Holiday marks end of War to End All Wars

Today is Veterans Day, once known as Armistice Day, sometimes known as Remembrance Day. And if you're not otherwise occupied at 11 a.m. this morning, you might want to take a moment to remember the war dead — and then call up a living veteran and take him or her to lunch.

The original reason for designating a holiday on this date was to remember the War to End All Wars, aka World War I, which stopped after 1,561 days of fighting on Nov. 11, 1918.

At 5 a.m. that morning in a railroad car deep inside a French forest, an armistice agreement between the Allied forces and the Germans was signed.

But for reasons that could only be chalked up to some faceless commander's strong sense of symmetry, it was declared the cease-fire wouldn't become official for another six hours — at 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month.

Consequently, 2,738 more men would lose their lives in the ensuing six hours, including 320 American soldiers.

The military writer Joseph E. Persico published a World War I history book three years ago called "11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour" to pay tribute to those 2,738 needless deaths, along with another 8,206 who were wounded, and to note that the casualties were a microcosm of a needless war.

"The reason I have written an account anchored to the last day of World War I is that the carnage that went on up to the final minute so perfectly captures the essential futility of the entire war," writes Persico in the book's introduction.

I found his book to be both a fascinating and disturbing account of a war fought to a large extent along a killing plain in western Europe no more than 85 miles wide stretching between Belgium and Switzerland. Details of the carnage in a war that started with cavalry horses, introduced chemical warfare and ended with dive bombers are staggering.

Before it was over, 55 million men had been mobilized into duty. Nine million of them died and another 30 million were wounded. One in every six, an average of 2,250 per day, perished along the tortuous mud of the trench line on the Western Front alone. Another 5,000 were wounded daily. At the end, 7 million soldiers limped home permanently maimed. In France, 1 million children found themselves fatherless as of 11/11/18.

America got off lightly, relatively speaking. We didn't enter the war until 1917, nearly three years after it started and about a year and a half before its end. Some 106,000 U.S. soldiers would lose their lives alongside another 204,000 wounded.