90 Years Ago, Did My Grandfather Hear the Guns Fall Silent?
Ninety years ago today, my father’s father was an American infantryman in France, and I wonder if he actually heard the sound: for four years, the artillery of both sides had belched shells non-stop, battering away at the siege lines dug into the mud of Europe. They and the machine guns had been the teeth of a meat-grinder that had consumed much of a generation of men from West, East and around the world. But at 11 a.m. on the 11th of November of 1918, the last salvos of the First World War blasted across No Man’s Land in Belgium and France. In synchrony, the guns stopped — and he and millions of other surviving soldiers realized that they might just see home again.
2 comments November 11th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
