100 Years Ago Today

One hundred years ago today on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the shooting stopped. All was finally quiet on the western front. Armistice day was first celebrated a year later and then became a national holiday eventually to celebrate the end of what had been until then the most deadly war ever. Sadly, in a few years an even worse war would overshadow it.

My paternal grandfather was a veteran of World War I; a few short years after it ended my father was born. He would serve in World War II and a few years after he returned from that war I would be born. On this Armistice Day, now Veterans Day, I have reached age 65. From this vantage point 100 years doesn't seem that long ago. I do not remember my paternal grandfather since he died when I was a preschooler but I did get to know my maternal grandfather since he lived to be 95. The world they were born into and were living in at that first Armistice Day had more in common with the world of Abraham Lincoln than it has in common with my world, especially in the isolated communities of Appalachia where they both lived. The mechanized killing of World War I along with the end of the age of empires and imperial monarchies that it heralded must have been a huge shock to their world. Things would be changing quickly going forward.

As I ponder the world today on my 65th birthday I am still shocked at the speed of change. I still recall childhood days of going to my grandfather's farm to pitch hay onto a horse drawn wagon, to draw water by hand from their well, and to wake on winter holiday visits to a cold floor that caused me to dress in a rush and scamper to the warmth of the pot bellied stove in the living room or hang around the wood stove in the kitchen. Those times that seemed so idyllic to me were actually long after the world had been shattered by that Great War. I am told that my grandfather was not the same after the war though it was not clear to me if that was from disease or heart issues or something else. He was not alone.

I am grateful today for all those who served in both World Wars; I also wonder how confused and sad they might be if they saw our nation today with its inability to recognize such basic traits as male and female and its confusion over marriage and morality and life itself. In some ways 100 years doesn't seem so long ago; in other ways it seems an eternity.