Veterans Day; Armistice Day
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]
Yes, indeed, I am that old—old enough to just barely remember when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day. The change in names occurred in 1954, when I was very small, in order to accommodate World War II and its veterans.
Since then, the original name has largely fallen out of use—although it remains, like a vestigial organ, in the timing of the holiday, November 11th, which commemorates the day the WWI armistice was signed (eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month).
I’m also old enough–and had a teacher ancient enough—to have been forced to memorize that old chestnut “In Flanders Fields” in fifth grade—although without being given any historical context for it, I think at the time I assumed it was about World War II, since as far as I knew that was the only real war.
You can find the story of the poem here . It was written by a Canadian doctor who served in the European theater (there is no separate URL for the discussion of the poem, but you should click on the link about it if you scroll down on the left sidebar). It’s not necessarily great poetry, but it was great propaganda to encourage America’s entry into what was known at the time as the Great War.
The poem’s first line “In Flanders fields the poppies blow” introduces that famous flower that later became the symbol of Armistice—and later, Veterans—Day. Why the poppy?
Wild poppies flower when other plants in their direct neighbourhood are dead. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, but only when there are no more competing flowers or shrubs in the vicinity (for instance when someone firmly roots up the ground), these seeds will sprout.
There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him bloodred poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.
But in this poem the poppy plays one more role. The poppy is known as a symbol of sleep. The last line We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields might point to this fact. Some kinds of poppies are used to derive opium from, from which morphine is made. Morphine is one of the strongest painkillers and was often used to put a wounded soldier to sleep. Sometimes medical doctors used it in a higher dose to put the incurable wounded out of their misery.
Now a day to honor those who have served in our wars, Veterans Day has an interesting history in its original Armistice Day incarnation. It was actually established as a day dedicated to world peace, back in the early post-WWI year of 1926, when it was still possible to believe that WWI had been the war fought to end all wars.
The original proclamation establishing Armistice Day as a holiday read as follows:
Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and
Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and
Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.
After the carnage of World War II, of course, the earlier hope that peaceful relations among nations would not be severed had long been extinguished. By the time I was a young child, a weary nation sought to honor those who had fought in all of its wars in order to secure the peace that followed—even if each peace was only a temporary one.
And isn’t an armistice a strange (although understandable) sort of hybrid, after all; a decision to lay down arms without anything really having been resolved? Think about the recent wars that have ended through armistice: WWI, which segued almost inexorably into WWII; the 1948 war following the partition of Palestine; the Korean War; and the Gulf War. All of these conflicts exploded again into violence—or have continually threatened to—ever since.
So this Veterans/Armistice Day, let’s join in saluting and honoring those who have fought for our country. The hope that some day war will not be necessary is a laudable one—and those who fight wars hold it, too. But that day has clearly not yet arrived—and, realistically but sadly, most likely it never will.
[NOTE: I’ve scheduled this post to be published at 11:11 AM on 11/11.]
Thank you to all those who served. This is your day. And you deserve all that a grateful nation can provide.
I think that’s a free Grand Slam at Denny’s and maybe some time to joke with old buddies that were there too. Hard to know, as reading the NY Times today, you would think the people serving the country are the laid off Twitter employees that were asked to show up to work. Well, we know who didn’t phone it in.
Some years back I visited the US military cemetery in Normandy, France. What a sobering experience that was.
These days it is “thank you for your service”. Viet days was “baby killers”.
Young generations should be made aware of the disrespect shown Vietnam vets, many who did not volunteer and had other plans but went anyway. Boomers can look at high school yearbooks and point to the friends who never came home.
Can also speak of elderly Dads and Uncles who fought in WW2 and Grandparents who served in WW1 and relatives fought in Korea and Iraq and Afghanistan.
Where we gonna go next?
Where we gonna go next?
