Trego's Mountain Ear

While Armistice Day had morphed into Veterans Day between the end of the second World War and the mid-fifties, ceremonies in my younger years continued the solemn tone of recognizing the end of the “War to End Wars.” My first school bus driver was a World War I veteran – gassed in the trenches, driving was a job he could still do. When I went to Trego in 1960, we had an acre of new playground, granted the school on a 99 year lease by Bill Opelt – another World War I veteran. I was, timewise, closer to those old veterans then than I am to the kid who went to school in the fifties and sixties.

As I watched Trego School’s Veteran’s Day ceremonies, I recognized the change – the solemnity of the Armistice (recognized on Martinmas) is a bit reduced. The kids take it with the same sincerity, but the majority of the adults no longer have the personal contacts. I don’t know when the last of the World War I veterans rejoined the fallen members of his unit. I remember the minutes of silence, and a lone old man’s simple toast “Absent Friends” with his coffee cup.

In Canada, it morphed from Armistice Day to Remembrance Day. The first World War was longer for them. Their war began on August 4, 1914, when the United Kingdom declared war. Canada lost nearly 60,000 men. The US entered the war on April 6, 1917 and had fewer combat deaths (disease brought US total losses to around 120,000). I recognized our late entry into that war when a Canadian friend went to France in 2016 for the commemoration at Ypres.

The religious formality of Martinmas – the soldier’s saint – and the huge losses to the nations who fought through the entire war – have maintained more of the solemnity. The US entered the first World War with it’s post-Civil war commemoration – Decoration Day. The war between the states, with 660,000 dead, gave our country the same taste Europe would encounter a half-century later. Decoration day became Memorial Day in 1971.