November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg

November 11: Long Endure (Armistice Day)

[ ππ ] n o v e m b e r 1 1 Long Endure (Armistice Day) The superintendent has been gone a week. Doesn’t he know that people die, waiting? Down in a newer part of the National Cemetery a small ceremony is taking place. Today is Veterans Day—what used to be called Armistice Day. On November 11, 1918, the Armistice silenced the ancient guns on the Western Front. Wilfred Owen’s parents, in the English town of Shrewsbury , had not received any news from the front in more than a week. They had no knowledge of the 2nd Manchesters’ attack on the Sambre and Oise Canal. At about eleven o’clock, as church bells in Shrewsbury pealed out the unfathomable relief, a very small bell rang at the Owens’ front door. They were handed a telegram from the War O≈ce. On the same day, Harold Owen also got a message. Harold was at sea half a world away. Since the two brothers had been very close throughout Wilfred’s life, it was with a certain irony—not a bitter irony, but a strange irony—that Harold had found himself assigned to the cruiser Astraea, ‘‘whose launching the Times had reported on 18 March 1893, the day Wilfred Owen was born.’’ This is Harold Owen’s description of what happened on the day of the Armistice: n o v e m b e r 1 1 [ π∫ ] We were lying o√ Victoria. I had gone down to my cabin thinking to write some letters. I drew aside the door curtain and stepped inside and to my amazement I saw Wilfred sitting in my chair. I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from my face. I did not rush toward him but walked jerkily into the cabin—all my limbs sti√ and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: ‘‘Wilfred, how did you get here?’’ He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile. I felt no fear—I had not when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there; only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. All I was conscious of was a sensation of enormous shock and profound astonishment that he should be here in my cabin. I spoke again. ‘‘Wilfred dear, how can you be here, it’s just not possible . . . ’’ But still he did not speak but only smile his most gentle smile. This not speaking did not now as it had done at first seem strange or even unnatural; it was not only in some inexplicable way perfectly natural but radiated a quality which made his presence with me undeniably right and in no way out of the ordinary. I loved having him there: I could not, and did not want to try to understand how he had got there. I was content to accept him, that he was here with me was su≈cient . I could not question anything, the meeting in itself was complete and strangely perfect. He was in uniform and I remember thinking how out of place the khaki looked amongst the cabin furnishings. With this thought I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty. . . . I felt the blood run slowly back to my face and looseness into my limbs and with these an overpowering sense of emptiness and absolute loss. . . . I wondered if I had been dreaming but looking down I saw that I was still standing. Suddenly I felt terribly tired and moving to my bunk I lay down; instantly I went into a deep oblivious sleep. When I woke up I knew with absolute certainty that Wilfred was dead. ‘‘Dead’’? * * * L. L. had got to the point where painstakingly rocking himself out of bed in the morning was a ten-minute procedure. He could no longer dress himself. The last thing—going to the o≈ce to see patients—was almost gone. At this point he finally accepted crucifixion: he began taking a drug for the Parkinson’s. l o n g e n d...