War To End

I HAVE TO confess that I was somewhat anti-military during my formative years.I say "somewhat" because I've not always supported the war, but I've always backed those who fought.I speak especially of Vietnam (although Grenada also bothered me). During the Vietnam War, my childhood fascination with miniature soldiers and tanks engaged in fantasy combat dissipated as the real combat raged on my television screen.Things got worse when the Army drafted one of my brothers. His heart sank when the notice came.

Veterans losing their dueThe guns finally fell silent at 11 a.m., Nov. 11, 1918, but not before a generation of European men was slaughtered. Although our nation's involvement was shorter than other countries', the "war to end all wars" left a painful mark on our people and culture.World War I touched most of the families in my hometown of Milwaukee. While many people knew of a doughboy who had made the ultimate sacrifice, everyone could see how the war ravaged those who did return.The usual way to describe veterans forever unnerved by combat experience was, "and after that, he was never quite right."

LONDON -- Eighty years later, Douglas Thomson can still summon up the smells and sounds of World War I.The military messenger who once ferried orders to British troops dug into trenches along the Western Front is now, at 100, one of the few survivors of a conflict that ended the old order and shaped modern Europe."

IT IS GENERALLY accepted that the Civil War was the most important event in American history. Yet, as two recent controversies remind us, we disagree on what that war was about.The question of whether the nation should make a formal apology for slavery has brought forth from such authorities as former history professor Newt Gingrich and columnist George F. Will the declaration that we fought the war to end slavery.Meanwhile, across the South, where battles continue over the display of Confederate flags and related symbols, white defenders of their "heritage" argue that the Civil War was not about slavery but about states' rights and "Southern independence."

ARMISTICE DAY was what it was called when I was a child. A distant point in time in a vague war that was dimmed in memory by that which had just been won by painful human sacrifice that could be seen in every street of our small town, and especially at the local cemetery.There was no mistaking the loss of furloughed Tom, whose right sleeve was empty of the limb he had given up in agony on some battlefield in Europe. Or of Mrs. Thompson, whose parlor table was crowded with the photographs of a smiling son who would never come home.

Revolutionary War soldiers fought with muzzle-loading flintlock muskets and lived off scant rations and what they could scrounge on the march.Two centuries later, Gulf War GIs -- including women -- carried high-powered automatic rifles, rode in Humvees and ate sophisticated prepackaged rations called "meals, ready to eat."Despite improvements in weapons, equipment and food, however, the "common soldier" has been the same person throughout history and should be honored for service to country, a history instructor at Boys' Latin School told students yesterday, Veterans Day."

IT BEGAN as Armistice Day, to commemorate the end of fighting in World War I at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. Not surprisingly, its meaning faded during the hell of World War II.Nov. 11 was given over to solemn observation of the sacrifice in that war until a federal law of 1970 said that Veterans Day honoring those who served in all wars would be observed on the fourth Monday of October. Resistance was so great that as of 1976, Nov. 11 was federally reinstated as Veterans Day. And so it has remained.

During spring vacation in the year 1919 I visited my grandmother and aunt in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Another aunt and my uncle had given me a small dinner dance the night before. At age 16 it had been a heady affair. Grandmother didn't believe in sleeping late, though my feet ached from much dancing, so we were having breakfast together.Smiling she said, ''Mamie told me six boys walked you home from the party. When I was your age the same thing happened to me.'' As she sipped her coffee from the large cup beside her I looked at her and thought, ''She was never young.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- They are dying at a rate of 20 a day, the last American voices of the First World War.But as they fade away, the surviving U.S. veterans of "the war to end all wars" are fighting a lonely battle to save the national organization that for generations has bound them together.Of the 4.7 million Americans who served in World War I, fewer than 25,000 have endured the march of time and will today mark Veterans Day, which was established in part to remember the end of that conflict in 1918 on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

LAUDERDALE LAKES, Fla. -- He looks back 77 years through hTC the comfortable shade of long memory and recalls the faded image of 58 brave young soldiers marching off to win the War to End All Wars.And as the rest of the country celebrates Veterans Day today, 100-year-old Ralph Foster will remember its other name, Armistice Day, and the battles he fought during the first World War.Mr. Foster was little more than a kid in 1917 when the United States joined the fight, just a few years out of high school and more comfortable as captain of the baseball and football teams in Bowling Green, Ohio, than as a soldier in the U.S. Army.

