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| The World War I Memorial Peace Cross in nearby Bladensburg, Maryland. |
Mark the time, friends; and mark the day. Eleven o’clock (local time in France) on this eleventh day of the eleventh month marks the one hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War.
The last combatant killed was an American; a Marylander, even, from Baltimore: Henry Gunther, who died at 10:59 that morning, sixty seconds before the guns went quiet. Ironically, his parents were immigrants from Germany.
The Americans had been the last to join the fray, declaring war in April of 1917, and finally landing troops in France much later that year. Gunther was the last of 116,708 American military personnel to die in that first of our military interventions in Europe.
It seems like a horrifying number for such a short period – just over a year. Compare that amount to the total number of military personnel who died: estimates range between nine and eleven million. Every one of them had a name, a hometown, parents, and a story just like Henry Gunther did. Then add the eight million civilians who died, and realize that our loss was a tiny portion of the carnage in that conflict, one of the deadliest in human history.
The eruption of that great conflict in the summer of 1914, ostensibly because of a terrorist attack, the assassination of royals on parade, ended one of the longest periods of peace the Europeans had enjoyed with one another. Because Europe was at peace, the world was largely without war, and cooperation and commerce flourished to bring about prosperity more widespread and elevated than the world had ever known. Cultural sharing and international friendships aided by new technology and ease of travel brought people closer together than ever before; now we call it globalization. One killer, two deaths, and the garden party collapsed into mobilizing armies and military campaigns that nobody expected but everybody was prepared for, seeming simply to happen spontaneously while everyone in charge was on August vacation.
In those days, they called this war the “Great” one, and thought it the War to End All Wars. But the elaborately conceived and relentlessly worked out Fratricide was just the first volume of a what would become a trilogy to be written across Western civilization over the century to follow. Two decades later its sequel, Genocide, would reach its gruesome climax in a conflagration that wouldmake this conflict the First of something awful of which there was a Second. The resultant societal self-doubt and collapse of confidence brought our culture to the third volume in the trilogy, already entitled Suicide, though an unknown number of chapters or perhaps pages have yet to be written before we reach The End.
One hundred years ago the guns went silent and millions rejoiced, thinking the end of this war had brought them to peace. Those combat deaths were but a trifle compared to what was to come; they had only just crossed the threshold of a century in which more people would be murdered by their own governments than the cumulative total of souls who had inhabited the planet Earth over all the preceding centuries combined.
Pause sometime today and listen to the absence of gunfire, the absence of bombs and explosions that we enjoy hereabouts. Find some silence, and be glad for it. Thank a veteran for making it possible for you to enjoy the confidence that you will make it through this day without being killed. And maybe, just maybe, reconsider what you might have been thinking was the gravest threat to the peace of the world, the peace of your home, and the peace of your heart.
Monsignor Smith
