Armistice Day

[julesjones]

My office is some ten minutes' walk from the Cenotaph in the city centre. I don't know where they actually fire the gun from at 11 o'clock, but it was loud enough to catch attention even over the sound of of a busy office. Within a few seconds, that sound had died to nothing, as people stopped typing and set down their files. The traffic noise went on outside, but inside there was nothing, by good fortune not even the sound of a phone ringing. The second cannon shot to close the silence seemed very loud indeed.

I have no other words this evening. I am too full of someone else's words. The book which went with me on the bus this morning was first published in Germany in January 1929, and in England in March 1929. My copy is from September that year, and from the twentieth print run, completing, as the book's colophon notes, 300,000 copies printed. According to Wikipedia, it sold 2.5 million copies in twenty-five languages in its first eighteen months in print. It was not enough. In 1939, only ten years after All Quiet On The Western Front was published, the Great War became the First World War. The armistice was broken, and another generation would discover for themselves the horror of war.

Comments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

*hugs* across the Pond, dear.