RHYS BOWEN: Today is Veteran's Day, or Armistice Day as it’s called in England. It celebrates the signing of the armistice—the official end of WW1 on November 11, at 11:11 in the morning. In England there is a moment of silence at that time every year. Poppies are sold to raise money for wounded veterans as they have been since 1918 and there is a beautiful ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall at the end of which thousands of poppies fall from the ceiling.
In 2018, the centenary, the Tower of London was flanked with thousands of poppies.
Maybe it means more to people in England because it was such a devasting war for us. I know the Americans came in 1917 and helped to bring the war to an end, but Britain and its allies had been fighting up to their necks in mud in trenches for three years before that. The costs were horrendous—a whole generation of young men wiped out. The chances of marriage for a young woman at that time were one in ten. And the men who returned were so damaged physically and mentally that they bore scars for life. Many were gassed and could never breathe properly again. Others had what they called shell shock, which we would now call PTSD. And it’s no wonder. The battlefields were a couple of hours away from home. A soldier could be on leave, sitting in the garden eating strawberries and cream and later that day in a rat-infested trench with shells raining down on him, or ordered to go ‘over the top’ to be met with a hail of bullets.
It’s no wonder minds snapped.
One thing that happened during WW1 was that women had to take over many jobs from men who were away fighting or would not return. They became bus drivers and blacksmiths. They worked in factories and fields. And because these were hard physical jobs they were given uniforms—trousers and boots. So they discarded their corsets and layers of skirts and cut their hair short. They emerged from the war knowing that they could do anything a man could do and that the country owed them a debt of gratitude. This gratitude led to women being granted the vote.
I wrote about the role of women in this war in my book THE VICTORY GARDEN. It’s about a young woman who becomes a land girl and shows how women stepped up to do what was necessary—far beyond the limits they thought themselves capable of.
Another thing we must remember on this day: It was called THE WAR TO END ALL WARS. But it didn’t work out that way, did it? Having been through a most contentious election it seems to me that humans are essentially tribal beings. If we are given a chance to hate and attack those who are different from us, we will do so. Every year on Armistice Day I pray that we might have learned a lesson, but I don’t think we ever will.
