Armistice Day

[callunav]

I can't - or I won't - call it Veteran's Day. It's not that I don't respect veterans. I do. I'd be more than happy for them to have a holiday. It's that the Armistice was something very specific and worth remembering in its specificity, on the day, at the hour and minute. It feels to me that broadening that out to all veterans of all wars everywhere obliterates that meaning.

Happy day of peace.

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

-- A. E. Houseman, "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries"

For the British Expeditionary Force, 1914, disparaged by German propaganda as 'mercenaries'.