HARRY PATCH Britain's last World War I veteran Harry Patch, Britain's last survivor of the trenches of World War I, was a reluctant soldier who became a powerful eyewitness to the horror of war, and a symbol of a lost generation. Mr. Patch, who died Saturday at 111, was wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Passchendaele, which he remembered as "mud, mud and more mud mixed together with blood." "Anyone who tells you that in the trenches they weren't scared, he's a damned liar: You were scared all the time," Mr. Patch was quoted as saying in a book, The Last Fighting Tommy, written with historian Richard van Emden.

Henry Gunther of Baltimore died at one minute before the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month - the last soldier killed in the four-year insanity of World War I. This Veterans Day 2008 marks 90 years since the armistice of 1918 and the deaths of Henry Gunther and nearly 3,000 other men - American, British, French, German - whose senseless loss in the final hours form the ultimate metaphor for the bloody lunacy of "the war to end all wars."...

The war in Iraq hasn't been a topic of conversation in many American homes for some time now. For most, a crippled economy, declining home values, job security and shrinking retirement savings are the more urgent concerns of the day. There are few reasons to talk about the Iraq conflict except to perhaps wager a guess on which of the two presidential candidates would best resolve the U.S. involvement there. But the deployment of U.S. soldiers, reservists and national guardsmen to Iraq or Afghanistan remains steady, as 50 families gathered this weekend in Glen Burnie know all too well.

Americans today are rightly concerned about the health and safety of our troops engaged in the global war on terrorism. We are equally interested in preserving the legacy of the "greatest generation" of World War II. But as we focus on our soldiers of today and yesteryear, we have largely forgotten our veterans of the "war to end all wars," World War I. They, too, deserve special recognition this Veterans Day because fewer than 40 survive; the death of...

They're the last of the last, the dwindling band of living veterans of World War I, the Great War, as it was called, the war to end all wars. It didn't, of course, and today, on the 88th anniversary of the day that the United States entered the war, its veterans are mostly forgotten even as newer veterans, from the current conflict in Iraq, come home. The best estimate is that perhaps 30 World War I veterans are alive in the United States, and that there are 150 survivors worldwide - a thin company left from the 65 million called up to fight the war. They're all very old now, even those who were very young when they went off to fight.

HAS THERE ever been a war that so many people disapproved of but so few wanted to stop? Have the reasons for starting a war ever been so thoroughly discredited without turning into reasons for ending it? The Vietnam era antiwar movement had an agenda: Bring the troops home. What seems to be today's antiwar position - it was a terrible mistake and it's a terrible mess, but we can't just walk away from it - was actually the pro-war position during Vietnam. In fact, it was close to official government policy for more than half the length of that war. Today's antiwar cause doesn't even have a movement, to speak of, let alone an agenda.

THIS MONTH marked the anniversaries of two events ending prolonged periods of conflict and generating the hope that war would no longer be the means to settle disagreements between nations. One was Nov. 9, the day in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, foreshadowing the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War that had sapped the treasuries and energies of the United States and the Soviet Union for almost five decades. The other was Nov. 11, called Veterans Day in America, marking the day in 1918 when an armistice ended the Great War, the War to End All Wars, in which millions had perished.

About 90 former soldiers from Carroll County gathered yesterday in Westminster for a Veterans Day ceremony that featured speakers revisiting experiences from past and present wars, starting with World War I and ending with Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though long converted into the city's gymnasium, Longwell Armory regained a part of its past with the tribute to the military yesterday. Maj. Thomas Long of the Carroll County Sheriff's Office talked about his "grandpap." Army Lt. John Long arrived in France singing patriotic songs such as "Yankee Doodle" and "Over There," but then endured machine gun fire, artillery barrages and poison gas. John Long survived, but, Thomas Long said, his grandfather's brothers-in-law weren't so fortunate, suffering and later dying from their injuries in the war. "Sadly, it wasn't the war to end all wars," Thomas Long said.

THE LETTER to the mother of the five soldiers arrived over the president's signature. Mrs. Lydia Bixby, of Massachusetts, lost two of her sons on the battlefield. Her sacrifice was great and the commander in chief was humbled by her loss: "I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save," President Abraham Lincoln wrote on Nov. 21, 1864.

At 11 a.m. tomorrow -- the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month -- we will mark the moment at which in 1918 the transaction ending the War to End War was achieved. For years, we celebrated Nov. 11 as Armistice Day. Now it's called Veterans' Day. Fine. War did not end. So it's fitting to honor those who have sacrificed in subsequent state-sanctioned bloodshed. And tomorrow there will go on the market a book that has much to say about sacrifice and bloodshed and why wars endure. That book is To America: Personal Reflections of a Historian, by Stephen Ambrose (Simon and Schuster, 288 pages, $24)