Armistice Day Centenary -- Commemmorating a Century of War in Europe

ARMISTICE DAY 100 YEARS AGO.When we were youngsters in school, we learned "the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month" as the moment of Armistice ending World War I. And, on every 11-11-11, we paused in silence as church bells or fire sirens rang out to mark the anniversary of the end of the "Greatest War." That commemmoration is largely gone now, as Armistice Day has become Veterans Day in the United States, and the celebration is shifted to the closest weekend to give federal workers a 3-day holiday. After 100 years, perhaps that is warranted. But, if we study the horror of World War I, we might want our children to remember it as a warning. • • • THE 1914 BATTLEFIELDS OF WW I. Every nation in Europe expected the war to be short. After the initial 1914 battlefields of Liege, Mulhouse, the frontier battles of the Ardennes and Maubeuge, came the First Battle of the Marne, the First Battle of the Aisne, the Siege of Antwerp, the First Battle of Albert, the First Battle of Arras, the Battle of the Yser, the battles at La Bassée and Armentières, the First Battle of Ypres, and the First Battle of Champagne. • These Frontier Battles of northern France and southern Belgium often called the Flanders Battles, were actually sometimes fought around frontier forts. It was Germany that realized that heavy artillery could destroy the old forts and open the way for victories. The Great Retreat of the Allies was a long withdrawal by the Franco-British armies to the Marne after the success of the German armies in the battles of the frontiers. The defensive use of artillery and machine guns dominated the battlefield and the ability of the armies to supply themselves and replace casualties made the battles go on for weeks. Thirty-four German divisions fought in the Flanders battles, against twelve French, nine British and six Belgian, along with marines and dismounted cavalry. • In addition, on the Eastern Front, the First German offensive against Warsaw began with the battles of Warsaw and Ivangorod. The Ottoman Empire commenced hostilities against Russia, when Turkish warships bombarded Odessa, Sevastopol and Theodosia. The Russian army crossed the frontier of Turkey-in-Asia and seized Azap. Britain and France declared war on Turkey and Keupri-Keni in Armenia was captured by the Russian army. Przemysl was surrounded by the Russian army, beginning the Second Siege. Memel in East Prussia was occupied by the Russians. Keupri-Keni was recaptured by the Ottoman army, and the Sultan proclaimed Jihad. The Battle of Cracow began, as well as the Second Russian Invasion of North Hungary. The Second German Offensive against Warsaw opened with the Battle of Łódź. • In October, Herbert Kitchener the British Secretary of State for War forecast a long war and placed orders for the manufacture of a large number of field, medium and heavy guns and howitzers, sufficient to equip a 24-Division army. The order was increased by the War Office but the rate of shell manufacture had an immediate effect on operations. While the Belgian army was still on the Aisne front, ammunition production for field guns and howitzers was 10,000 shells a month, but only 100 shells per month were being manufactured for 60-pounder guns. The UK War Office sent another 101 heavy guns to France during October. As the contending armies moved north into Flanders, the flat terrain and obstructed view, caused by the number of buildings, industrial concerns, tree foliage and field boundaries, forced changes in British artillery methods. Lack of observation was remedied in part by decentralizing artillery to infantry brigades and by locating the guns in the front line, which, however, made them more vulnerable, and several batteries were overrun in the fighting between Arras and Ypres. Devolving control of the guns made concentrated artillery-fire difficult because of a lack of field telephones and the obscuring of signal flags by mists and fog. • German tactics began to develop during the battles around Ypres, with cavalry still effective but hampered by the terrain of hedges and fenced fields, railway lines and urban growth, which made the ground far better suited to defensive battle. German accounts stress the accuracy of Allied sniper fire, which led German troops to remove the spike from Pickelhaube helmets and for officers to carry rifles to be less conspicuous. Artillery remained the main infantry-killer, particularly the legendary French 75-mm field guns, firing shrapnel at ranges lower than 1,000 yd (910 m). Artillery in German reserve units was far less efficient due to lack of training and fire often fell short. • YPRES. For example, in the lower ground between Ypres, which we will discuss in a moment, and the higher ground to the south-east and east, the ground was drained by many streams and ditches, divided into small fields with high hedges and ditches, roads were unpaved and the area was dotted with houses and farmsteads. Observation was limited by trees and open spaces could be commanded from covered positions and made untenable by small-arms and artillery fire. As winter approached the views became more open as woods and copses were cut down by artillery bombardments and the ground became much softer, particularly in the lower-lying areas. The weather