Armistice Day

[chani]

I learnt on television today that there were only 6 "Poilus" left in France and I wondered how many World War I veterans  were still alive in other countries...

 

 

I also wonder if that "Great War" is still taught in details in other countries. It seems that the 2nd World War and its genocide have taken such a room in our folk memory...and in the the way we teach History these days.

Who still remembers the horror that 14-18 war was? Or rather who, among young people, really knows about it nowadays? Who will?

Because there's a big difference between History and "Memory Duty" or commemoration. I know it's a commemorative day, but as a Historian I wish we'd stop get everything mixed up. I have nothing against commemorative events. They are a political ritual and it's important for the res publica to have such moments.

But History is another matter. It isn't about civics, nor morality nor about the society's needs nor about the political norm. It's a job for Historians, not for politicians who want to dig in to revel in politically correct or please certain lobbies (like with that outrageous law about teaching colonization by emphazing the "good sides" of it!). And nowadays politicians and lobbies are trying to interfer more and more with teaching, telling us what we should teach as a matter of priority and the way we should do it. It goes against the principles of  laïcité as well as the religious signs we ban inside of school. It's kinda like what is happening in certain American schools about biology courses and  the whole Intelligent Design vs Evolution.

It's the kind of thing you find in dictatures and totalitarian States. Something is going on, and I don't like it. I'm going to be very not politically correct and I might shock some people but I'm really fed up with all the Shoah stuff  I've been receiving in my teacher box, almost every week, for a few years. Stop covering me with that Gospel and let me do History damnit (and no, don't worry I am not a revisionist at all) !

Sorry for the digression but my point was that I have the feeling that War World I is going to be less and less known in the future because of some people's priorities. Yet it's a very interesting matter.

At least some film makers evoke it like in "La Chambre Des Officiers" a few years ago or Genet and his "Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles". But artists and films won't replace History. They should not.

Anyway I may go see "Joyeux Noël" tomorrow. It's a movie about Christmas 1914, when German soldiers did that incredible thing: they decided to fraternize with the ennemy, left their trench and shared that night with French/Scottish soldiers. And it's a real event. It happened despite all the propaganda and the horror that were the first months of that war (more soldiers got killed during those months than during the 4 following years).

But of course historical accuracy  in no way guarantees that the film will be a good one. I'm afraid it's gonna be a bit too tears-jerking and over the top. Sometimes when directors aim at moving people they overdo.

Comments

[pfeifferpack.livejournal.com]

He is not alive but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that my father was in WWI (and WWII and in between for that matter). He was born in 1901 and graduated from high school at age 12 (wish I had his mind!)...he faked his age and enlisted in the Army. They discovered his underage situation and sent him home. He got his parents to sign a waver and enlisted in the Navy six months later, still underage but legal. He was mostly stateside in that war but was all over north africa and the pacific theaters in WWII. He was a Navy medic and in WWII he was part of a "raider" group (they were groups of 10 - 12 Marines...the US Marine Corp uses Navy for medical corps....who went in advance of a "landing" and secured a beachhead for the approaching Marines.).

My father was a loving and gentle man for all his military history. He saved lives and took lives as well. He had shrapnel in his leg bones that set off airport security the rest of his life. He had multiple scars from wounds and his eye was cut out in hand to hand combat on Okinowa. He rarely spoke of his wartime service and never of his box of medals and awards.

He passed on in 1982 at the age of 81.

Kathleen

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I recall you mentioned it at least once. My grandfather (from my father's side) did both wars too. I never knew him, he passed away as he slept a few years before my birth.

He was my grandmother's second spouse. The story is kinda tragic but she married her first husband in Summer 1914 and he immediatly went to the front and never came back. He got killed in action quickly. Sp she actually never lived with him, but when she was in her 80's, before her death, her memory got wonky and the only husband whom she recalled and talked about was the first one, not the second one with whom she had lived for years and who fathered her children, she had completely forgotten my grandfather....

*hugs*

[pfeifferpack.livejournal.com]

Funny, my mother was that way at the end too. She remembered so well her first husband and some of my father but the memories were mostly the first marriage. The mind is a funny thing indeed.

Love,
Kathleen
{{{{hugs back}}}}

sad how humanity changes so little except in our technology!

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Looks like human memory is made of layers, like geological strata. The freshest memories are the first to go, the old ones are the ones that remain the longest.

Of course when it comes to erosion, there's also the resistance factor. Tender layers vanish and hard rocks show on the surface...

[pfeifferpack.livejournal.com]

Then there are all those fossils *G*..A good analogy actually.

Love,
Kathleen

[pfeifferpack.livejournal.com]

I forgot to mention....as for WWI...the most daddy ever said of his overseas months was that the mustard gas terrified him as did the flame throwers. I don't know where he was during that war. He saw no real reason for that one in hindsight although he always maintained that WWII had to be fought when things had been allowed to get that far into the evil.

