Memorial in Wiarton, Ontario, listing the honored dead from the area in the Great War. Later, Second World War dead were likewise honored.
We would do well to remember our Canadian brethren. Some 67,000 perished in combat in the First World War and 173,000 were wounded.
“Mud Road to Passchendaele” by Douglas Culham.
A public domain image borrowed from an article by Joseph E. Persico, published by Military Times in 2017.
Note the date of the paper: November 7, 1918. As I understand it, there was a false alarm about an armistice on that day that was picked up by the AP and spread at the speed of telegraphy.
The article tells the story of men who fell on November 11 that year, in spite of the armistice, a bloody coda for four bloody years. Including the story of Henry Gunther who, for official purposes at least, was considered the last American killed in the war. Official time of death: 10:59 am, as he unaccountably charged Germans with machine guns.
He was one among thousands. “Losses on all sides that day approached eleven thousand dead, wounded, and missing,” Persico notes.
“Indeed, Armistice Day exceeded the ten thousand casualties suffered by all sides on D-Day, with this difference: The men storming the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, were risking their lives to win a war. The men who fell on November 11, 1918, lost their lives in a war that the Allies had already won.”
It occurred to me not long ago, though it’s been true for a good many years, that every bit of writing, photography, film and other work created during the Great War is in the public domain. So I went looking for images of the first Armistice Day or thereabouts.
At the front. Really something to celebrate.
Paris.
London.
New York.
Actually, there’s some hint that the NYC pics are from November 7, when the AP erroneously reported that an armistice had been signed. No matter. The celebratory spirit is there.
One of many.
Laurice John Inglis was born in South Australia on the 2 March 1898, the only son of Henry W. and Lucy Inglis. He enlisted on 1 November 1916 and took part in the assault on the Polygon Wood and the capture of Black Watch Corner. Private Inglis, aged 19 years, was killed in action at Broodseinde Ridge, Belgium, on 5 October 1917.
Also, I’m happy to report — literally — that the National World War I Memorial in Washington, DC, is mostly complete.
Image taken by Ernest Brooks during the Battle of Broodseinde, showing a group of soldiers of the 8th East Yorkshire Regiment moving up to the front, silhouetted against the skyline.
During my break from posting, Arlo Stribling was born to my nephew Dees and his wife Eden in Austin. Congratulations to the new parents, here’s hoping the boy is a joy. Best regards to little Arlo, an emissary to a future my generation will not see.
On the afternoon of Friday, October 9, Ann and I went southward for a visit in and around Shawnee National Forest, which stretches in large patches — in typical national forest style — from the Ohio River to the Mississippi, or vice versa, occupying a lot of extreme southern Illinois. We looked around the east part of the forest. The weather turned out to be flawless for such a little trip, warm and partly cloudy.
We spent the first night in Mattoon, Illinois, continuing southward the next morning. The first place we went on Saturday morning wasn’t in southeast Illinois, but further west: Carbondale, visiting Castle Park, or more formally Jeremy Rochman Memorial Park, on the outskirts of town. Afterwards, we looked around Southern Illinois State University, and saw the nearby Buckminster Fuller House. A domed house, of course.
Heading east on Illinois 13, we eventually made our way as far east as that road goes, Old Shawneetown, a husk of a formerly much more populous place on the banks of the Ohio, and home to the Shawneetown State Bank Historic Site. We spent the next two nights in Harrisburg, Illinois, which bills itself as the Gateway to the Shawnee National Forest.
On Sunday, we drove the roads of the southeast part of the forest, climbed a modest flagstone path to a grand vista — the Garden of the Gods — hiked along a small lake surrounded by trees approaching their peak coloration, climbed a bluff via a CCC staircase, and visited a large cave entrance facing the Ohio River at Cave-in-Rock State Park.
Small, winding roads pass through the national forest, rising and falling, flanked alternately by walls of trees and expanses of flat farmland, post-harvest but before a winter freeze. Towns come in the sizes small, smaller and hamlet. In that part of Illinois, sometimes known as Little Egypt, small white churches are a common sight, more Baptist than any other denomination. Not quite as common, but enough in evidence were abandoned structures: farmhouses, gas stations, motels, restaurants and shops. If it were up to the people who put up political signs in that part of the country, the president would be re-elected by a wide margin. A smattering of Confederate battle flags were flying here and there.
Traffic is at a trickle on those roads most of the time. That made for easy, and sometimes picturesque, driving. Car commercial driving, I told Ann.
On Monday, Columbus Day Observed, that lightest, most gossamer of all national holidays, we headed home, with one major short detour into Indiana, to visit the town of New Harmony. The 19th-century utopian colonies there might have failed (two! count ’em, two utopian experiments), but the town has succeeded in being highly pleasant and intriguing everywhere you look in our time. Also, a famed theologian is buried there, in as much as theologians get fame.
As mentioned above, we didn’t spend much time in Mattoon. But early on Saturday I got up and looked around for a few minutes. The town looks frayed, buffeted by the contraction of U.S. manufacturing and the vagaries of the farming industry and the rural economy as a whole.
The town’s relatively greater prosperity in the early 20th century is reflected in its cemetery. A sizable place, the Dodge Grove Cemetery measures about 60 acres and has 20,000 permanent residents, including three Civil War generals and 260 soldiers from that war, one of whom is an unknown Confederate. There’s a story in that last detail, probably lost to time.
Blazes of fall color rise in places.
According to Find a Grave, only one of those Civil War generals counts as a notable burial in Dodge Grove, James Milton True, commander of the 62nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry. I like the other major item on his CV: U.S. consul in Kingston, Ontario in the 1870s.
