11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month

In spite of being a couple of days late, let us take a moment of silence, please, to commemorate Armistice Day. On November 11, 1918 the British, French and German commanders signed the truce in the forest of Compiegne to end World War I. With almost 9 million dead the Brits and French were elated.
The Frogs mobilized 7.5 million men.
Of those, 1.3 million were killed.
4 million were wounded.
The Brits moblized 5.3 million.
Slightly less than a million killed.
1.6 million wounded. All that, in just 4 years.

Armistice is still celebrated in Britain and France. In 1938 the US Congress passed a bill to make Armistice day an American holiday, as well. A day "dedicated to the cause of world peace." Amen.

I posted this poem last year, so it is cheating a bit. But I like the poem and the poet -- Wilfred Owen. A poet and soldier, he was killed in action just a week before the war ended in some godforsaken place in France. This is an excerpt from a longer poem "Dulce et decorum est". Can you imagine him in some stinkhole trench writing poetry?

. . . If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.**"

**Translation: it is sweet and proper to die for your country.

Hoping for: A headline like the photo above, about Iraq.
Listening to: "Blue Train" Coletrane
Eating: Leftover Halloween candy - Hershey miniatures.