Handed in at 175 Brigade Office 10:00 hrs – received 10:05 hrs
To 12th BATTALION
Hostilities cease 11:00 today [aaa] Troops will stand fast on the
outpost line already established [aaa] All military precautions will be
observed and there will be no communication with the enemy [aaa] Further
instructions later [aaa] Acknowledge
…and of course…
The English and French headlines are both easy. What the German one says is: “Acceptance of Armistice Terms. Kaiser Interned. Hindenburg on the Run.”
But not soon enough.
Not soon enough at all.
These dates tell their own story.
George Edwin Ellison, 5th Royal Irish Lancers, British Army – killed
09:30 am
11/11/18.
Augustin Joseph Trébuchon, 415e Régiment d’Infanterie, Armée de Terre Française – killed 10:50 am
11/11/18.
George Lawrence Price, 28th Battalion (Northwest), Canadian Expeditionary Force – killed 10:58 am 11/11/18.
Henry John Gunther,
313th Infantry Regiment, American Expeditionary Forces – killed 10:59 am 11/11/18.
At least those men had names, and their relatives knew what had happened.
Others were less fortunate.
Many didn’t get even anonymous graves and headstones. Their bodies were lost, to exploding shells, ever-present mud and a shifting battlefront, until only names and memories remained.
Those names have sunlight and clean rain at the Thiepval Memorial…
They have bugles every evening at the Menin Gate…
And the memory of them has the song of skylarks, above Flanders fields where poppies still grow where they fell.
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.”
“At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.”
Remember.
One hundred years ago today. Here’s Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, the Latin mass intercut with Wilfred Owen poems:
the assassination of franz ferdinand was actually the most hilariously botched assassination attempt of all time though like i can’t even explain to you how badly it went i mean there were six guys and the first one chickened out and the second one forgot to factor in the delay on a hand grenade so it exploded like three cars past the archduke’s so the guy took a cyanide pill and threw himself into a river, but the cyanide was expired and the river was six inches deep so the police just pulled him out and took him off to jail and then everyone else basically gave up and headed home, and then the driver of the archduke took a wrong turn and the car stalled next to the last of the six guys, and he was just like “what a crazy random happenstance” and started world war one
THIS LEAVES OUT THE BEST PART. Gavrilo Princip was ordering a sandwich when the car took a wrong turn and he IN THE MIDDLE OF ORDERING A DAMN SANDWICH turned around and shot the archduke
