This week our Nation honors its veterans with a poignant holiday. Originally called “Armistice Day,” it marked the first anniversary of the armistice that effectively ended combat on the Western Front in World War I. At the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month the artillery fell silent, the biplanes ceased their bombing missions, and the trenches stopped being death traps for the soldiers that inhabited them.
We lost over 117,000 U.S. servicemen in that war. The total number of deaths (both military and civilian) for the Allies in that conflict was over 9 million. The central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire which is now modern day Turkey) lost over seven million. While both France and Germany lost about four percent of their population in that conflict, some other nations lost a considerably greater proportion of their countrymen. Romania lost nine percent, the Ottoman Empire almost 14 percent, and Serbia an astounding 16 percent of their populations.