Oblivion, as the latest disrespect is just ignoring the day. Nothing on the front page of NYTimes or WaPo. ABCNews.com mentions very low on a sidebar that the First Lady held a Veteran’s Day breakfast. I’m sure many attended. NBCNews, below a long scroll actually reminds us Latinos honorable military tradition this Veteran’s Day. Hard to know if excluding other races is balanced by not using the word Latinx. FoxNews of course has a list of video clips regarding Veteran’s Day. So perhaps not oblivion.
It is a great tragedy that an Armistice (=cessation of combat) occurred in 1918. The Germans had thus NOT lost the war, but its opponents,England, France and USA, sought onerous terms, to which Germany agreed. It lost ALL its African colonies, surrendered a portion of the country to France, and it was required to reimburse those countries millions of $ annually, which the German nation could not afford. In 1921, the new Weimar Republic experienced obscene inflation: a loaf of bread’s price had been stable at one Mark for a century or more, but with inflation its price rose to one billion Marks in one year. Ruinous, since one must eat to live, and city dwellers cannot grow their own wheat. Farmers held their wheat off the market since the wheat price was increasing at an astronomical rate.
So the actions of the Allies gave birth to National Socialism, aka Nazis. Germany did rather well economically during the Great Depression under Hitler! He invented superhighways and the VW. VW= People’s (Volk) Wagen (= wagon, thus car). I’ve never been able to consider buying one.
I’ll end my history lesson now.
My deepest respect to all who served. These include my father in WWII, and many of my high school classmates, some of whom did not return alive from Vietnam.
When I think of Flanders Field (I learned it, too, in school), and WWI, it’s hard to think what the overarching cause and result were from the sacrifices in those dreadful trenches.
I left out Belgium as one of the reimbursed Allies.
Cicero, the Germans were beaten. The fleet had mutinied and refused Hipper’s Götterdämmerung attack on the Royal Navy.
As I near the end of the trail, this day has become more precious. Happily, a few of my vet friends are still alive and we contact one another, especially on this day. Memories and thoughts of those who are no longer with us are shared. It warms my heart.
It was an honor to serve. To have served with honorable men who had my back was a privilege. Our military is mostly made up of “salt-of-the-earth” men and women who do their duty, often at a great price. And now, they are all volunteers.
This nation is worth defending. It’s not perfect and never will be, but it’s still the last best hope of humanity. Though foreign adversaries remain, our greatest present enemy is those within who plan to fundamentally change this country into a socialist paradise. We can also serve our country by being informed citizens who stand up for democracy, freedom, and the rule of law.
Enjoy the day. I certainly will.
Cicero. In referring to Germany losing part of its country, are you referring to the Saces, Al and Lorraine? Used to be French until Bismarck’s faked-up Franco-Prussian war.
Nope. Given Germany’s record–Germany became Prussia and vice versa– Versailles failed. It let the Germans run their own affairs. See WW II. Remember, they could have stayed home in 1914.
Balck, the best German general nobody ever heard of, mused during his second invasion of France that if Carl’s reich had not been divided, Europe would have been better off. If all Europe had been German, he meant. And “poor Germany, always surrounded by stronger powers and forced to strike first.” They let guys like that walk around loose in Germany. Shows to go you.
@Cicero
I disagree, it happened after.
Sorry, but any comment that begins with this is a nonstarter. The Germans had obviously lost the war, and those In The Know in the leadership understood that. Had they not lost the war, they would have never considered asking for an armistice or even stopping in their pursuit for total victory, especially not with bloodthirsty, extremely hawkish Proto-Hitler Erich Ludendorff in command.
By the end of 1918 however the walls had caved in. Germany had been facing starvation and encirclement for years, just barely sustained through 1918 by loot pillaged from Russia and Romania after their capitulations in 1917. So they made a last ditched attempt to batter the Western Allies to submission in France and Italy while trying to hold the line in the Middle East and the Balkans.