became much colder in November in Flanders, with rain and a little snow. Night frosts and ground covered by snow led to frostbite cases and the physical strain increased among troops occupying trenches half-full of freezing water, falling asleep standing up and being sniped at and bombed from opposing trenches 100 yd (91 m) away. A reorganization of the Allied forces around Ypres took place in 1914, and the British line ran 21 mi (34 km) from Wytschaete to the La Bassée Canal at Givenchy. The Belgians held 15 mi (24 km) and the French defended some 430 mi (690 km) of the new Western front. Germany ordered the 4th Army to cease its attacks and the German III Reserve Corps and XIII Corps were ordered to move the Eastern Front. • Both sides were exhausted by the efforts around Ypres. At the end of 1914, German casualties around Ypres had reached about 80,000 men and British losses were 89,964, with 54,105 at Ypres alone. The British army had been reduced by half and the French had lost 385,000 men by September, 265,000 men having been killed by the end of the year. Of 134,315 German casualties in Belgium and northern France in October and November, 46,765 losses were incurred on the front around Ypres. All this happened in 1914. No one had won. • • • 1915 -- THE SECOND BATTLE OF YPRES. 1915 saw the Second Battle of Ypres, fought from April 22 to May 25, 1915, for control of the strategic Flemish town of Ypres in western Belgium after the First Battle of Ypres the previous autumn. It was the first mass use by Germany of poison gas on the Western Front. It also marked the first time a former colonial force (the 1st Canadian Division) defeated a European power (the German Empire) on European soil (in the battles of St. Julien and Kitcheners' Wood, engagements during the Battle). • The eminent German chemist Walther Nernst. who was with the army in 1914 as a volunteer driver, saw how trenches produced deadlock. He proposed to Colonel Max Bauer, the German general staff officer responsible for liaison with scientists, that they could empty the opposing trenches by a surprise attack with tear gas. Observing a field test of this idea, the chemist Fritz Haber instead proposed using heavier than air chlorine gas. (He would have preferred more deadly phosgene, but little was stockpiled.) German commander Erich von Falkenhayn agreed to try the new weapon. The gas would be released by siphoning liquid chlorine out of cylinders; the gas could not be released directly because the valves would freeze. A prevailing wind would carry the gas to the enemy lines. 5,730 gas cylinders, the larger weighing 90 pounds (41 kg) each, were manhandled into the front line. Installation was supervised by Haber and the other future Nobel prize winners Otto Hahn, James Franck and Gustav Hertz. Twice cylinders were breached by shell fire, the second time three men were killed and fifty wounded. Some of the Germans were protected by miner's oxygen breathing apparatus. The first German chlorine gas attack was launched on April 22, 1915, shortly after 5 PM, French troops in the path of the gas cloud sustained about 6,000 casualties. Many died within ten minutes and others were blinded. Chlorine gas reacts with water to form hypochlorous acid, thereby destroying moist tissue such as the lungs and eyes. The survivors fled their poisoned trenches despite heavy enemy fire. Anthony R. Hossack of the Queen Victoria's Rifles described the chaos as the French Colonial Corps troops fled from the gas : "Plainly something terrible was happening. What was it? Officers, and Staff officers too, stood gazing at the scene, awestruck and dumbfounded; for in the northerly breeze there came a pungent nauseating smell that tickled the throat and made our eyes smart. The horses and men were still pouring down the road. two or three men on a horse, I saw, while over the fields streamed mobs of infantry, the dusky warriors of French Africa; away went their rifles, equipment, even their tunics that they might run the faster. One man came stumbling through our lines. An officer of ours held him up with levelled revolver, 'What's the matter, you bloody lot of cowards?' says he. The Zouave was frothing at the mouth, his eyes started from their sockets, and he fell writhing at the officer's feet." __ A. R. Hossack. • The gas attack produced a 4-mile (6.4 km) gap in the French front, and the German infantry followed well behind the gas cloud, breathing through cotton pads soaked with sodium thiosulfate solution. As ordered they occupied the villages of Langemark and Pilken, where they dug-in, even though they might have occupied Ypres almost unopposed.  