THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 11, 1996 TAG: 9611090011
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 39 lines
Veterans Day in the United States was originally Armistice Day. Congress renamed the day in 1954.
But as every American schoolchild knew once upon a time, Armistice Day commemorated the end of World War I. That war ended officially - as hundreds of millions of Americans and Europeans never forgot - when the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.
Europeans called World War I ``the Great War.'' Allied propagandists had also called it ``The War to End All Wars,'' which is what everyone hoped it would be but which it never could be: Humankind's belligerence dooms the globe to wars without end.
But humankind had never before experienced the horrors of battle on such an immense scale as the remorseless slaughter on the Western Front during World War I. Waves of soldiers leaped from trenches by the tens of thousands only to be cut down by machine guns as wheat is mowed by combines.
In any contest between killing machines and flesh, machines win. Poison gas - an innovation from which the planet recoiled even more than from the insane hurling of legions at chattering guns and artillery - also won when the wind blew toward the enemy.
Few veterans of World War I are still alive. Memories of the Great War were eclipsed a half-century ago by the far greater war numbered II.
But veterans of other wars abound. This day of honor is their due.
For war turns life wrongside out; not killing becomes a crime. And although not everyone in uniform in wartime sails in harm's way, anyone may. The same goes for civilians. As the Great War showed, safe areas are not clearly defined in modern wars.
WHRO-TV and other PBS outlets this week are presenting ``The Great War'' in four two-hour segments (Part II airs tonight: 9 p.m.-11 p.m.). Broadcasting the documentary ensures that Veterans Day this year - more than it has been for a long time - is again Armistice Day, and fittingly solemn. by CNB