This scored some impressive advances but ultimately failed and failed utterly, and then Germany’s alliance began to collapse one front at a time, with Bulgaria and Turkey being forced to give up the game, the Western Allies making breakthroughs of the German and Habsburg lines at Amiens in France and at the Piave in Italy, and finally Austria-Hungary collapsing, which allowed Western Allied troops from the Balkans and Italy to advance over the Alps and up the Danube to possibly strike Germany’s soft-ish underbelly just as the main advance was consistently gaining ground in the West.
To add insult to injury, just as the last fieldworthy German armies gone, the internal dissent and occupied peoples that the Centrals had kept at bay with martial law rose up. Germany’s Polish puppet state mutinied (again), driving the Governor General out of Warsaw and spreading the war into “Posen”, while the German Navy responded to orders to commit a massive, WWII-Japan style “Suicide by Western Navies” attack by mutinying. And there was really nothing left capable of holding the line, especially once it became clear that the armies had been shattered and the civilian populace (which had grown thoroughly disgusted by “War Socialism”) largely joined the mutineers or remained indifferent.
So at Spa, Paul von Hindenburg and his Boss/Lieutenant Ludendorff told the Kaiser that the front lines would not hold for another 48 hours, and if they collapsed before the Germans asked for an armistice they would be utterly discredited and likely hanged for their many atrocities (more on that later). So they decided to try and buy time, offer a compromise peace, and bring the German domestic opposition in to “take responsibility” for part of the armistice.
Which turned out to be a very poisonous fruit indeed since it allowed them to turn around and blame the Reichstag dissidents for losing the already-lost war.
Bluntly, Germany had no choice in the matter beyond “get beaten down even more”, and the Western Allies were absolutely correct to seek such terms.
WWI as a whole has slipped into a kind of oblivion, especially here in the US, and you’d be hard pressed to find people who could cite any atrocities in the war outside of the Armenian Genocide (which itself is cruelly ironic since the Armenians were just one of several groups the Ottoman Turks massacred with the large support of their allies), overshadowed as it is by even more time and the far greater and more horrible costs of WWII. Well, among those who flat out confuse the two (such as calling the German-lead alliance in WWI “the Axis” rather than any historical term they had).
That’s unfortunate for a whole host of reasons, starting with the fact that the Central Powers’ atrocities in WWI were by far the most prolific atrocities in the past 200 or so years of history at the time, and understanding the kind of totalitarian “War Socialism/Army Socialism” that had taken root (first in Germany and Turkey and then in others) is pretty important if you wanna understand Fascism, National Socialism, and Bolshevism.
And in particular what tends to get utterly ignored about the Versailles reparations (leaving asides the fact that they weren’t all paid for) is the REASONS why.
Starting with the fact that the war started as a result of Austria-Hungary using the Sarajevo murders as an excuse to try and genocide Serbia out of existence, and that during their occupations of Allied territory the Central Powers had been extremely brutal. Wartime damage was one thing, but in addition to the couple dozen or so thousand Belgians and Frenchmen that were massacred in reprisal killings for real and alleged “Franc-tireur” attacks or as hostages, the Central Powers used slave labor on a massive scale, deporting something like a million people from their homes to work for starvation rations in the German War Machine while keeping even more working in-place and pillaging them to the point of subsistence if not beyond.
https://mises.org/library/hindenburg-program-1916-central-experiment-wartime-planning
https://www.historyhit.com/forgotten-forced-labour-in-first-world-war-germany/
Which is why hundreds of thousands of people – including POWs who were illegally forced to work in war factories and tortured if they refused- died throughout Central Powers occupied Europe, even asides from the mass murders (of which there were several, with a higher proportion of ethnic Serbs dying to Habsburg, German, Bulgarian, and Albanian bayonets and nooses in WWI than died of the Nazis and their friends in WWII).
And when the Central Powers had to abandon territory, they made a policy of utterly ruining it, even well beyond the point of legality. Forcibly deporting entire villages and shooting those who refused, burning down what was left, poisoning the wells, and flooding mines. Which is why something like 25% of the “Zone Rouge” in France and Belgium isn’t from areas that were actively fought over or shelled, but from rear area positions that the Germans trashed.
