11/11/11 : A calendar quirk highlights Veterans Day

                   As you are no doubt aware, last friday was 11/11/11.  It's a little quirk of the calendar, without any larger meaning.  And it is really only 11/11/11 in its abbreviated form, as the date is actually 11/11/2011. 
                   A real 11/11/1111 took place 900 years ago, but calendars were scarce then, the province of monks and not available to the common man.  If that day stood out at all, it would have been because Nov. 11 is the feast day of St. Martin of Tours (Martinmas), a day which immediately preceded a 40-day period of fasting before Christmas.  (This period would subsequently be shorted, requirements relaxed and is known as Advent.)  Martin Luther, by the way, was born on Nov. 11 and named for St. Martin.
                   It is Veterans Day in the United States.  In many countries around the world it is called Remembrance Day, and is observed as a kind of international memorial day.  It is on Nov. 11 because that is the date of the Armistice that ended the First World War.
                  In 1918, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, hostilities between the Western Allies and German ceased, effectively ending what was until then the bloodiest conflict in human history.  The phrase "at the 11th hour" is biblical (Matthew 20:6 -- "And about the eleventh hour, he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle?), and it is understood to mean "at the very last possible minute."
                  Although it has become conventional wisdom that the signatories of the Armistice deliberately employed the symbolism of the 11th hour, too much should not be read into it.  Negotiations had been going on for five weeks, and agreement was finally reached at 5 a.m. on Nov. 11, with the cease-fire to be implemented at 11 a.m. Paris time.  The Armistice was not crafted around 11/11/1 as much as it took advantage of the coincidence.  Had agreement been reached on, say, Nov.10, the cease-fire would not have been delayed 24 hours (thus condemning to death that many more soldiers) to achieve a symbolism best left to poets.  As it was, 2,738 men still died before 11 o'clock.


                   But there would be symbolism connected with that day.  The Armistice was signed in a rail car that belonged to the French commander, Field Marshall Ferdinand Forest.  After the war, a park was created at the site called the Clairiere de L'Armistice (the Clearing of the Armistice).  A concrete pavilion was built to house the rail car, and a statue of Foch was erected along with a plaque that read: "Here on the eleventh of November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German empire.....vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave."
                   There were many links in the chain of catastrophe that created Nazi Germany and the Second World War, but none likely greater than in the way the First World War ended.  The Armistice should not be confused with the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which imposed the great and bitter humiliation on the German people that included full responsibility for the war and exacted reparations that approached half a trillion in 2011 dollars.  But for Adolph Hilter's generation of Germans, that was a distinction without a difference.
                    In 1940, when the Wehrmacht went through France like a hot knife through foie gras, the first thing Hilter did was order the Armistice pavilion jackhammered and the rail car replaced on the track just as it had been in 1918.  There, sitting where Foch had sat in 1918, he imposed on France the same humiliation that France had itself imposed on Germany 22 years before.  He then had the rail car shipped back to Germany and ordered the park demolished to the point of having the gardens desecrated and all the trees uprooted.  He left the statue of Foch to bear witness to the shame.  It was the only building or monument in France that Hilter ordered destroyed.
                   In the last days of World War 2, the SS burned the rail car before it could fall back into the hands of the Allies.  After the war, France did not attempt to reimpose the same reparations as it had in 1918 (not that the Brits and Americans would have allowed it), and today the French president and the German chancellor work side by side to address the Greek debt crisis.
                   Nov.11 compels us to remember the brave fallen and that so many of us owe so much to the sacrifices of a very few.  We should also try to remember that we reap what we sow.