They had taken 2,000 prisoners and 51 guns. Canadian troops defending the flank of the break-in identified chlorine because it smelled like their drinking water. The Germans released more chlorine gas at them the following day. Casualties were especially heavy for the 13th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which was enveloped on three sides and had over-extended its left flank after a break there. At Kitcheners' Wood, the 10th Battalion of the 2nd Canadian Brigade was ordered to counter-attack in the gap created by the gas attack. They formed up after 11:00 AM on April 22, with the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish) of the 3rd Brigade arriving to support the advance. Both battalions attacked with over 800 men, in waves of two companies each, at 11:46 AM. Without reconnaissance, the battalions ran into obstacles halfway to their objective; engaged by small-arms fire from the wood, they began an impromptu bayonet charge. The attack cleared the former oak plantation of Germans at a 75-percent casualty rate. The British press were confused by the attack. The Daily Mail reported : "The Germans set fire to a chemical product of sulphur chloride which they had placed in front of their own trenches, causing a thick yellow cloud to be blown towards the trenches of the French and Belgians. The cloud of smoke advanced like a yellow low wall, overcoming all those who breathed in the poisonous fumes. The French were unable to see what they were doing or what was happening. The Germans then charged, driving the bewildered French back past their own trenches. Those who were enveloped by the fumes were not able to see each other half a yard apart. I have seen some of the wounded who were overcome by the sulphur fumes, and they were progressing favorably. The effect of the sulphur appears to be only temporary. The after-effects seem to be a bad swelling of the eyes, but the sight is not damaged." And Captain Alfred Oliver Pollard, who was later awarded a Victoria's Cross, wrote : "Dusk was falling when from the German trenches in front of the French line rose that strange green cloud of death. The light north-easterly breeze wafted it toward them, and in a moment death had them by the throat. One cannot blame them that they broke and fled. In the gathering dark of that awful night they fought with the terror, running blindly in the gas-cloud, and dropping with breasts heaving in agony and the slow poison of suffocation mantling their dark faces. Hundreds of them fell and died; others lay helpless, froth upon their agonized lips and their racked bodies powerfully sick, with tearing nausea at short intervals. They too would die later -- a slow and lingering death of agony unspeakable. The whole air was tainted with the acrid smell of chlorine that caught at the back of men's throats and filled their mouths with its metallic taste." __ Captain Alfred Oliver Pollard, The Memoirs of a VC. Lance Sergeant Elmer Cotton described the effects of chlorine gas : "It produces a flooding of the lungs – it is an equivalent death to drowning only on dry land. The effects are these -- a splitting headache and terrific thirst (to drink water is instant death), a knife edge of pain in the lungs and the coughing up of a greenish froth off the stomach and the lungs, ending finally in insensibility and death. The color of the skin from white turns a greenish black and yellow, the color protrudes and the eyes assume a glassy stare. It is a fiendish death to die." The Germans reported that they treated 200 gas casualties, 12 of whom died. The Allies reported 5,000 killed and 15,000 wounded. Within days the British were advised by John Scott Haldane to counter the effects of the gas by urinating into a cloth and breathing through it. Both sides set about developing more effective gas masks. • The Second Battle of Ypres was also inconclusive, but there were some 80,000 French and British, and 35,000 German, casualties. And, the era of chemical weapons had begun. • • • THE BATTLE OF PASSCHENDAELE -- THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES. The battle took place on the Western Front, from July to November 1917, for control of the ridges south and east of the Belgian city of Ypres in West Flanders, as part of a strategy decided by the Allies. Passchendaele lay on the last ridge east of Ypres, 5 mi (8.0 km) from a railway junction at Roulers, which was vital to the supply system of the German 4th Army. The next stage of the Allied plan was an advance to close the German-controlled railway running through Roulers and Thourout. • A campaign in Flanders was controversial in 1917 and has remained so. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, opposed the offensive, as did General Ferdinand Foch, the French Chief of the General Staff. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), did not receive approval for the Flanders operation from the War Cabinet until 25 July. Disputes by the participants, writers and historians since WW I have included the wisdom of pursuing an offensive strategy in the wake of the Nivelle Offensive, rather than waiting for the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force in France. The choice of Flanders over areas further south or the Italian front, the climate of Flanders, the choice of General Hubert Gough and the Fifth Army to conduct the offensive, debates over the nature of the opening attack and between advocates of shallow and deeper objectives, remain controversial. The passage of time between the Battle of Messines (June 7-14) and the Battle of Pilckem Ridge (July 31), the first Allied attack of the Third Battle of Ypres, the extent to which the internal troubles of the French armies motivated British persistence with the offensive, the effect of the exceptional weather, the decision to continue the offensive in October and the human cost of the campaign for the soldiers of the German and British armies, have also been debated. • As it turned out, the Battle of Passchendaele was a monumental human killing field. The