Armistice Day
Today is Armistice Day. November 11 2012. They may have changed the name but really, it is Armistice Day.
On this day in 1918 at 1100 hrs, the guns finally fell silent along the Western Front. The First World War, The Great War, The War to End all Wars was done and over. Germany had been defeated. Brave little Belgium had been avenged. By best count, some 16,563,868 people had lost their lives.
In two years, we’ll be able to mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of this Great War.
The numbers don’t make any sense almost a hundred years later. 37,792,681 people killed and / or wounded in a conflict that spanned only four years. The British daily loss rate during the Battle of the Somme alone, between 1 July and 18 November 1916, averaged 2,943 men. The Russians lost an estimated million civilians due to starvation alone. There hadn’t been enough manpower at home to plant and harvest the crops.
Then came the Spanish Influenza, a disease returning soldiers helped spread from 1918 to 1920. Estimates vary greatly but it is believed that between 50 and 130 million died. The most common figure given is 95 million worldwide.
Yet less than 20 years later, the world was ready to do it all again, this time with improved weapons, different tactics and with greater fury. Not much had been learned in the intervening years it seemed. The guns were again primed and ready.
When I was in my early 20’s in the late 1980’s I worked for a small market radio station here on Vancouver Island. Like many young people in the “business” back then I had aspirations of greater things, content to enjoy starving on a pittance of a salary while learning and having a heck of a lot of fun doing it. I did the Morning Drive, afternoon news and the occasional evening shift. I voiced commercials, wrote copy and did everything and anything else required. I made horrible coffee.
The station where I worked was always trying to be community spirited. They were eager to stay in everyone’s good books. I was reminded time and again, that while it took at least 15 minutes to attract a listener, they could turn off their radios in a snap of the finger. How they came up with these figures remains to this day a mystery. However, no listeners meant no advertisers and no advertisers meant, well that concept was just too horrible to contemplate. If Sammy’s Discount Mattress Warehouse* didn’t renew its contract, nobody knew where the money was going to come from.
Sammy’s was also very much in the public relations business. They sponsored a two-hour block of station time on Tuesday and Thursday evenings for alternative programming. Tuesdays were wide open. Anyone with a hankering for the microphone could sit and spin records, talk politics, tell stories or what have you. The list of odd characters was fairly monumental. We had ventriloquists who showed up without props (this was radio) and who yet performed as if they had a wooden partner. We had a fellow who was somehow associated with the communist party and who spent his hour railing against the government, taking the calls of outraged citizens in stride. There was Lucy, the Story Lady who read Beatrix Potter, Babar and Curious George stories to the kids, describing the pictures in such detail as to enthrall her young listeners. On one memorable occasion we made the mistake of hosting a teen-aged punk rocker who lasted exactly two minutes before uttering one of those words simply not permitted and who left the station cursing and ranting shortly thereafter.
Thursdays however were reserved for a program which had been running then for over 20 years, called Continental Express. The premise was that the host would each week take the listener on a European train ride stopping in here and there to listen to the local music. It was fairly popular and received a lot of mail. real mail, for this was in the days before email.
The host of this music program, was Gebbert Kuhn**, an unassuming German fellow who had been living in Canada for most of his adult life. Long retired from his job in the lumber mill he was in his late 60’s when I met him. Short statured yet very fit for his age, he was mentally sharp as a tack. He still enjoyed the music of Europe and of his youth there. On those evenings, he’d show up clutching his box of records, ready to do the show which ran from 7 til 9pm. I’d prepare the news broadcast for 7:00pm and then turn the station over to him. Because most of his offerings spun at 78 r/pm he set himself up in the auxiliary studio. It had the old, high-speed turntables and was the one in which we produced commercials and ran things from when the main studio was either down for maintenance or setting up for a remote broadcast or sports event.
No sooner did I finish the brief weather forecast when I would say, “And now ladies and gentlemen, It’s time once more for Continental Express with Gebbert Kuhn, brought to you by Sammy’s Discount Mattress Warehouse, where this week you can save up to 50% on all queen size box springs with 12 months same as cash OAC. …. Then Gebbert would say a few words and play his first selection.