That hints at some pull with the postwar federal government, probably based on connections he made during the war, or because he became a local politico who could deliver votes. Or both. Seems like a plumb diplomatic assignment in the 19th century: no language skills necessary, close enough to home that you can visit periodically, and no danger of catching malaria or some other dreaded tropical disease.
I didn’t see his grave. I didn’t know he was there till later. I did see the Pythias obelisk.
Erected by
Palestine Lodge No. 46
Knights of Pythias
In Memory of
Deceased Members
1929
I’ve encountered vestiges of the Knights before, such as in Atlanta, Illinois. I associated them with an earlier time, the sort of organization that George Babbitt might have mentioned in passing as having a chapter in Zenith. But no: the Knights of Pythias are still around, though at much diminished numbers.
Still around, and up with the times. “The Summer 2020 Edition of the Pythian International is now online,” the fraternal org’s web site says. “It includes information on the rescheduled Supreme Convention, Oct. 1-6.”
As I was about to leave, I spotted this stone.
A heartbreaker of a stone. Though I’m sure combat deaths didn’t quite stop exactly at 11 am on the 11th, since even modern armies with good internal communications can’t stop on a dime. Still, the day before the Armistice. Damn.
I don’t know why I’m surprised any more at anything online, but I was surprised to find a local newspaper account of Lawrence Riddle’s last days, though it doesn’t specify how he died (and this too: a niece that he never knew). In the article, the most attention is paid to Riddle’s participation in combat during the days before his death, charging a German machine gun position with four other men. They seized the position and brought back prisoners.
I wonder whether the Germans, eager to surrender at this point in the war, were making it easy for the raiders, or whether the Americans faced bitter-enders who were still playing for keeps. Either way, a clear act of bravery on the part of Riddle and the others.
Not quite a year ago — after November 11 last year — we saw They Shall Not Grow Old in a movie theater. I was skeptical about the colorization of WWI, but came away convinced that Peter Jackson and his talented technical team had done a superb job of it. More than colorizing, but also adding appropriate sound and making the speed of the film more natural to our eyes.
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.
— Laurence Binyon (1914)
On Sunday morning I went downtown to the University of Illinois at Chicago campus and attended a short ceremony to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice, held by the university’s Honors College as the end of a series of events marking the occasion.
My old friend Neal mentioned it last summer and as it happened, Michele, his wife, organized the November 11 event. She did a good job.
The event included the posting and retrieval of the colors, some short remarks, poetry from the period, and of course at 11:00 a moment of silence, followed by the playing of Taps.
Michele read the two poems. This is her preparing to read.
One was “Grass” by Carl Sandburg, dating from 1918.
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work —
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
Also, verse by Dame Mary Gilmore, lesser known in this country, but renowned in Australia. Also 1918.
They are not dead; not even broken;
Only their dust has gone back home to the earth:
For they — the essential they — shall have rebirth
Whenever a word of them is spoken.
About 30 people attended the event, which was held at the campus’ Memorial Grove, a renovated green space. A small tent had been erected in case of rain, but Armistice Day this year in Chicago was sunny, though fairly cold, just above freezing. So I parked myself just outside the tent, where I could sit in the sun.
Guillaume Lacroix, Consul General of France in Chicago, said a few words, echoing those of President Marcon during Armistice Day ceremonies at the Arc de Triomphe only a few hours earlier. Words about the dangers of nationalism, which doubled as a pointed rebuke against you-know-who, a subtext that was lost on no one.
Also speaking were a representative of the Italian consulate and the dean of the Honors College, Ralph Keen.
A Peking lilac (Syringa pekinensis) tree had been planted near the sidewalk a few days earlier, next to the new memorial. During the event, the memorial was covered with black cloth topped by poppies.
The Morton Arboretum says that “The Peking lilac is a dependable urban tree and a great choice even for parking lot, boulevard, and parkway plantings. Native to Asia, it is both hardy and beautiful, with attractive, amber-colored, peeling bark. In early summer, when many shrubs and trees are done blooming, it has large, creamy-white, honey-scented flower clusters.”
Toward the end of the event, the French Consul General, the dean of the college, and the Italian representative lifted the black cloth from the memorial.
A granite block with a burnished aluminum plaque.
According to Neal, the block had once been part of the former skywalk system around campus. When the skywalk was dismantled in the early 1990s, the removed materials were stored. They are still being recycled for newer structures, such as the memorial stone but also some nearby benches installed when the Memorial Grove was renovated a few years ago.
Has it been 100 years? That milestone might merely be a quirk of the fact that we use base 10, but I still think it’s worth an extra measure of reflection on the man-made cataclysm that came to a halt on Armistice Day.
But the Great War wasn’t that long ago. Not really. All of my grandparents were alive for it — were grown men and women, and in one case, my mother’s father, in France when it ended.
I took this picture a few years ago at Cantigny Park, former estate of Robert McCormick, who was so deeply affected by his experience in the Great War that he preferred to be known as Col. McCormick even in civilian life, and named his property after the Battle of Cantigny, in which he participated.
I probably didn’t mean to capture Ann in that picture, but I did. A child amusing herself within sight of a memorial to bravery in the face of a bloodletting she could not imagine, and that her father can only dimly imagine, as informed by books and movies.
Somehow, though, I know November 11, 1918, is a special moment in the history of mankind, and we would do well to remember it. In Breakfast of Champions (1973), Kurt Vonnegut wrote a remarkable passage about Armistice Day:
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
An artifact at the Spurlock Museum in Champaign, Ill.
Armistice Day Hand Drum. United States, ca. 1918. Rawhide, steel, copper, cotton, paint. Reginald and Gladys Laubin Collection.