There's another holiday that we're currently closing in on that, though observed with enthusiasm in many circles, has almost totally lost touch with its origins. Veterans' Day is the descendant of Armistice Day – which is what we called it in my childhood – the commemoration of the signing of the armistice (not a peace treaty or a surrender, but an agreement to pause armed activity, like the one in Korea) between the Allies and the Germans. It was famously solemnized in a railway car parked in a French forest at 11:00 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month. A message from the commanding general had reached the front lines that morning:

Thus ended the War to End All Wars, which virtually wiped out an entire generation of young men from Britain, Germany, France, and Australia. The United States, which eventually committed 1.2 million troops, lost about 120,000, more than twice the number lost later in the much longer Vietnam War. The US entered the war only after multiple provocations – the sinking of the Lusitania being one – and at the urging of American bankers who'd lent roughly $3 billion to the struggling allies and would not recoup it if they lost. The first Americans – only 190 of them – landed in France in June 1917 and marched to the grave of the Marquis de Lafayette, who'd been a key helper in the American Revolution. There, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Stanton made his unforgettable declaration, "Nous voila, Lafayette!" We are here!

The war was one in which – as in many others, the American Civil War among them – defensive positions were dominant. The infantry and cavalry charges of the 19th century were met with massed artillery and, later, barbed wire entanglements and machine gun fire. The response was entrenchment and stasis, the remains of which are described in "The End of the Line," by William Vollmann in the October issue of Smithsonian. The common soldiers suffered as much from trench life as from enemy activity.

By one hundred years ago this week, the German armies were pressed all across their long front with the Allies. An attempted breakout (eerily like the Battle of the Bulge only 27 years later) had failed. More and more German strongpoints fell to and were successfully occupied by Allied troops. Both sides were exhausted by what both sides had once fervently embraced. Two German admirals, in a last-ditch attempt to reverse matters, planned an unauthorized sea engagement with the British Royal Navy. But their sailors mutinied – shades of the battleship Potemkin – and it was obvious the war was kaput. The monarchy collapsed, and on the 20th the German government replied to President Wilson's proposals for cessation of hostilities. Just before the signing of the armistice, the Kaiser fled across the border to neutral Holland, where he spent the rest of his life, the Dutch government refusing to extradite him for prosecution.

The first Armistice commemoration was held at Buckingham Palace on November 11, 1919, at the order of King George V. President Wilson set it aside, as well, and Congress approved it as a national holiday in 1926, then renamed it Veterans Day in 1954, during the Korean War.

Could such a thing happen again? World War II proved that it could; and Vollman is pessimistic: "...in the next 800 or even 200 years (if human beings persist on this earth so long) there will be another one, at which time the iron ghosts of the trenches will come shrieking back." Yuval Harari, however, in his latest book, Homo Deus, points out that nations now fear nuclear warfare as "a mad act of collective suicide." Thus, "...in 2012...war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000...and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder." As we commemorate on November 11th the cost of what was won for all of us on the battlefields of the 20th century, we may come to realize that the most dangerous threat to human existence has always been the innate perversity of human nature.