11-11-11

On the 11th minute of 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 a permanent ceasefire was declared along the Eastern and Western fronts. Canadian George Lawrence Price was hit by the sniper's bullet at 10:58 and he has long been thought to be the last casualty of that conflict, although troops continued to shoot at each other for several hour after the armistice ended the four-year global conflict.

11-11-11 occurs once a year.

Someone in the armistice committee must have been heavily influenced by numerology to have chosen this powerful repetition of the first prime number to magically stop soldiers from killing each other.

Of course it could have just been a coincidences like 9/11/2001.

Today the major combatant nations of World War I commemorated their fallen dead.

Over 65 million soldiers participated in the struggle.

According to Wikipedia the last living veteran of World War I (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918) was Florence Green, a British citizen who served in the Allied armed forces, and who died 4 February 2012, aged 110. The last living combat veteran was Claude Choules who served in the British Royal Navy (and later the Royal Australian Navy). He died 5 May 2011, at the age of 110.

The last veteran to serve in the trenches was Harry Patch (British Army) who died on 25 July 2009, aged 111 and the last Central Powers veteran, Franz Künstler of Austria-Hungary, died on 27 May 2008 at the age of 107.

My grandfather and grandmother both served in France for the Canadian Medical expedition. As my grandmother was disembarking at Le Havre, she stumbled coming down the steep gangplank. My grandfather stopped her fall and helped her onto the dock They served as doctor and nurse along with my Aunt Marion at Epinay tending to thousands of wounded and dying. After the outbreak of Spanish Flu in 1917, the three of them returned home on an ocean liner together. Captain Smith and Nurse Hamblin married soon after their arrival in Maine. The two veterans lived together for thirty-two years. My grandfather died the year I was born and my grandmother twenty years later.

She was the last WWI vet I knew.

I love her always.