See the BBC page for today.

It is the 90th anniversary of the end of a conflict that we’re still living with the repercussions of, and will be living with, for the rest of our lives. Consider that without the German High Command of WWI, Lenin would probably have died in exile (and no, he wasn’t “shipped back to Russia in a sealed boxcar like a contagion”; it was a rather luxurious cabin-car).

There would have been no Irish revolution of 1916 (Germany is the “Friendly Foreign Power” of the monuments- while thousands and thousands of Irishmen volunteered, fought and died for Britain, the IRA were being formed by willing associates of Kaiser Wilhelm, and it’s no wonder Germany isn’t more prominently mentioned).

No Canada-as Canada, and perhaps most poignant today, no Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or Palestine/Israel.

Women would not have had the leverage for equal rights, and the Second World War wouldn’t have got started at all. India and it’s independence from the UK, Hell, the collapse of four empires…Five if you count France's.

But there is the personal side as well. Millions died. Each an individual story snuffed out, interwoven with families that would never be the same. Family names disappeared forever in the mud of France, the sands of Arabia, the mountains of Italy, the jungles of India and on the savanna of Africa. Men fought in the skies for the first time, and under the sea…and took to their graves novels we will never read, paintings we will never find in museums, philosophic thoughts that will never trouble our sleep.

But this was no generation of saints. Before the Great War, race and gender were iron chains. Class was firmly on its throne. Religion had a stranglehold on everything (some things never change). There would have been no acceptable way for friends I have to express their love; they could not walk down the street hand-in-hand. They barely can now.

There were no treatments that we would recognize for mental illness. There would have been no “Roaring 20s”, and I wonder how art would –not- have changed: what would, say, motion pictures, have been like without the technological advances of the war? Or aviation? Or music?

It was a Pandora’s Box of a thing, this war of 90 years ago. I think of the old men in my neighborhoods growing up- all different but for the shade of the war; I can remember their stories and the silences that could be cut by a knife as they relived a moment…My Great Uncles and Aunts…Both Grandfathers...They’re all gone now, these old men and women, only a handful remain… but today is really their day, and this is the world they shaped for us. We all live in their shadow, on their ground.

There’s a 19 year old boy, who sleeps in a small village, in northeastern France, who put down his paints and pencils, put away his athletic uniform, and put on the King’s green, and became a dashing cavalryman. He, like most 19 year-olds, probably thought he was immortal, that they would march into Berlin and hang the fat megalomaniac in the pikelhaub in a matter of days or weeks. He’s in France still, this 90th anniversary; “Sadly missed by his Father, Mother, Brothers and Sisters”. I’ve visited him, and remember his name today, along with all my own mates, who decades later, did nothing quite so great in scope, but did their bit. I’m a Vet as well, but William and the others gave far, far more than I did. And more are giving their all in far-away places.