A Different Kind of Armistice Day
Armistice Day
The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month
We take a moment of silence to honor our fallen soldiers.
We have military parades, we have memorials, we have lots of postings on social media with pictures of friends and relatives who have served.
In America, we call it Veterans Day now, mostly because most Americans no longer have any living memory of what it represents and why it is celebrated, if that is the right word, when it is.
The original Armistice Day was commemorated to mark the moment the Armistice Agreement was signed between the Allies and the Germans in a railway car in Compiegne, France — November 11th, 1918 — to end The First World War, the War to End All Wars.
The First World War, of course, did not end all wars. The agreement signed at Compiegne in many ways laid the groundwork for The Second World War.
And, despite all the memorials and honor for those who gave their lives, in truth The First World War was very much a meat grinder; a ruthless killing machine that slaughtered millions, much of it pointlessly.
It was a war unlike any other war that had ever been fought before. The generals who ran it were old men who applied tried and true 19th century tactics to the first 20th century mechanized war with predictable terrible results.
In the 19th century, and long before that, well dressed and well trained soldier had simply lined up and marched toward each other, firing their rifles as they went. It was a tactic that worked until it didn’t, and it stopped working when the lines of brave soldiers found themselves marching into machine guns — a new invention — a killing machine.
The generals, however, were at a loss as to how to deal with mechanized warfare- machine guns and barbed wire -so they just kept sending their soldiers over the top of their trenches, to run as far as they could until they got mowed down. Soldier after soldier over and over and over again.
Pointless.
At the Battle of the Somme, for example, the French, British and Germans suffered an astonishing 1.2 million casualties. 1.2 million, in one battle, and all to advance a few hundred yards.
Pointless.
But still they kept sending their troops over the top and into the machine guns’ fire.
A few few, and to my mind, very brave in their own way, soldiers simply refused to participate in this mindless slaughter.
One of them was Private Thomas Highgate.
At the age of 17, he enlisted in the 1st Battalion, Royal West Kent Regiment and was immediately shipped off to France.
At his first battle, of course, the first battle he had ever seen in his life, his regiment suffered extraordinary losses, which was not, sadly, extraordinary in the First World War.
Highgate, seeing what was going on around him decided this was not for him and simply walked off.
“I’ve had enough of it,” he said, chucking his uniform and returning to civilian clothes and simply walking away.
Quickly captured, he was as quickly tried and convicted of desertion and sentenced to be shot at dawn by his own troops. He was ordered to be ‘executed at once, and as publicly as possible.’
And he was, with not only his own regiment but two others required to watch his execution.
The British high command did not want anyone else deciding on their own that being sent to slaughter was not for them.
There were another 305 British soldiers who were similarly executed during the First World War.
In 2006, the British government passed a mass pardon on the 306 soldiers summarily tried and executed for desertion. There is a memorial, called the Shot At Dawn Memorial to these men in Staffordshire, Britain.
It may be, in the light of 100 years past, that these were brave men in their own way, and perhaps the most sane.
But then, to the British military, the most dangerous.