And this didn’t stop even at the end of the war, with the Germans realizing they were about to lose resulting in them going all out. They basically trashed Picardy’s economy and came close to doing the same with Alsace-Lorraine only to get overhauled by advancing Western troops, while in the East the retreating units engaged in an orgy of looting and mass murder while retreating to East Prussia (until they stopped and made another bid to conquer Eastern Europe; but that’s a really complicated story).
The upside of this is that there were literally MILLIONS of refugees in Serbia, Poland, France, Italy, Belgium, and so forth the Allies had to rehouse on unoccupied territory until they could go home (…only to find their homes ruined both by combat and by the aforementioned sabotage), and hundreds of thousands of surviving POWs and slave laborers coming home who needed months or years of physical therapy.
At the time this absolutely enraged public opinion in a way kind of like how discovering the Nazi Concentration Camps or the fate of the Bataan surrenderees did. And I’d argue RIGHTFULLY so. This was utterly disgusting, evil, and above all illegal behavior, and now the Allies had to deal with the consequences.
So unsurprisingly, they demanded Germany and its allies pay up, abandon its territorial empire, and cede disputed territories.
And who can blame them?
Unsurprising, since it had lost all of its colonies except one by 1915 and lost even that exception by 1918, with Vorbeck’s army not being destroyed but being forced to go into Portuguese Mozambique and British Rhodesia as basically a large guerilla force.
Moreover, more or less accurate accounts of German colonial policy such as the South African Blue Book (detailing mass murder and genocide in what’s now Angola) as well as basic reality meant that there was absolutely no mood to turn these colonies back to Germany, and limited interest even by German ultranats like freaking Hitler to argue over keeping them (at least in the immediate aftermath of WWI).
A “portion of the country” that had been heavily Gallicized since the start of the 17th century and which had only been annexed in 1871. And which Bismarck and the German military had originally not planned to annex for various reasons only to be convinced it was necessary (by some of the bureaucrats and war hawks) in order to weaken France, and which the Prussian state that administered it had treated like an internal colony.
Unsurprising given the nature of 19th and early 20th century peace deals, and particularly given the magnitude of the war damages (and how much of them were illegal atrocities) in WWI.
Yeah No.
This meme needs to die and die utterly, and is probably the central example I bring up why John Maynard Keynes was a mistake.
The fact of the matter is that the Germans and their allies had seen nothing wrong with imposing far higher reparations (either per capita or absolutely) on the nations they defeated when they won, such as the Treaty of Frankfurt on France in 1873 and the treaties of Brest-Litvosk and Bucharest on Russia and Romania in 1918. Treaties that are even more lopsided when you realize that the Germans had been occupying large swaths of said countries for years prior to the agreement engaging in forced requisitions and outright looting that the countries would never be able to get recompense for, making the actual costs of the peaces that much higher.
The difference is that Brest-Litvosk and Bucharest never came into full effect due to Germany’s defeat in WWI, while after Frankfurt the French decided on a very different path. They grit their teeth and committed themselves to prioritizing reparations repayments in order to save the value of their currency and help rebuild the country.
And they succeeded massively within about a decade of the treaty, to the point where it marked a point where French Republicanism stabilized and calmed down.
The difference is that the French bit the bullet and did not try to screw the other guy even at the expense of their own people. The assorted German governments did, made all the worse given the atrocities of the Imperial government towards these nations before.
And then launched a massive propaganda campaign through the German Foreign Office’s Kriegsschuldreferat and assorted “independent” proxies in Germany and Central Europe in an attempt to dupe the world about the actual state of the German economy, why it wasn’t repaying, and how it really hadn’t lost WWI and even if it did hadn’t done things like working British POWs to death in the Rhineland anyway.