Working with him was a pleasure, because even though I didn’t care much for the music, I saw he was a serious presenter. This program was important to him, it wasn’t something to be sloughed off or to call in sick for. Over the months I worked there, I got to know him better and better and we developed a good rapport.
In November of 1989 it two days before Remembrance Day when he came in to do his Thursday program. The subject came up and we began to talk about the war. I assumed he’d been over in Europe as a young man, and so asked him what it had been like living in Germany so many years ago. Once he saw that I showed a sincere and respectful interest, Gebbert began to tell his story. It was one that I had no idea existed or that he was willing to tell.
“When I joined the Wehrmacht in 1940 we thought we were going to set everything back to rights. The wrongs inflicted on Germany in 1918 were going at last to be avenged. We would get back our lands, our honor would be restored as a Nation and we would lead the world into a better future. We would once and for all tear up the treaty of Versailles. It was only a matter of time, we were in the right, God was with us and we would not be betrayed by the politicians as had been the army of 1918.”; He said and added sadly, “How foolish we were. How naive. How we were taken in.” “It was all lies of course.” “They did nothing but lie.” “In the beginning, it was all tea and roses. The Army had rolled through the low countries without too much trouble, France had fallen already and they waved flowers and gave us wine in the South. Soon we would be in the streets of London, they had said. Once the governments had been defeated, the people would come to see us as friends. It was Britain after all that had declared war on us when Hitler sent the Army into Poland. We the common German people had never wanted a war with Britain.”
I simply sat and listened. What else does one do in situations like this? Between announcements and for over an hour after his program had finished and the night DJ was running the main board, I listened. He described it all. From the glorious summer in France of 1940 to the horrors of the Eastern Front, to the final fight for survival in the winter of 1944/45 when his side was forced to scavenge for food along the countryside. I listened as he described losing friends and companions, some of whom still lie hidden in Russian forests to this day.
I heard how he had escaped the battle of Stalingrad by hitching a ride on a passing truck which was headed for the safety of the repositioned German front lines. I heard how he managed to make it to the British Sector after the war, and so avoided being taken prisoner by the Soviets, whom every German soldier dreaded. How out of his high-school class of 25 young men, only four survived the conflict. How he spent a year in a British prisoner of war camp with conditions dreadful enough to kill hundreds weekly. How he applied to come to Canada after the war, realizing that there was little left for him in a country that had more or less thrown itself away in an effort to gain false glory. How he had at first claimed to have been of Swiss ancestry when applying for work in order to avoid the stigma German immigrants faced in the town he’d decided to settle in. How he had married a Canadian girl in the 1950’s and raised a family. How he finally came to grips with the holocaust, seeing it for what it was and being shocked by the horror of it. He told it all and answered whatever questions I put to him.
We two held a Remembrance Day of sorts a few days early that year. There wasn’t any wreath laying. We didn’t observe a moment of silence. They were simply the uttered remembrances of an old soldier. One who had been as young in 1940 as I had been at the time of the telling. One who had fought for a cause he believed in, who believed in that cause because he had been taught to believe and who was to live through it all to see that belief utterly betrayed, his ideals shattered, his country once more plunged into ruin and disgrace. He had suffered as all combat soldiers ultimately do suffer. Post traumatic stress disorder plagued him for years he’d said. His hands would tremble, his mind reeled with an unshakable panic and his body bathed itself in sweat for no apparent reason. “And yet you go on, you know?”; He said. “What else do you do but pick up your life and try to get long?” “You have to get along in spite of what happened, the mistakes you make. You get along because you were the one who made it out, one of the lucky ones.”
“God that it would never have happened. It was all for nothing and we started a fight that for a time ruined the world. It was all such a waste of all humanity and my friends and I, we all bear a measure of responsibility. That is something I have come to accept. It is hard. Every day it is hard.”
Gebbert Kuhn passed away about a year after I left the radio station, in 1991. He was 72. He was neither hero nor villain. He was one of the many millions of individuals caught up in a series of violent world events which took place a very long time ago. He had been 20 years old when he joined the German Army in the spring of 1940.
I hope he’s finally found a measure of peace.
Let us remember
