Remembering the Great War

In one of the most poignant scenes in The Show, featured on BookBub today, time traveler Grace Vandenberg tells a distant relative that World War I will end on "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month." Spoken in October 1918, in the waning weeks of what was then the most destructive war in history, the words comfort a woman who is worried about the fate of a brother fighting in France.

Today marks the hundredth anniversary of that day, when the Allies and Germany put down their guns, cooled their rhetoric, and began the arduous and unpleasant work of settling a conflict that claimed more than nine million combatants and seven million civilians.

Those who know the history of Veterans Day, observed in the United States tomorrow, know that the important holiday resulted from the armistice signed in a private railroad car on November 11, 1918. Though the name and even the observation date have changed over the years, the significance of the holiday has not.

I chose to set two novels -- The Show and The Memory Tree -- in the autumn of 1918 because I consider that time period both fascinating and relevant to what's going on today. Despite a hundred years of armed confrontations, including the biggest one of all, nations still struggle to resolve their differences in peaceful ways.

(Today's date also has some personal relevance. A beloved uncle, my father's oldest brother and a veteran himself, was born on November 11, 1918, and given the middle name Peace.)

Though my contributions cover the home front in 1918, many other works focus on the war itself. I highly recommend Jeff Shaara's To the Last Man and Joseph Persico's Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour, in addition to several classics on the war. One of the best lists of these works can be found at Barnes & Noble.

Those more interested in Hollywood portrayals of what contemporaries called the War to End All Wars may want to consider the list of iMDB's ten best World War I movies. I would recommend numbers 1, 4, 5, and 10 on that list and throw in Flyboys for good measure.

A photo essay of the western front, published last May in The Atlantic, offers readers a glimpse of the war zone today. I encourage anyone interested in this period of history to check these resources out.