Armistice Day

Winter.  Yikes!

Here is a photo of the tomb of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Commander in Chief of the Allied Armies in 1918.  The tomb is located at Les Invalides, also the location of the Tomb of Napoleon.  Foch's tomb is of ordinary French soldiers bearing on their shoulders the body of a comrade in arms.

Foch was the person who on November 11, 1918 accepted the enemy request for an armistice.  Eventually the final peace terms as embodied in the Treat of Versailles were not as Foch wished, he declared, "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years".   World War II began twenty years and 65 days later.

Here's a repeat from Armistice Day 2011:

The photo is of the Minnesota Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the State Capitol approach. The inscription is a quotation from the poem, "The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak", by Archibald MacLeish. The inscription reads, "We were young. We have died. Remember us."
Here is the complete poem:

The young dead soldiers do not speak.
Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:
who has not heard them?
They have a silence that speaks for them at night
and when the clock counts.
They say: We were young. We have died.
Remember us.
They say: We have done what we could
but until it is finished it is not done.
They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished
no one can know what our lives gave.
They say: Our deaths are not ours: they are yours,
they will mean what you make them.
They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for
peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say,
it is you who must say this.
We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.