It is "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month"--and of the eleventh year this year--and at exactly this time in 1918 an "armistice," a ceasefire, was called in what was then "the war to end all wars," what we now call World War I.  We now see that armistice as the beginning of World War II.  World War I was the greatest disaster to ever befall Europe, greater than World War II because nothing good came of it, greater because it changed the soul of one of the world's greatest people, the French; greater because it was so avoidable.

Image: trench warfare, Battle of the Somme.