On November 11, while millions of Europeans and North Americans bought poppies and gathered at the tombs of various unknown soldiers, during a quiet ceremony on Carifesta Avenue, the President of the Guyana Legion, Hector Bunyan, gave a dismaying account of the poverty which afflicts many local veterans. Mr Bunyan noted that our veterans spend much of their small incomes on health care, and quipped that “old, old” veterans could easily be re-described as “poor, poor.” In subsequent remarks, Major General Joseph Singh observed that no local newspapers had mentioned the event at which he was speaking, and he lamented a general lack of appreciation for the services which Guyanese veterans have performed.
In the British Commonwealth, November 11, the date of the armistice which ended the Great War, is dedicated to the memory of the numberless dead who fell on the killing fields of Europe between 1914-1918. In the United States the date is known as Veterans Day and commemorates the sacrifices of American soldiers in all foreign wars. Throughout North America, many local communities organize Veterans Day parades and use the occasion to display the standards and insignia of battalions who distinguished themselves in combat. These ceremonies have acquired a valedictory quality in the last few years simply because of the length of time which has elapsed since the end of the two world wars. In 2008 it was estimated that in the US alone, veterans of World War Two were dying at the rate of 1,000 a day. As for the Great War, worldwide there are now only three verified survivors of active combat, each aged 109. By next year there may be none.
The carnage of World War One is still hard to ima-gine. Nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks, we vividly recall the horror of watching nearly 3,000 people die on a single day. Death in the First World War occurred on an altogether different scale: approximately 230 people died every hour (the equivalent of a 9/11 every 13 hours) for four-and-a-quarter years. Worse yet, millions of these deaths made little or no strategic difference to either side, since trench warfare was less a pitched battle than a form of industrial slaughter. The British Army (which a German general is said to have called “lions led by donkeys”) endured the worst of this madness with grim resolve, and so did many of the colonial troops. On the first day of the battle of the Somme – which fell on the middle day of the middle year of the conflict – there were more than 57,000 casualties, a third of whom were killed outright or eventually died of their wounds. (This remains the single bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.)
We also too easily forget how much the Great War changed the world. The immediate aftermath was political and due largely to the sea-change in social attitudes which veterans of trench warfare brought home with them. Having watched millions of their comrades sacrifice themselves at the behest of their elders, it is no surprise that the survivors demanded better political representation. (Within a year universal adult suffrage was introduced in Austria, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania and the Soviet Union.) Another consequence was the entrenchment of the modern nation state, through the introduction of tight border controls and passports. European culture also underwent a profound shift, most notably in the birth of Modernism which cast an extremely wary eye on traditional European culture, not least because of its failure to prevent the wholesale butchery of almost an entire generation.
Some historians have argued that, with hindsight, the Great War is best understood as the opening phase of a Long War during which the West answered deep questions as to whether its political future would be determined by communism, fascism or parliamentary democracy. This master-conflict (which includes the Second War and the Cold War) is said to have ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1990. On the other hand, historians like Niall Ferguson have argued that Britain could easily have sacrificed Belgium to Germany in 1914, thereby saving the world the Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of postwar Germany, the rise of the Nazis and a great deal else. Whether or not either thesis is accurate, both reflect a shared understanding among professional historians that the entire political, social and economic history of the twentieth century was profoundly altered by the consequences of the Great War.
It is a great shame then that we value our veterans so lightly. No society should allow itself to overlook the sacrifices of a volunteer army, especially when so many of us are deeply moved by fictional treatments of conflict such as Sebastian Faulk’s wonderful novel of the Great War, Birdsong, or by movies like Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan. Our veterans, the poor and the poorer, deserve much greater acknowledgement and support than they have received, and they certainly should not be left to struggle with paltry pensions and inadequate health care during their final years. We ought to do much more for them before they too join the silent millions which the rest of the world honours on Remembrance Day.