Figure 1 – A “gob”, two “Tommys,” and a Red Cross girl in Paris, November 11, 1918 – out to celebrate the Armistice. From the US Library of Congress, taken by the US Army Signal Corps, and in the public domain in the United States.

I have set today’s post to publish at 11 am GMT, that is ninety-nine years to the moment of the armistice that ended World War I, the moment that the Western Front fell silent. In some sense it seems strange that World War I ended still less than a century ago. It seems such a remote and alien time – the time of our grandparents. People gasped, and people celebrated. They went on to live their lives, but always carried those times with them.

Figure 1 is from the United States Library of Congress and is a photograph taken by the United States Army Signal Corps

– Paris, A “gob,” “two Tommys,” and a Red Cross girl went to make up this merry quartette [sic] in Paris on Armistice Day.

A “gob” was an American sailor. A “Tommy”, as we have previously discussed, was an English soldier – much like a GI Joe in America.

There are lots of pictures of people celebrating the end of that war from all around: New York City, London, Paris, Sydney … But these images are usually of great crowds, and your eye has to draw in to isolate individual faces. But here the camera has magically and intimately done that for us, and as a result empathy is easy, as we catch their eyes.

In the end, it was not the war that ended all war, but rather a first episode in a series of terrible conflagrations to end European monarchy and imperialism. But at that moment there was great joy and great hope for the future. Look no more into their faces. We have failed them.

“This is a war to end all war.”

President Woodrow Wilson

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

George Santayana, Spanish-American philosopher