As you all know today is a very special day, November 11, Veteran’s Day. But today is much more than that. It is the one hundredth anniversary of the event that caused us to assign this day on the calendar as a remembrance of our soldiers who risked and gave their lives in war. At 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month an armistice was signed which ended the bloodiest conflict in human history.
The carnage was so great that people hoped it would be the war that ends all war. A hundred years has shown us quite the opposite. The “Great War” became “World War I” after the next global conflict barely twenty years later and smaller yet still devastating wars have been waged regularly all over the planet since then. My generation assumed that if there ever came a “World War III” that it would destroy civilization and the planet we live on.
World War I which we remember today is in many ways a forgotten war. People nowadays refer to the Korean War as the forgotten war because it ended in a stalemate. But I can better imagine what that was like for a soldier than I can for a war which took place more than a hundred years ago. I remember seeing my grandfather’s dough boy uniform hanging in the closet but about all I know about what it would have been like to fight in WW I comes from reading All Quiet on the Western Front.
Today we are all aware of the sarcophagus created at Chernobyl to contain the hazardous contamination from the nuclear melt down there. But did you know that there are still places near Verdun in France where people do not go because of toxic and ordinance contamination left over from World War One?
No man’s land. That term took on its modern meaning as a result of World War One. You hunkered down in your trench, shelled the opponent’s trenches and maybe you even tried to tunnel under their trenches to blow them up. But you never charged up the hill through no man’s land as you would have in the olden days of warfare because you would be mown down by withering machine gun fire.
World War I may be a forgotten war but I hope not on this special centennial. The losses by European countries were devastating and the losses by our own country substantial. Many died of the Spanish flu. Many a family got news that their young soldier was dead. But the saddest aspect of the whole episode is that a lesson was not taken to heart. Less than a quarter of a century after the Great War Hitler forced France to sign surrender documents in the very rail car on which the armistice had been signed.
Bluegrass has a lot to say about that other great war, WW II. The genre started around that time so it’s natural. I had to go back to our bluegrass cousins, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family to find a song about Boom Boom One. And here it is:
Soldier’s Sweetheart
Once I had a sweetheart
A sweetheart brave and true
His hair was dark and curly
His loving eyes were blue
He told me that he loved me
And he often proved it so
And he often came to see me
When the evening sun was low
But they took him away
To this awful German war
And when he came to say goodbye
My heart did overflow
He said, goodbye, little darling
To France I must go
He takes a golden finger ring
And he placed it on my hand
Said, remember me, little darling
When I’m in no man’s land
He promised he would write to me
That promise he kept true
And when I read this letter from him
I pray the war is through
The second letter I got from him
The war was just ahead
The third one, wrote by his Captain
My darling dear was dead
I’ll keep all his letters
I’ll keep his gold ring, too
And I’ll always live a single life
For the soldier who was so true
