Remember, Remember, for we should never forget

I know very few people read this blog, but try to remember the 11th, not the fifth, of November.

89 years ago, on the 11th minute of the 11th hour on the 11th day on the 11th month, the worst war the World had yet seen finally ended. On that day, many hoped for peace. True, many of them also hoped for glory, but the people on the field rarely thought of that- they just wanted to survive. They saw possible friends die on the field that day. Some of them had played football together in the Xmas of 1914 for crying out loud! Those soldiers, in another life, were or could have been friends; due to the war, people with similar ideas never had the chance...

By that day, the hope was not for a peace built on quicksand like the Treaty of Versailles; they wanted the Great War to be the War to end all Wars, the last time war would ever be fought. The fact that the peace didn't even last a year- as Central and Eastern Europeans fought to carve out their states from Austrian, Hungarian, German, Turkish and Russian territory- but no one really wanted that. The hope was that Wilson would be able to lead us into a new world, where war wasn't just a memory, but its very recurrence unthinkable.

The fact that he failed is not the same thing as wanting to fail. He really did hope he could save the world from other wars. Sure he was a racist and had a nasty messiah complex, but he did believe what he said. He wanted no more wars.

I believe the British and their ex-colonies wear poppies to remember those who thought they were fighting to end that war. Sure it may have been for glory at first, but there was a genuine hope that the Great War would be the last War.

We Americans don't have such a tradition. Maybe we should start it. For it does not stand for war, but for those who hoped there would be no more.