never-yet fully determined casulties of the British and French were between 200,000 and 450,000 men, and the Germans, between 210,000 and 410,000 men. • The initial rounds of the Battle of Passchendaele began at the end of April, 1917, and was still going on in September, when the British plan for the Battle of Menin Road fought from September 20 to 25, included more emphasis on the use of heavy and medium artillery to destroy German concrete pill-boxes and machine-gun nests, which were more numerous in the battle zones being attacked, and to engage in more counter-battery fire. The British had 575 heavy and medium and 720 field guns and howitzers. Aircraft were to be used for systematic air observation of German troop movements, to avoid the failures of previous battles, where too few aircraft crews had been burdened with too many duties and had flown in bad weather. On September 20, the Allies attacked on a 14,500 yd (8.2 mi; 13.3 km) front and captured most of their objectives, to a depth of about 1,500 yd (1,400 m) by mid-morning. The Germans made many counter-attacks, beginning around 3 PM until early evening, all of which failed to gain ground or made only a temporary penetration of the new British positions. The German defense had failed to stop a well-prepared attack made in good weather. Minor attacks took place after September 20, as both sides jockeyed for position and reorganized their defenses. A mutually-costly attack by the Germans on September 25, recaptured pillboxes at the south western end of Polygon Wood. Next day, the German positions near the wood were swept away in the Battle of Polygon Wood. • The First Battle of Passchendaele on October 12 was another Allied attempt to gain ground around Passchendaele. Heavy rain and mud again made movement difficult and little artillery could be brought closer to the front. Allied troops were exhausted and morale had fallen. After a modest British advance, German counter-attacks recovered most of the ground lost opposite Passchendaele. There were 13,000 Allied casualties, including 2,735 New Zealanders, 845 of whom were dead or stranded in the mud of no-man's-land; it was one of the worst days in New Zealand military history. Allied army commanders agreed that attacks would stop until the weather improved and roads could be extended, to carry more artillery and ammunition forward. The offensive was to continue, to reach a suitable line for the winter and to keep German attention on Flanders, with a French attack due on October 23 and the Third Army operation south of Arras scheduled for mid-November. The battle was also costly for the Germans, who lost more than 1,000 prisoners. The German 195th Division at Passchendaele suffered 3,325 casualties from October 9 to 12 and had to be relieved by the 238th Division. German commanders became optimistic that Passchendaele Ridge could be held and ordered the 4th Army to stand fast. German counter-attacks pushed back the 35th Division in the center but the French attack captured all its objectives. Attacking on ground cut up by bombardments and soaked by rain, the British had struggled to advance in places and lost the ability to move quickly to outflank pillboxes. The 35th Division reached the fringe of Houthulst Forest but was outflanked and pushed back in places. German counter-attacks made after October 22 were at an equal disadvantage and were costly failures. • The German 4th Army was prevented from transferring troops away from the Fifth Army and from concentrating its artillery-fire on the Canadians as they prepared for the Second Battle of Passchendaele on October 26 to November 10, 1917. The four divisions of the Canadian Corps had been transferred to the Ypres Salient from Lens, to capture Passchendaele and the ridge. The Canadians relieved the II Anzac Corps on October 18 and found that the front line was mostly the same as that occupied by the 1st Canadian Division in April 1915. The Canadian operation was to be three limited attacks, on October 26, October 30 and November 6. On 26 October, the 3rd Canadian Division captured its objective at Wolf Copse, then swung back its northern flank to link with the adjacent division of the Fifth Army. The 4th Canadian Division captured its objectives but was forced slowly to retire from Decline Copse, against German counter-attacks. The second stage began on October 30, to complete the previous stage and gain a base for the final assault on Passchendaele. The attackers on the southern flank quickly captured Crest Farm and sent patrols beyond the final objective into Passchendaele. The attack on the northern flank again met with exceptional German resistance. Three rainless days from November 3 to 5 eased preparation for the next stage, which began on the morning of November 6, with the 1st Canadian Division and the 2nd Canadian Division. In fewer than three hours, many units reached their final objectives and Passchendaele was captured. The Canadian Corps launched a final action on November 10, to gain control of the remaining high ground north of the village. • On November 18, the British took over from the Canadian Corps. The area was subjected to constant German artillery bombardments and its vulnerability to attack led to a suggestion by Brigadier C. F. Aspinall, that either the British should retire to the west side of the