One hundred years ago, 11 a.m. on November 11 marked the hour and day that the guns stopped and the armistice that ended World War I began.
This Sunday, a crowd of people who gathered at the Owls Head Transportation Museum went quiet just before 11 a.m., waiting as the engines of several World War I-era biplanes were silenced and as an honor guard readied to shoot their guns into the blustery sky.
Then the crack of gunfire and the somber sound of “Taps” rang out across the tarmac of the museum as the centennial Armistice Day moment was commemorated with pomp, biplanes and a sobering dose of historical perspective.
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“Any time you have a centennial moment, it’s a great opportunity to pause and reflect,” Toby Stinson, the museum’s director of the New England Auto Auction and a former social studies and U.S. history teacher, said shortly after the ceremony. “It’s important to recognize the origin of Armistice Day. It was the greatest war in the history of the world — great in terms of if mankind had ever tried to destroy itself intentionally, it would have been the Great War. No one knew how to stop it, and that’s what the armistice was. Everyone would have been celebrating the fact that this was over.”
World War I came to be known as the “war to end all wars,” and though that did not hold true, it is crucial that the Great War be remembered and studied, Stinson said.
Globally, the numbers of military and civilian casualties were high, with about 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded, according to the Robert Schuman European Centre. Even though the United States didn’t enter the war until 1917, three years after it had begun, more than 32,000 Mainers served in uniform during the war. More than a thousand of those who served did not come home alive. Among the dead were Moses Neptune, the son of the Passamaquoddy governor, who died one day before the 1918 armistice, according to a proclamation from Gov. Paul LePage that marked the war’s centennial.
“The first world war is probably a conflict that modern world citizens should go back and study,” Stinson said. “The questions that came out of this include what is worth fighting for? What reasons are worth it?”
The biggest moral questions may have arisen in muddy trenches of no-man’s-land, but certainly remain relevant today, he said. Armies in World War I had many technological advances available to them, including armored tanks, airplanes and chemical warfare, that would have been unimaginable a generation before. They used the technological advances, but certainly the soldiers paid the ultimate price, Stinson said.
“What is the value of human life?” he asked. “And if we have the ability to do something, should we?”
On Armistice Day 1918, the mood of the world was jubilant, Stinson said.
“It was one point in time that everybody seemed to be on board with the idea that let’s never let this happen again,” he said. “Look at photos of Armistice Day in the United States. People felt that the Great War has ended, and peace will be here forever.”
Even though that did not happen, remembering its 100th anniversary is still important, he said, and doing it at the transportation museum is a way to make the distant past seem relevant and alive.
“This is one of the places you can connect with history on a visceral level,” he said.
Two people who came to do so were Jamie Rice of Portland and her son, 7-year-old Thomas Rice. Both wore red poppies on their lapels, the flower that has come to symbolize World War I.
“I’m a big World War I aficionado,” said Jamie Rice, who works for the Maine Historical Society. “I find it a very amazing period in history. It’s just a transition, and a pivotal moment in American history.”