But perhaps all was not quiet on the Western Front. Hindsight suggests that the Holy Spirit stopped the guns so humanity could have the chance, after years of fighting, to listen to the silence speak about faith. November 11, 1918, fell on the feast day of St. Martin of Tours. The Church had memorialized him for centuries as the patron saint of soldiers. St. Martin of Tours had served in the Roman army until, around the year 339, he experienced a vision of Christ in his sleep. The vision occurred after Martin had cut his cloak in half for a beggar at the gates of Amiens, France. When not in prayer, the soldier-convert received spiritual direction from St. Hilary, combated the heresy of Arianism, and founded monasteries throughout Gaul until his death in November 397. Church historians have dubbed his monasteries the “nursery of bishops.”
The end of WWI and the canonized life of St. Martin of Tours provide parallels hard to dismiss as mere historical chance. For one, the “war to end all wars” had ended on the very feast day of the patron saint of soldiers. A relatively unknown fact today is that approximately 5,000 French Catholic priests lost their lives serving as chaplains, bloodshed that helped drain life from an anti-clericalism that had dominated France since the late 19th century.
Geographically, the trenches that scarred most of the landscape in France by 1918, as well as parts of Belgium and Germany, cut through the heart of what maps once recognized as Gaul, once the fertile field of Christian Europe.
November 11, 2011.
Look at this day on a calendar. Setting aside the sad reality that many Americans don’t even know the existence of Veterans Day, those few that do still probably don’t know why it is celebrated each year on this particular day.
Canadians also attach significance to this date. Their calendars indicate that they call it by the same name as their European counterparts. Appropriately, and perhaps more accurately, they all recognize it as Remembrance Day.
