The war to end all wars: a look at World War I

The restrained events that mark Veterans Day stand in stark contrast to the grueling four-year-long First World War that ended 100 years ago today

World War I, which introduced industrialized killing to a world utterly unprepared for it, ended at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918 — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Beginning in 1919, the day was marked in America as Armistice Day.

Church bells would sound at 11 a.m. and people would observe a moment of silence to remember the men who died in the 1914-18 war.

In 1954, in the aftermath of World War II, Congress renamed the day as Veterans Day.

In August, 1914, Europe had blundered into a war that all the major nations swore would “be over by Christmas.”

Instead, as the British historian Sir Max Hastings recounts in his book “Catastrophe 1914,” by that first Christmas, over 300,000 Frenchmen had been killed, wounded or captured. During the same period, the Germans suffered 800,000 casualties.

The toll of deaths was unrelenting.

“Throughout four years of war, casualties on both sides on the western front averaged 2,250 dead and almost 5,000 wounded every day,” Joseph Persico writes in his “11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour.”

The war ushered in new, ever more violent ways of killing: poison gas, flamethrowers, the tank, and saw the emergence of the machine gun as a mass killing machine.

The airplane, a mere 11 years old when the war began, was quickly converted into sinister new roles; in 1917, massive German “Gotha” bombers launched terror raids on London.

The submarine, which had been around in very rudimentary form since the American Revolution, was refined into an increasingly lethal weapon.

The ripples of the war continue to reverberate in any number of places, most particularly in the Middle East.

The war caused three empires to collapse: Russia, the Hapsburg Empire (which governed a polyglot mix of 10 Eastern European countries), and the Ottoman Empire, which had governed much of the Middle East.

In his essential book “The Great War and Modern Memory,” the author Paul Fussell addresses the true impact of the war.

“The Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing meliorist myth... It reversed the idea of Progress.”

In battles large and small fought on three contents — Africa, Asia and especially in Europe — the war claimed some nine million combatants and an estimated seven million more civilian lives.

America, which entered the war in April 1917, lost 53,402 of her sons in combat and another 63,114 to non-combat deaths, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Another 204,000 American soldiers were wounded.

Regrettable as they are, those losses pale in comparison United Kingdom soldiers who died on the Somme but whose remains have never been recovered.

The now-pleasant fields were also left studded with the detritus of war.

Fully a third of the artillery shells fired during the war failed to go off. They still pose a threat, however, because many of those shells contained poison gas.

Corroded and slowly rusting away, they could yet claim more victims.

The war did not end so much as it stopped.

The time of the Armistice had been announced in advance, at 5 a.m.

Yet, incredibly, some commanders, seeking either glory or promotion, still sent their troops forward in the waning six hours.

Henry Gunther, a 23year-old soldier from Baltimore, was the last man to die in the war — at 10:59 a.m. on Nov. 11.

Gunther was not alone, Persico notes.

The total casualties of that last day were 10,944, of whom 2,738 were killed, he writes.

Not only did it kill millions and destroy the innocence of millions more, the war also laid the groundwork for the even greater slaughter that was World War II.

Exhausted as the war wound down, the British and French chose not to push on and occupy Germany once the fighting ended.

Doing so would have forced Germany to face the reality it was beaten on the battlefield. But by not doing so, the Allies enabled Adolf Hitler to claim Germany “was stabbed in the back” by the men who negotiated the armistice.

Instead, the Allies laid down their arms and tried to pick up their lives and move on, embracing an ideal of remaking the world.

Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Chief of the French General Staff, Supreme Allied Commander, was not fooled by the Armistice signed in a railway car in Compiegne, however.

“This is not peace; it is an Armistice for twenty years,” Foch declared.

He was off by a nine months and 21 days.