La Vie En Rose for 2006 November 12 (entry 0)

Sun Nov 12 2006 17:59 From Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth:

When the sound of guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other's faces did not cry jubilantly: "We've won the War!" they only said: "The War is over."

Deeply buried beneath my consciousness there stirred the vague memory of a letter that I had written to Roland… "As I listened," I told him, "to the organ swelling forth into a final triumphant burst in the song of victory, after the solemn and mournful dirge of the dead, I thought with what mockery and irony the jubilant celebrations which will hail the coming of peace will fall upon the ears of those to whom their best will never return, upon whose sorrow victory is built, who have paid their with their mourning for the other's joy."

(This was supposed to go up yesterday, but instead it's up today.)