A narrative which was taken in by a lot of people, including a great deal of prog useful idjiots in the West such as – among others – the Beard Couple, David Lloyd-George (who was fighting a rear guard action against army loyalists to Haig about his own dismal conduct and had reasons to be receptive to it), and dear John Maynard Keynes. Who wrote a highfalutin book about how Germany supposedly couldn’t pay the reparations demanded of it, in essence “Because Germany told me so.”
Which catapulted him to international fame.
It took decades to tear this abject nonsense apart, and unfortunately by then it had largely done its job. of obfuscating German guilt and defeat in the war and shaping Allied financial policy. And it still shapes a lot of the pop culture narratives in WWI media, like the ending of the latest remake of All Quiet on the Western Front.
Which is the problem when you get when you don’t do what French did in 1873, but do what Germany did in 1919. Focus on screwing the other guy over at the expense of your economy.
The fact is that hyperinflation in Germany didn’t start in 1918, it started in 1914, when the Germans made the concentrated decision to try and fund their war effort through a mixture of money printing and looting goods from occupied territories, rather than taking on debt. On the surface this made sense; German military doctrine was geared towards quick, lightning wars of maybe a year or two while living extensively “off the land”, and a policy like this would pay massive dividends in such a conflict. It was also arguably kind of necessary given how the London and Paris stock exchanges would not be on speaking terms with the Germans and it’d be hard to access the New York Stock Exchange to take on debt. And furthermore some unrelated scandals had led the main alternatives in Geneva/Bern and Amsterdam to be leery of the German military and its trustworthiness.
But it also set a ticking time bomb at the heart of the German economy. The longer the money printers ran, the less and less value the Mark would have, and if Germany couldn’t keep conquering territory and looting goods from what they took for either free or a massive discount and then ship them back to Germany to absorb the increasing money supply, things would cascade out of control.
https://www.academia.edu/40246490/From_Compromise_to_Coercion_Occupied_Poland_the_German_Officer_Corps_and_the_Transformation_of_German_Imperialism_in_WWI
https://www.academia.edu/40246492/Before_Lebensraum_meant_Genocide_Autarky_Ethnic_Diversity_and_German_Imperialism_in_WWI
Well, guess what happened in 1918?
That’s right. The floor fell out on Germany’s military strength, meaning it could no longer minimize the inflation by sticking bayonets in the face of Polish peasants or Belgian Burghers to take their stuff and labor for discounts. All while the printing presses continued.
Which is something the Allies considered might happen, which is why if you actually READ Versailles (which is something painfully few do) you’ll recognize they demanded payment in gold and in Kind. Because they understood German financial strategies and recognized that the Paper Marks were going to be extremely deflated. Whether or not considered what happened later with the new Republic going Salt the Earth is something I don’t know, but it certainly helped.
This is important because while taking reparations payments in the likes of Gold, Gold Marks, Trains, Cattle, or the like DID contribute to inflation, it did so RELATIVELY minorly: by diminishing the supply of goods relative to the money supply, NOT by increasing the money supply. Which is crucial because the central point of German hyperinflation (and most hyperinflations) is the money supply.
Now at this point in time, the new German Republican government had a crucial choice to make. It COULD have shut down the printing presses or at least limited their ability and begun rejiggering their economy to work on a much diminished capacity. It could have tried to repay the Allies or at least negotiate for a diminishment while making an initial down payment in order to regain public trust in the Mark. It could have done a whole host of things.
But those things would’ve meant tapering off much of the Dole politics they felt was necessary to keep in power and pursue their agendas like a larger welfare state.
So instead they extended a middle finger to Germany’s war victims, and indeed their own citizenry and economic reality itself by upping production of money.
This ended PREDICTABLY, and disastrously. Especially once the German government began openly paying strikers in the Rhineland to not work, leading to the Western Allies deciding to occupy Germany’s industrial heartland.
https://mises.org/library/hyperinflation-germany-1914-1923
It took until 1923 for a ravaged Germany robbed of several years of recovery to accept that this “Screw the other guy” Policy was not actually HELPING them, though it did let them negotiate for diminished reparations payments in 1923. But all of this had helped lay the foundations for a shaky Republic in a shaky global financial system, and one that was abetting the rise of some new breeds of totalitarian.
