Image: Soldiers of the 11th Battalion on the Western Front. Credit: Imperial War Museum, non commercial license.
November 11th marks the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended (most of) the First World War. I say “most of”, because fighting continued in various theatres in Europe and the Far East, in some places for years. But that day in 1918, with a cease-fire commencing at 11 am, saw silence at last fall on the Western Front, where the bulk of the war’s millions of military casualties had died, been wounded, ingested gas or suffered permanent mental scarring, and where millions of civilians experienced harsh occupation, destruction of property and years of displacement. Much of Belgium and northern France had been turned into churned mud, as offensives surged and ebbed, and hundreds of miles of trenches were dug, captured and re-captured.
The extensive programming devoted to the end of the war, primarily broadcast by BBC television and radio, has understandably emphasised personal experience. We are, after all, in the age of #MeToo. And there is a wealth of personal testimony available, in letters, in diaries, and in interviews with surviving combatants recorded over the last few decades. It is of course much easier to identify with individuals rather than grand strategy; and with particular battles and incidents rather than the sweep of a military campaign.
