Remembrance Day Reading

Even as someone who has lived most of his life in the U.S., November 11 remains to me "Remembrance Day," not "Veterans Day."

Even as someone who has lived most of his life in the United States, November 11 remains to me "Remembrance Day," not "Veterans Day."

Yet remembrance proves surprisingly challenging work. Southern Americans appreciate this difficulty better than northerners: How do you remember the gallantry and sacrifice of soldiers who fought for a cause their own descendents repudiate and condemn? But even with better causes, remembrance is complex and charged. World War II is the great good war of western historical memory. We are not so good at remembering that most of the fighting and dying was done on the eastern front, and that there the war was not so good: not a struggle between fascism and democracy, but a death grapple between two terrible systems of oppression, one only slightly less  demented and murderous than the other. We are not so good at remembering that the nation that suffered the hugest casualties was not Poland or Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, but China, whose agony began two years earlier than anyone else's in 1937.

As for the war that originally inspired the November 11 ceremonies - the First World War, the original "great war" - there the work of remembrance faces opposite difficulties. The 1914-1918 war is remembered with such bitterness that its purposes and achievements go unmentioned. The British contrast the endless bloodletting of 1914-1918 with the decisiveness and economy of the Second War. That contrast is an illusion, attributable to the relative brevity of the engagement of the main British and German land armies.

A British or American or Canadian soldier who landed at D-Day and fought his way through to VE-Day had a 50% chance of being killed or wounded, the same fearsome odds as faced by his 1914-1918 predecessor. And of course on the eastern front, and especially for civilians, World War II devoured many more lives than World War I, and was fought with a savagery that makes the earlier war seem almost civilized in contrast.

In this contrasting remembrance, the achievements of the 1914-1918 war - and the reasons for fighting it - get lost. Yet then too the western world faced an enemy bent on continental conquest and brutal exploitation of the conquered. (Read Larry Zuckerman's The Rape of Belgium to see some of what was at stake in 1914: behind the discredited atrocity stories of raped nuns was a comprehensive German plan for the immiseration of the defeated for the aggrandizement and enrichment of the conquerors.)

Which is why on this day of shared remembrance throughout all the North Atlantic world, it still feels right to wear the poppy that supremely recalls to mind the sufferings and sacrifices of that first and worst-remembered war.