Kathleen

[kazzy-cee.livejournal.com]

But history is always being rewritten, and so there are whole sections never mentioned, and then 'found' again (for example the war heroine Mary Seacole who was a famous name in her time, but only recently 'rediscovered'). There was poll in London today about the red poppies sold to commemorate the first world war. Some Londoners remembered why, but worryingly so many really didn't know what it was all about.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

So? I mean I don't get your "But".
Aren't you actually talking about folk memory rather than about History?

History is a construction written by Historians who work on sources and passed on by teachers. Of course there are controversories, changes or new stuff.

[kazzy-cee.livejournal.com]

Sorry - not explaining myself very well. What I meant was that history is written to fit in with the feeling of the times. The example I used was Mary Seacole who was a contemporary of Florence Nightingale. She was black and very well known at the time. Because of racial feelings she was 'expunged' from the history books for a long time, and only recently has been reconsidered as a famous person deserving of mention. In Victorian England she made the front pages of the newspapers, but was 'forgotten' for a long time.

It's the same with the wars - history is written by the victors, and just after the war there is a lot of propaganda written. It's only with hindsight that the truth emerges.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, Mary Seacole's current 'discovery' is an example of the way history can be twisted and turned in more ways than you might think. I recently read a letter in a Nursing Journal from a Scottish nurse pointing out that Mary Seacole's father was Scottish - but now she is being interpreted purely as a black Jamaican! The Scottish nurse wanted her Scottishness to be acknowledged as well. It is an example of what worries you, frenchani some bits of history get forgotten to suit the agenda of the day.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Well, but that exactly what I contested and the difference I tried to explain.

I don't think that History is written to fit in anything and certainly not "with the feelings of the time", at least not by nowadays Historians who live in democracies and who are real/serious Historians (even if being human they can't be compeletely unbiased in the way they use the sources they find).

Looks like you are talking of "official history" that is actually the political version of past and it always fits in with the feelings of time. Your examples pointed out that it's propaganda or demagogy, not History. Sometimes people need to foeget, sometimes people need to remember, or are told that they must remember (the unfamous Memory Duty I talked about) but Historians are not supposed to care about such issues.

I mentioned a law that has been voted by the Assembly last year and pissed off all the Historians in France, that basically said that History books used in schools had to be changed because the good sides of colonization must be shown. There's no way we're going to submit to that.

John Cleese?

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

There are thought to only be either 4 or 7 UK WW1 veterans are left depending on the source - but I do know that the oldest one is 109, called Henry Allingham, and he went in person to lay a wreath today at the airfield in France where he served.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

It must be weird for them to be that old and to think of all those guys who so prematurely died in 14-18.

Speaking of weirdness they were so many changes during that 20th Century, much more than during the previous one (of course not many people got that old then), so to have known the 1900's and to live still in 2005, I guess it's kinda having lived several lives in different times...in a Highlander kind of way.

[candlelightfrot.livejournal.com]

Well, WWII is remembered primarily because that generation fathered and also taught the next generation which was a baby boom. It's just numbers of us who were brought up on the deeds of our fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, and others. While my father was denied military sevice due to his broken legs and crushed ankle, his brother served in the Pacific, as did two of my mother's brothers and several of my aunt's husbands. My step-father stepped into France from a landing craft at Normandy. WWII just has it in numbers over WWI.

But today is Veteran's Day and in smaller towns like that I grew up in head-stones of all are decorated with the American Flag. Veterans of WWII, the Korean War, Viet Nam (Police Action), Iraq I & II will march and remember their progenitors of other conflicts, WWI, the Spanish-American War, the Civil War, the Mexican War, the War of 1812, the Revolutionary War, and other smaller conficts and duties in which soldiers and sailors have lost their lives.

One cannot remember it all, it takes the entire community. It is up to us to also create that extrasomatic knowledge and preserve it, that future generations will have those memories intact. A while back we in our genealogy group were doing just that, interviewing the stories of veterans of WWI and WWII. It is interesting that such personal stories often do not come out until the end of that person's life. It seemed to be not the pain off remembering, but that the memory is so personal and so deeply felt. But they have much to tell us of war, its horrors and joy, pain and pleasures, of loss and sometimes the remorse at having yet lived while others so close have died. It all seems to come out at some time, it did for my father-in-law when he saw his own end.

Well, this is the first time in Canadian history

[ladyemorgaine.livejournal.com]

there was not a WWI vet at the Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa.

And yes, in Quebec at least, in English schools they do still study "The War to end all Wars". My grade 11 son just did a project for History comparing the strategy used at The Battle of the Somme and Vimy Ridge, both of which had a strong Canadian component.

He ended it with a poem by Wilfred Owen, who was at the Battle of the Somme, and later dies in 1918.

Anthem for Doomed Youth
 
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.