100 Years

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Today we celebrate 100 years since the end of the Great War, World War 1, which killed an estimated 10 million soldiers.

My grandfather fought in the cavalry, and when I went with Mom to Europe many years ago, she shuddered as our train passed through Verdun and other battle sites.

The past not that long past to her, because it lived on through the memories of her father.

World War II is the war that lived in my memory, and in a way similar to Mom's — because my father fought in it.

But it is World War I we memorialize today, the War to End All Wars (oh, how I wish that were true).   Here are the last paragraphs of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front:

He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

(World War 1 trenches, 1916. Photo: Wikipedia)