The Eleventh Hour….
Today is Armistice Day.
It is a holiday we don’t celebrate to much in America.
But here in London, people take this very seriously.
This morning, at 11AM, everything in this country came to a halt for two minutes.
Two minutes of silence.
The BBC stopped transmitting, as did every other TV network or radio station.
The whole country comes to a standstill for two minutes of silence to remember and comemorate those who gave their lives from Britain in war.
It’s a noble tradition, and a powerful one.
By 1918, when the Great War ended, Britain had suffered more than 2 million casualties on the battlefield – 1.2 milion deaths.
The total population of Great Britain at that time was just north of 40 million people.
In other words, 5% of the population were killed or injured in battle.
In the US, this would be equivalent to 15 million casualties.
It is an almost incomprehensible number.
At the Battle of the Somme, the British suffered 415,000 casualties.
The problem with the First World War was one of elan vs. technology.
The armies of Europe had been educated to fight swinging sabres or firing volleys from rifles as the bravely marched toward the enemy.
The problem was that a new technology – the machine gun – arrived.
Many technologies are disruptive.
Few have been more disruptive than the machine gun.
The first Maxim Guns were simply machines that indiscriminately spewed death. They didn’t care how much elan you had, how brave you were.
Rows of marching men were mowed down like so much grass on a summer day.
The Generals had no idea how to re-orient their strategies to account for this new kind of mechanized killing.
They only knew how to keep doing what they had done in the past – march bravely into enemy fire.
Once it had been successful.
Now it was merely pointless.
So wave after wave of young men died, over and over.
Ultimately, they retreated to the trenches, and it would take four long years of slogging through mud and blood to reach an end.
A whole generation of Europeans would be wiped out for nothing.
In the end, The First World War would extract more than 35 million casualites across Europe.
And for what?
For ‘glory’?
Is it any wonder then, that even now, 93 years later, people still stand silent for two minutes to remember.