TIK is by no means perfect but he discusses much of the problems with this narrative and how Germany consistently grabbed opportunities to miss opportunities out of ideological fervor, raw spite, or delusion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJNiPxLDeuE
Yeah No. This sounds convincing and all until you start studying Adolf Hitler himself and the early Nazi Party (whose precursor had been formed midwar), as well as Erich Ludendorff, who had only taken power in 1916 but already begun molding the German Empire to either adopt or exaggerate many of the features of what we’d recognize as National Socialism.
Largely because Germany was already exiting the Depression as he took power and stole wholesale credit from his predecessors, such as the “Hunger Chancellor” Brunning (who made the decision to shorten the depression by briefly intensifying it, and thus underlining how often making the right decisions doesn’t get you) and General von Schliecher (who was trying to return Germany into a kind of authoritarian monarchy able to wage war with large statist public works projects).
Moreover, Germany did decently well in the interwar period when it wasn’t actively trying to screw over its debtors and engaging in hyperinflationary nonsense, hence the golden half-decade or so of the Republic from 1923-1929.
Cicero:
Cut to the chase: the German people are responsible for Adolph. Who exactly forced Germany to invade Belgium in 1914, space aliens? Who exactly forced Germany to invade Poland in 1939, those same space aliens? Quite the take on Armistice Day. Sad.
Try a bit more reading before you try more “history.”
The Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs are still around, duking and princing–nobody pays attention to them politically–making the society pages, marrying money and apparently don’t need a 9-5 to keep bread on the table.
The last of the European Usual, armies tearing up the countryside, bunch of guys die young should have died old, shove the borders around a bit, big shots don’t miss a meal.
Should say you have a treaty when the likely losing side retains enough muscle, relatively speaking, that they can be pushed so far and no further, however far that may be.
It’s different from unconditional surrender.
These days it is “thank you for your service”. Viet days was “baby killers”.
The ideological descendants of those calling US troops “baby killers,” are literal baby killers (abortion enablers) today.
To all veterans: thank you for your service to our country!
Good comment Jordan Rivers.
JJ, the relationships formed in squadrons are life-long treasures. I presume this is true of other branches as well. These days the concept of “privilege” is thrown at many of us an invective. The greatest privilege was to serve with likeminded men (it was essentially men in my era); and that privilege was available to all.
I suppose I am just an “Old Curmdgeon” but I find the rote, “thank you for your service” mildly irritating. Somehow, it rarely seems sincere.
I will say sincerely, if a day late, “Happy Birthday United States Marine Corps”. Those who served in “marine green” have traditionally set a very high standard in so many respects, even if they could be insufferable at times.
Armistice. I think it is unworthy to criticize anyone for seeking or accepting an Armistice in 1918. Although WWII was much larger in scope, the horror of WWI was unprecedented at the time. It changed the world. I would not fault anyone for accepting an Armistice. I am also reluctant to criticize the terms that defined the peace given the sacrifices of those who dictated them.
It was often observed in the years after that people still spoke of the Armistice and never of the Peace.
In memory of 2 of my brothers.
Craig Eric Morze. United States Marine Corps Viet Nam 1968 Returned safely.
Killed walking across a street in S. California.
Brian Gene Morze United States Marine Corps Viet Nam 1968 Returned safely.
Purple Hearts, Bronze Star with Valor.
VA ruled his death years later 100% Viet Nam caused.
When Brian came home he refused to tell us when he was coming into LAX so we wouldn’t pick him up and be spit on by protesters.
I wore the Eagle-Globe-and-Anchor pin every day throughout their service.
Minta Marie Morze:
Condolences.
So hard to lose siblings.
Old joke: “How come hippies pick on crippled soldiers?”
“It’s safer.”
