It’s not over yet. The guns may have fallen silent at 11:00 a century ago last Sunday, we may have lost everyone who fought in the “Great War” and nearly everyone who knew them. But its consequences linger on.

Including geopolitically. The Second World War was a continuation of the First World War by other means, made far more poisonous by the rise of Bolshevism and Naziism in a Russia and Germany broken by defeat in the Great War. And the Cold War that resulted still finds echoes in today’s renewed confrontation between Russia and the West.

Whether liberalization in Russia from 1905 to 1913 would have proved a false dawn regardless we cannot know. But 1914 led inexorably to 1917. While Islamism is less directly connected to the Great War, China is still led by the Communist heirs of Mao Zedong. And the West has yet to recover the confidence and sense of purpose, including in the possibility of Truth, that perished in the trenches. 

So it’s not over. I try not to polemicize about Remembrance Day on or right before it, unlike some French presidents I could name. But I’m taking up pen and torch now because it’s very important to recognize what Nov. 11 was and was not about.

Ceremonies tended to dwell on the horror of war. Especially regarding the First World War, supposedly the epitome of the futility of taking up arms. But at bottom we recall sacrifice. Not waste. In the back of our minds we still remember that on the Allied side at least all those men did not die for nothing.

Even death for a losing cause, if it is just, is not in vain. And we won the First World War. And it mattered.

So listen carefully, I say again, to all the words of “In Flanders Fields.” It evokes the irreparable loss of those who “(s)hort days ago lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved, and were loved” and now lie dead, often in unmarked graves. But then it says “Take up our quarrel with the foe” because “If ye break faith with us who die we shall not sleep.”

Perhaps McCrae was a fool. Perhaps the right response, in 1914 or 1917, was to throw away the torch, surrender to German aggression, say nothing was worth fighting over. Certainly interwar “statesmen” thought so in 1936 and 1938. But it wasn’t true then. Or in 1914. Or now.

The Kaiser wasn’t Hitler. But he was a nasty piece of work with nasty war aims. A world in which Britain did not fight for Belgium in 1914, the French did not fight for themselves, or Canadians and Americans did not fight for both, would have been a very ugly place.

Now wait, you cry. Americans did not fight in 1914. Its left-wing “idealist” president dismissed the conflict as “a drunken brawl in a public house” as late as 1916 and when American interests were directly threatened, snivelled about “being too proud to fight.” Even when fighting became inevitable, Woodrow Wilson was too proud to arm; the dreadful battle of Passchendaele had to be fought in the summer and fall of 1917 to relieve German pressure on the shattered French army long enough for a U.S. military buildup. Americans got there late in the Second World War as well, not because they were bellicose or selfish but because pacifism had too strong a hold on their minds.

Hence a very topical point. Given the horrendous consequences of American abdication of responsibility before both world wars, is giving Donald Trump a virtue-signalling poke in the admittedly tempting eye really Plan A? He may be flirting with narrow America First nationalism. But the right answer is to persuade the U.S. to lead a coalition of armed nations ready to see evil clearly and fight it resolutely despite the horrible cost of war. Europe, in smug decline, is not such a coalition.

The final way the Great War is always with us is Thucydides’ “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” We should remember that the dead “gave all their tomorrows for your today.” But also that not every death in war is vain. Nearly 2,500 years after Thucydides, Eisenhower’s first inaugural address rejected “the false and wicked bargain of trading honour for security … in the final choice a soldier’s pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner’s chains.”

Those who fought for liberty under law in the First World War understood that truth and made that choice. The Vimy Memorial has haunting figures regretting the loss, including Mother Canada mourning her sons. But atop the memorial stand Peace and Justice, right above Faith and Honour.

Peace is not a synonym for surrender. And In Flanders Fields is a call to take up arms not cast them down.