only speculate as to how European history might have been different if the great powers had exhausted themselves fully and arrived at their own peace without America tipping the scales in favor of the Allies. Some say the Nazis never would have come to power, some say the bolsheviks would have been supressed. What we do know is that American soldiers paid an incredibly heavy cost in the European trenches, and that their "victory" convinced Americans of the unstoppable force of American ideals. I know, that's a leap: military victory --> strength of ideals? That's how the war recrossed the Atlantic in 1918, and that's how its memory would return in 1941, 1950, 1964, 1991, 2001, and 2003. America made a myth of war because America did not know what modern war really was.

The soldiers who fought on the Western Front knew the war for what it was, a place where "killing and dying, dying and killing . . . have lost touch with any fact of life save the fact of death's absolute dominion . . . the death depicted [in their writing] is never gallant sacrifice. It is not grand, valorous, brave death. It is bowel-ripping, head-shattering, body-rending death. It is the kind of death that makes men scream for their mothers, soil their trousers, dissolve themselves into whimpering wrecks. Moreover, it is death on the whole vast scale of modern mechanization."

Remember the men who served, suffered, and died on the Western Front. But remember them as humans victimized by the cold machinery of modernity, not as heroes in the cause of freedom, for the soldier caught in the machinery of war is the least free human of all.