Dwain Northey (Gen X)

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month – we will remember them. The Armistice, an agreement to end the fighting of the First World War as a prelude to peace negotiations, began at 11am on 11 November 1918.

WWI has since been called the Great War although there was nothing Great about it the loss of life on a global scale had never been seen at that point in our existence.

Historically the spark that started WWI was the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists, 28 June 1914. The circumstances that lead up to that event are far more set for a Doctoral Thesis than a blog post but leave it to say that the brutality that The Great War revealed to the world was horrific. There were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians.

World War I popularized the use of the machine gun—capable of bringing down row after row of soldiers from a distance on the battlefield. This weapon, along with barbed wire and mines, made movement across open land both difficult and dangerous. Thus, trench warfare was born. This barbaric weapon of war has been perfected and is still used today on warfare and even in our cities today.

The Great War gave the barbarity of humanity new weapons to eliminate soldiers and civilians without remorse. It is estimated that as many as 85% of the 91,000 gas deaths in WWI were a result of phosgene or the related agent, diphosgene (trichloromethane chloroformate). The most commonly used gas in WWI was ‘mustard gas’.

The war waged on for 4 years before the Armistice was signed and the Treaty of Versailles imposed very harsh penalties on Germany. The strict monetary punishment of the treaty was surely the impetus for the rise of a decorated German soldier to lead the Nazi party in 1921 and set off a second world war by invaliding Poland in September of 1939.

This day is currently recognized as Veterans Day a day where se solemnly honor those who served. In the first and second world wars we could say All gave Some and Some Gave All lest we never forget. Those wars touched everyone globally, we haven’t reached that level of brutality since, we have seen war and bloody conflicts but none to date that have enlisted the entirety on humanity to the level of WWI and WWII. I hope that we never have a global conflict because with the advances we have made in the amount of death that cause there won’t be another world war after the next one.

Lest We Never Forget…