Armistice Day

Here in the US we have called it Veterans Day (officially it should have no possessive apostrophe) since 1954, but I am not on board with the name change. Armistice Day was meant to be a day to mark the end of the The Great War and to pause to consider the fates of the millions who died in that eruption of violent European tribalism. In the US we have subtly shifted the emphasis to the soldiers, which takes us away from the horrors visited on civilians and closer to a glorification of the soldier and of war, the sort of glorification that Mark Twain depicted well in his War Prayer. The ceremonies we conduct on this day, usually in military cemeteries, are all about honoring the soldiers, and there is little talk anymore about the utter futility in which they died in that war, since the conventional wisdom that has settled across the land has it that to discuss the futility, idiocy, or infamy of any of our wars is to dishonor the soldiers. Nor is there any talk of the huge cost to civilian populations; and in a war with 7 million  civilian dead alongside the 10 million million  military dead, this seems a major and shortsighted lapse. The sort of lapse that I have to think will lead to more war and more dead.

But let's get back to my usual subject, which is mental breakdowns. In the case of war we have the well-known example of what we today call Post-traumatic stress disorder. I am far from knowing much about this, but I do know that in this clip comedian George Carlin makes a few essential points on the importance of the names we give to "abnormal" mental conditions.



The effects of war on minds need to be taken as seriously as its effects on bodies. In each case the young, the healthy, the fit are mangled, broken, destroyed, crippled. It is well known today that field and emergency medicine has advanced a great deal since the days of MASH or even Vietnam. Our ability to heal minds lags sadly behind.  And though the economic cost of this destruction can be tabulated, there is no way to tabulate the cost in psychic trauma,  the cost of promising young lives dumped into a maelstrom of psychological dysfunction, and the price paid by parents, spouses, children, siblings. If we were to apply a psychological cost-benefit analysis to our wars we might find most of them to be grievously expensive.

I have no solutions for any of this, nor any comforting words. Someday, I would like to think, we will honor our soldiers by not sending them to die for empire or for lies. And in the meantime, until that day arrives, we might honor them by facing up to the full cost of their service, by honestly addressing their conditions, and by putting as much money into healing their souls as we put into perfecting ways to kill.


Bonus: Armistice day poem

The poppies used across the Commonwealth on Armistice/Remembrance day are taken from the poem "In Flanders Fields" by Canadian Lieutenant John McCrae. It was written in 1915, before the full, grinding horror of the war became apparent. It is, we might say, practically a product of the pre-war era, when one might with no shame raise up war as a noble endeavor. But the war was to produce a new generation of poets and poems, many of whom, like McCrae, would not survive the trenches.  These would depict the war in more realistic, graphic and horrible ways. One of the more potent of these is Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est," the name of which is taken from the poem's last lines, which contain a quote from Horace that translates to "Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country." Horace clearly meant it. Owen, whose poem is based on his own experience on the receiving end of gas attacks (in the poem the gas seems to be mustard or phosgene) places the Horace quote in the title with bitter irony. By 1917, when the poem was written, it was no longer possible to discuss the glories of battle.

Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


Wilfred Owen died one week before the end of the war; news of his death reached his parents on Armistice Day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month.