One-hundred years ago today, the war to end all wars came to an end. On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, bells rang around the world. The war was over. The fighting had stopped. My grandfather came home.
Bells around the world will once again ring today. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice and the end of World War, bells will resound on U.S. naval vessels, army bases, the U.S. Capital, and from the steeple of St. James Church in Pennington, N.J. where Grandfather Kelly was buried.
Born on January twenty-fourth, 1894 in South Dublin, Ireland, Bernard Kelly boarded the S.S. Arabic in Liverpool bound for America in August 1909. After a seven-day sail across the North Atlantic, he passed through Ellis Island just as thousands of like-minded Irish immigrants. He settled in Yonkers with his mother and a horde of siblings, all living with another family under the same roof. Six years later, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight for his newly adopted country. After the war, he married the girl next door, Rose Launtenschlager, the daughter of German immigrants.
I recall bouncing on my grandfather’s knee as he sang The Ballad of the Foxhunter. “Lay me in a cushioned chair; carry me, ye four. With cushions here and cushions there, to see the world once more.” The walks he took with me gave me a much-needed balance in life, for I had just learned to walk and was more adept at skinning my knees than navigating on two feet. Later he would share stories with me about his childhood in Dublin, but rarely did he mention his time fighting in France. As a member of an artillery battalion, he served miles from the front, but wasn’t saved from German mustard gas. I always wondered if his cough was due to his love for pipe tobacco or the chemical warfare at the Somme.
The Great War, as some called it, saw the greatest advancement in weaponry than any other war. Sure, WW II brought the advent of the rocket, jet engines, and the atomic bomb. But the First World War saw the first use of ocean-going submarines, air power, armed tanks and personnel carriers, long-range holsters like Big Bertha, chemical warfare, and the machine gun. Battle technology outpaced battle tactics, and the casualties were high. Over 1.8 million died in the Hundred Days Offensive, but the allied victory forced Germany’s surrender and brought an end to this bloody conflict.
Yet the war to end all wars did nothing of the sort. The war cry of mothers who lost their sons became, “Lest we forget!” Yet, here we are now. What have we forgotten? Many historians attributed World War Two to the unsettled aftermath of the Great War of 1918. Then came the Korean War in which my father served as an air rescue pilot. Like dominoes falling in sequence, one war led to another. The Vietnam War sprung out of the three decades of the Cold War in which I served as a submarine officer. While the great world spins with its own gladiatorial momentum, I’ll continue to pray for peace, both at home and overseas.
Posted: 11 November 2018; 11:00 GMT
