Today is Veteran's Day, but it is worth recalling that it was originally established as Armistice Day: a day to commemorate the armistice that finally ended the fighting on the Western Front of the long, bloody "Great War"-- World War I.
The cessation of hostilities took effect at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, noted as "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month."
Here in the U.S. it's easy to overlook the impact that this terrible conflict had on an entire generation in Europe.
During the course of World War One, eleven percent (11%) of France's entire population were killed or wounded! Eight percent (8%) of Great Britain's population were killed or wounded, and nine percent (9%) of Germany's pre-war population were killed or wounded! The United States, which did not enter the land war in strength until 1918, suffered one-third of one percent (0.37%) of its population killed or wounded.
The casualties were concentrated on young men, of course. I've read estimates that as much as one-third of that generation's men were killed or wounded, on all sides.
Author and former soldier J.R.R. Tolkien felt the war's impact keenly, and it had a profound influence on his life and writing.
"One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."
The memorable scenes of Frodo, Samwise, and Gollum inching their way through the haunted Dead Marshes before the Black Gate of Morder seem right out of Tolkien's memories of the trenches and blasted landscapes of the Western front.
In his spare time off duty, in the barracks behind the front, and often disturbed by music from gramophones (as he would later say), Tolkien started writing in a notebook the beginning of a mythology that he initially called The Book of Lost Tales. He would never finish this book, although most of it would eventually be published as The Silmarillon.In those months Death was omnipresent. Bodies of British and German soldiers lay unburied, stinking and rotting, around him in No Mans Land. Writing became for Tolkien a way to deal with this brutality and barbarity around him. He wrote whenever he found an opportunity, "in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even down in dugouts under shell fire".
Here in America, we've set aside November 11 as Veteran's Day, a day to honor living veterans. But it's important to remember the deep sacrifices made by our friends and allies in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Keep them in your thoughts, too.
Posted by Alan at November 11, 2005 12:41 AM