At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns that had been firing incessantly for four years were silent. The Great War that had ravaged Europe for the previous four years was finally over.
Noted filmmaker, Peter Jackson, commemorates this war in his powerful 2018 documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old”. He and his crew reviewed 600 hours of interviews from 200 British veterans and 100 hours of original film footage from the Imperial War Museum. They restored the film and colorized it, then added sound effects and voice acting, all to make it as realistic as possible so that we could see that these were real men in real conditions. For nearly two hours, we saw them walking through trenches filled with water and “go over the top” of the trenches and across a landscape of shell holes and bodies to attack the German lines. We saw the rats, the sucking mud, the haggard expressions on the faces of the soldiers. We saw the wounded and the dead and heard the sound of the guns and saw the explosions.
When the end came that November, there was no cheering from the men, no shouts of joy, only a strange sound of silence. Dazed, hesitantly at first, they dared to stand up. It was the first time they could do so without fear of being shot. They had trouble believing it was really over. Later, anger came and sorrow at all the horrible things they had seen and the friends that had died.
At the end, nobody cared who had won. “We’d had enough,” one veteran said. Others echoed his sentiments: “There was no demonstration of any kind,” another said. “Nobody said a word. Everyone just slumped away.”
“It was one of the flattest moments of our lives,” recalled another veteran said. “We just couldn’t comprehend it. We had that sort of feeling that we’d been kicked out of a job.”
There was real fear about the future. “There was no work to go back to,” a veteran said. “What would we do next?” His fears were well grounded; the costs of the war had crippled the British economy. Exports were weak. Unemployment and inflation were high.
“The war to end all wars”, made by men who dreamed of empires, brought only death and disaster to Western Europe: 41 million casualties, crippling inflation and debt, and a fractured political structure. Its long-term effects were even worse—the Great Depression eleven years later, and another world war, far greater and more horrific than the first one.
Be careful what you dream.