Gheluvelt Plateau or advance to broaden the salient towards Westroosebeke. Expanding the salient would make the troops in it less vulnerable to German artillery-fire and provide a better jumping off line for a resumption of the offensive in the spring of 1918. The British attacked towards Westroozebeke on the night of December 1-2, but the plan to mislead the Germans failed because of the noise of the British assembly and the difficulty of moving across muddy and waterlogged ground. In the moonlight, the Germans had seen the British troops when they were still 200 yd (180 m) away. Some ground was captured and about 150 prisoners were taken but the attack on the redoubts failed and observation over the heads of the valleys on the east and north sides of the ridge was not achieved. • In a German General Staff publication, it was written that "Germany had been brought near to certain destruction by the Flanders battle of 1917." In his Memoirs of 1938, Lloyd George wrote : "Passchendaele was indeed one of the greatest disasters of the war...No soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign ..." In 1939, G. C. Wynne wrote that the British had eventually reached Passchendaele Ridge and captured Flandern I Stellung but beyond them were Flandern II Stellung and Flandern III Stellung. The German submarine bases on the coast had not been captured but the objective of diverting the Germans from the French further south, while they recovered from the Nivelle Offensive in April, had succeeded. In 1997, Griffith wrote that the bite and hold system kept moving until November, because the British had developed a workable system of offensive tactics, against which the Germans ultimately had no answer. A decade later, Sheldon wrote that relative casualty figures were irrelevant, because the German army could not afford great numbers of losses or to lose the initiative by being compelled to fight another defensive battle, on ground of the Allies' choosing. The Third Battle of Ypres pinned the German army to Flanders and caused unsustainable casualties. • • • WHY SO MUCH ABOUT YPRES? Because it is a sort of micrososm of the Western Front of World War I. And, because the total war was so immense and covered so much of Europe and the Mediterranean that it has filled the careers of thousands of researchers. I have not touched on the American entry late in WW I, and the decisive effect of General Pershing's tanks, or on the Battle of the Somme, which was one of the costliest battles of World War I. The original Allied estimate of casualties on the Somme, made at the Chantilly Conference on 15 November 1916, was 485,000 British and French casualties and 630,000 German. That puts it above Ypres in casualties. . • • • WORLD WAR I WAS A HORROR. Both for military and civilians. The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was about 40 million. Estimates range from 15 to 19 million deaths and about 23 million wounded military personnel, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history. The total number of deaths includes from 9 to 11 million military personnel. The civilian death toll was about 8 million, including about 6 million due to war-related famine and disease. The Triple Entente (also known as the Allies) lost about 6 million military personnel while the Central Powers lost about 4 million. At least 2 million died from diseases and 6 million went missing, presumed dead. About two-thirds of military deaths in World War I were in battle, unlike the conflicts that took place in the 19th century when the majority of deaths were due to disease. Nevertheless, disease, including the 1918 flu pandemic and deaths while held as prisoners of war, still caused about one third of total military deaths for all belligerents. Consider -- Russia mobilized 12,000,000 and 1,700,000 of them were killed. France mobilized 8,410,000 and 1,357,800 were killed. The British Empire mobilized 8, 904,467 and 908,371 were killed. You can read more details at < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties >. Of France's total population 1 out of 20 were killed -- that is, France lost 5% of its population. Germany lost 4% of its population. The UK lost 2% of its population. The Austro-Hungarian Empire 4% of its population and ceased to exist after WW I. The Russian Empire lost 1.7%. By comparison, the US lost 0.13%. • World War I was a pointless conflict that need not have happened, yet had been predicted 36 years earlier by German’s then Chancellor Otto Von Bismark, who wrote in 1878 : "Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal....A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all...I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where....Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off." Bismarck was right. • • • THE 20th CENTURY OF EUROPEAN AND WORLD WAR. And, horrendous as World War I was, it was surpassed by World War II. By far the most costly war in terms of human life was World War II (1939–45), in which the total number of fatalities, including battle deaths and civilians of all countries, is estimated to have been 56.4 million. But, only Germany and the Soviet Union sustained the WWII casualty levels equal to those of WW I. Officially, roughly 8.7 million Soviet soldiers died in the course of the war, including millions of POWs. World War II killed about 3% of the 1940 world population of an estimated 2.3 billion. More than half of the total number of casualties are accounted for by the dead of the Republic of China and of the Soviet Union. The government of the Russian Republic in the 1990s published an estimate of USSR losses at 26.6 million, including 8 to 9 million due to famine and disease. The People's Republic of China as of 2005 estimated the number of Chinese dead at 20 million. In 2005 the German government listed the war dead of 7,395,000 persons, including Austria and men conscripted from outside of Germany's 1937 borders. The total number of German military dead was estimated at 5.3 million by Rüdiger Overmans of the Military History Research Office of Germany in 2000, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside of Germany's 1937 borders, in Austria, and in east-central Europe. The number of Polish dead are estimated to number between 5.6 and 5.8 million according to the Institute of National Remembrance (2009). Documentation remains fragmentary, but today scholars of independent Poland believe that 1.8 to 1.9 million Polish civilians (non-Jews) and 3 million Jews were victims of German Occupation policies and the war for a total of just under 5 million dead. The Japanese government as of 2005 put the number of Japanese casualties at 3.1 million. • Jeremy Bender wrote in May, 2014 : "The truly enormous scope of World War II is almost impossible to understand in hindsight. The war devastated vast swathes of Europe, East Asia, the Pacific, and North Africa, while its influence touched upon every part of the planet. Randal Olson, a Computer Science graduate research assistant at Michigan State University, has helped to illustrate the true devastation. His charts showcase the percentage of a country's population that died during WWII. Olson charts show that Belarus suffered the worst devastation of any country during the war in terms of a percentage of its population. Over a quarter of its population, 2,290,000 people, died during the conflict. And, other every eastern European country from Ukraine to Poland lost more than 15% of its population. Germany lost 12%. Japan and China lost 5%. The UK, France, and Italy lost 1.5-2.5%. The US and Canada lost less than 0.5% each. • • • DEAR READERS, in American history, Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, with more than 51,000 casualties, including 7,863 dead. Battle deaths in the Civil War totaled nearly 215,000. But, the single bloodiest day in American military history fell on Sept. 17, 1862 : at the Battle of Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. Forces of Union General George McClellan and the Confederate troops of General Robert E. Lee met in a daylong pitched battle. By its end, more than 23,000 soldiers had been killed or wounded. During the entire Civil War (1861-1865), an estimated 750,000 soldiers died, according to a 2011 study in the journal Civil War History. This is almost twice the number of US battle deaths during World War II, when the armed forces were eight times as large. It was war fought in your own streets and countryside. • When we commemmorate the Centenary of Armistice Day on Sunday, November 11, remember the death, the gassing, the civilian casualties, the shattered infrastructure of Europe. BUT, remember more than anything the loss of the generation that should have matured in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. It was simply decimated by war. And, most historians agree that Europe has never fully recovered from that decimation. The battlefields of Ypres and the Somme, the military cemeteries found all over France and Belgium and Italy tell the tale of a Europe that slaughtered itself. And, not more than 20 years later, Europe was again submerged in war, this time with Nazi Germany. Historians also agree that the draconian penalties and reparations levied on Germany after WW I were a principal cause of the rise of socialist nationalism in the form of the Nazis. • Armistice Day -- during the last century, the day has become in Europe a sombre day of reflection, marked with poppies and respectful silence. • The last third of the 20th century, after World War II, contrasts sharply with what had come before in Europe -- retreat from empire, and compulsory military service, and even large militaries, abandoned. • The words that appear on the gravestones of unidentified soldiers of the First World War, “A soldier of the Great War known unto God,” were written by the celebrated writer and Nobel Prizewinner, Rudyard Kipling. The words written by Kipling, contain a cruel irony. Kipling’s own son John had been taken into the army despite his appallingly weak eyesight, and was killed by a German shell in 1915 at the battle of Loos. His body was never found, so he too became, in his father’s words, “A soldier of the Great War known unto God.” • It is not difficult to understand why Europeans today are prepared to accept almost any compromise in order to avoid war. That does not make it reasonable -- but war fought in your own city streets and farms is not reasonable. It is starvation, loss of husbands and fathers and sons, enemy troops taking over your country and village. Europeans have learned that lesson twice in the past century. "In Flanders Fields the poppies grow between the crosses row on row..."