Armistice Day

11.11.1918

"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. 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. Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things."

(Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions)

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride, 

Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside? 

And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun, 

I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done. 

And I see by your gravestone you were only 19 

When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916, 

Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean 

Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene? 

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly? 

Did the rifles fir o'er you as they lowered you down? 

Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus? 

Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest? 

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind 

In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined? 

And, though you died back in 1916, 

To that loyal heart are you forever 19? 

Or are you a stranger without even a name, 

Forever enshrined behind some glass pane, 

In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained, 

And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame? 

The sun's shining down on these green fields of France; 

The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance. 

The trenches have vanished long under the plow; 

No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now. 

But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land 

The countless white crosses in mute witness stand 

To man's blind indifference to his fellow man. 

And a whole generation who were butchered and damned. 

And I can't help but wonder, now Willie McBride, 

Do all those who lie here know why they died? 

Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause?" 

Did you really believe that this war would end wars? 

Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame 

The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain, 

For Willie McBride, it all happened again, 

And again, and again, and again, and again.

© 1976 Eric Bogle