Almost 11,000 casualties after ceasefire signed 90 years ago today
Nov. 11, 1918.
Just after 5 a.m. After working through the night in a railway car north of Paris, the bigwigs of the German, French and British armies had finally hammered out the fine points of the ceasefire agreement which would see a four-year-long global war come to an end.
While the war raged from 1914 to 1918, 8.5 million people were killed and 21 million wounded. The numbers are too immense to grasp, but what’s easy to understand is each of those millions of fighting men was a son, a brother, a husband, or a father, and a defender of whatever king, country or god they called their own.
These soldiers, many of them barely boys, had their lives torn from their broken bodies in miles of trenches filled with blood and rats and barbed wire and mud. Always the mud and the sound of the guns and sometimes the terror-filled scrambling for masks as the yellow-brown clouds of mustard gas floated in on a mission to kill everyone it touched.
Then in the moments of stillness that would descend when the guns were quiet for a while, weary men would huddle together in the mud on the edge of No-Man’s Land, hungry for home.
But with the signing of the armistice, the end was in sight. The War to End All Wars would end in six hours on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, somebody’s big idea of how to end the bloodiest conflict the world had seen up till then on a poetic note.
But several hundred more men would die in the next six hours.
Men like Augustin Trebuchon who served in the French Army. Trebuchon was the last French soldier to be killed, shot on his way to tell his brothers-in-arms the cook had made a special soup and they’ve all be getting a hot bowl to celebrate the Armistice right after 11 a.m.
A shot rang out from the German lines and struck Trebuchon at 10:45 a.m.
Or Private George Lawrence Price, the last Canadian solder killed in the war. Price was killed just two minutes before the armistice in street fighting with retreating German soldiers.
Ninety years have come and gone since the end of the War to End All Wars.
Take a moment today to remember all the brave men who fought for this country and suffered at the whim of the rulers of the day, like the 11,000 killed and injured between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918 because someone in an office far from the fighting thought the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month had a nice ring to it, with no thought at all for the men.
Just after 5 a.m. After working through the night in a railway car north of Paris, the bigwigs of the German, French and British armies had finally hammered out the fine points of the ceasefire agreement which would see a four-year-long global war come to an end.
While the war raged from 1914 to 1918, 8.5 million people were killed and 21 million wounded. The numbers are too immense to grasp, but what’s easy to understand is each of those millions of fighting men was a son, a brother, a husband, or a father, and a defender of whatever king, country or god they called their own.
These soldiers, many of them barely boys, had their lives torn from their broken bodies in miles of trenches filled with blood and rats and barbed wire and mud. Always the mud and the sound of the guns and sometimes the terror-filled scrambling for masks as the yellow-brown clouds of mustard gas floated in on a mission to kill everyone it touched.
Then in the moments of stillness that would descend when the guns were quiet for a while, weary men would huddle together in the mud on the edge of No-Man’s Land, hungry for home.
But with the signing of the armistice, the end was in sight. The War to End All Wars would end in six hours on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, somebody’s big idea of how to end the bloodiest conflict the world had seen up till then on a poetic note.
But several hundred more men would die in the next six hours.
Men like Augustin Trebuchon who served in the French Army. Trebuchon was the last French soldier to be killed, shot on his way to tell his brothers-in-arms the cook had made a special soup and they’ve all be getting a hot bowl to celebrate the Armistice right after 11 a.m.
A shot rang out from the German lines and struck Trebuchon at 10:45 a.m.
Or Private George Lawrence Price, the last Canadian solder killed in the war. Price was killed just two minutes before the armistice in street fighting with retreating German soldiers.
Ninety years have come and gone since the end of the War to End All Wars.
Take a moment today to remember all the brave men who fought for this country and suffered at the whim of the rulers of the day, like the 11,000 killed and injured between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918 because someone in an office far from the fighting thought the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month had a nice ring to it, with no thought at all for the men.
posted by Street Wise Guy | 6:02 AM
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