When the First Gulf War started, a shopping mall nearby put up a Wall of Honor” with letters home from local guys. It got lots of eyeballs. Told my son that, if that it had been done during the Viet Nam era, it would have taken every cop in the county to keep it up.
When my brother was killed in October of 70, my folks got taunting calls. I didn’t hear about this from my father for thirty years. Probably afraid of what I might do. Still on active duty. Smart man, my father. When I think of him trying to beat my poor, tormented mother to the phone, it makes me crazy.
I do not and will not forgive such deliberate evil.
I try not to see the same thing in current progressives, but it takes an effort.
This was sent to me by a vet buddy. I’d never seen it before.
A video that says much about military service.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOMrOKHMMPU
JJ–
Thanks for that video. Here’s a video of two buglers from the U.S. Army Band (“Pershing’s Own) playing “Taps” in Arlington National Cemetery (summer and winter).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfe4TxvUOiw&ab_channel=TheUnitedStatesArmyBand%22Pershing%27sOwn%22
“Taps” goes back to the Civil War: per Wikipedia, “The tune is a variation of an earlier bugle call known as the “Scott Tattoo,” which was used in the U.S. from 1835 until 1860. It was arranged in its present form by the Union Army Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, a Medal of Honor recipient. Butterfield commanded the 3d Brigade, 1st Division, V Army Corps, Army of the Potomac, while at Harrison’s Landing, Virginia, in July 1862, and wrote it to replace the customary firing of three rifle volleys at the end of burials during battle . . . . Captain John C. Tidball, West Point Class of 1848, started the custom of playing “Taps” at military funerals. In early July 1862 at Harrison’s Landing, a corporal of Tidball’s Battery A, 2nd U.S. Artillery, died. He was, Tidball recalled later, ‘a most excellent man.’ Tidball wished to bury him with full military honors, but, for military reasons, he was refused permission to fire seven rifles three times (three volley salute) over the grave. Tidball later wrote, ‘The thought suggested itself to me to sound taps instead, which I did. The idea was taken up by others, until in a short time it was adopted by the entire army and is now looked upon as the most appropriate and touching part of a military funeral.'”
The tune became a standard part of U.S. military funerals in 1891. When my dad, a WWII veteran, died suddenly in 1964, the local American Legion post sent a bugler to play “Taps” at his graveside following the church funeral. And I, like many kids in that era, learned to sing the words to “Taps” at lights-out on Scout camping trips:
Day is done, gone the sun,
From the lake, from the hills, from the sky;
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.
@Minta Marie Morze
Condolences indeed. We must be grateful they lived, and thank you for keeping their memory alive.
PA+Cat : Taps. Like you, I learned it in Bot Scouts. It never fails to send shivers down my spine while simultaneously giving me assurance that “God is nigh.”
The pain and division of the Vietnam era has persisted through all these years. As noted by Jordan Rivers: “The ideological descendants of those calling US troops “baby killers,” are literal baby killers (abortion enablers) today.”
The harassing phone calls to families of warriors who died over there were ubiquitous and a harbinger of how loathsome these anti-capitalist leftists are. Such acts were the forerunner of doxing, canceling, and censoring of their opposition. It’s a pattern that we fail to recognize at our own peril. These people are deadly serious and don’t hesitate to use any foul means to achieve their goals. A good way to honor our vets is to stand up against these forces as they stood up against our enemies in the past.
Turtler: “@Minta Marie Morze
Condolences indeed. We must be grateful they lived and thank you for keeping their memory alive.”
Yes! Our memories are of courageous, honorable men and women. When we say or write their names and recite their deeds, we keep them alive – ever young, ever vital, deeply loved, and never forgotten. The Vietnam Memorial Wall is such a special place because those names will last through the ages.
This is a bit of light trivia I learned in Catholic school; Veteran’s Day is also Martinmas, the Feast Day of St. Martin who is/was the patron saint of soldiers. Don’t know if St. Martin is still a saint, the Church cleans house every so often and it’s hard to keep up.