They called it “The War to End All Wars.” H.G. Wells coined this phrase near the beginning of the First World war and it caught on quickly.1 And why wouldn’t they imagine this to be so? The whole world was fighting “Over There”– in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asian Pacific.2 It was the first war to be fought on the land, in the air, and on the sea. Air attacks on civilians became widespread for the first time. With many advances in technology, it was the first war to use tanks, flamethrowers, and chemical weapons like chlorine gas.3 The death toll was astronomically higher than previous wars. In the first year alone, more than a million soldiers were killed.4 Overall, more than 70 million military personnel fought in the First World War, down in the trenches, looking out over no man’s land; waiting for the command to go over and fight.5
It’s not been more than a hundred years since the Armistice of World War I. It’s not the day the final peace treaty was signed; it’s the day of the ceasefire. At 5:00 am on November 11th, they came to the understanding that all hostilities would cease six hours from that time. So it was that the war took a major turn toward peace on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.6
But that did leave six hours to continue fighting; to get out all that hatred and frustration. There were many artillery units that kept firing on the Germans as long as they could (if for no other reason than if they fired all the shells, they wouldn’t have to haul away such heavy ammunition). One American soldier charged the Germans sixty seconds before 11:00 to try to gain his last chance for glory. He is considered the last soldier to die in action in World War I – one of the 2,738 who died on that last day.7
They called it “The War to End All Wars,” but even while the war was still going on, one British politician quipped “This war, like the next war, is a war to end [all] war.”8 I think part of the reason that this saying is sad but true is because we so often fail to really listen to what veterans have learned in their service in and out of wartime. We’re more interested in daring feats and war stories than we are in understanding what it was really like to risk so much, to believe that you can make a difference, to lay your life on the line. Few can understand the blessing of peace, the urgency for peace like a soldier can.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_war_to_end_war
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
[3] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/firsts-of-the-first-world-war
[4] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-modern-weapons-changed-combat-in-the-first-world-war
[5] Ibid.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_of_11_November_1918
[7] Ibid.
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_war_to_end_war