On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of
the eleventh month in 1918, the world saw an end to World War I. More than 9
million soldiers died in this terrible war along with 5 million civilians, and
21 million were injured. Then there were 2 million Armenians slaughtered in
Turkey and an influenza that killed 50 million, all during the war. From 1914
to 1918 the world was a very dark place.
In every war the beginnings are always
complicated, but you will always fight someone trying to take someone’s freedom
away. Those who start wars look for pretenses, and they found one when the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. He was the heir to the kingdom of
Austria and Hungary. A Serb in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo killed him and
his wife. Quickly, Austria declared war on Serbia even though there was no
evidence that the Serbian government had anything to do with the assassination.
Winston Churchill wrote to his wife on
learning of the Austrian declaration of war, “I wondered whether those stupid
Kings and Emperors could not assemble together and revivify kingship by saving
the nations from hell but we all drift on in a kind of dull cataleptic trance.
As if it was somebody else’s operation.”[i]
In April 1917, almost three years after the
war began, the United States joined the war to fight for freedom. A year
and half later the war was over. We lost 53,000 men fighting in a war for
others, but had we not, the world would have been terribly different. This war,
like so many of our wars, was fought far from home for our freedom and the
freedom of the world. Then twenty years later, we would go back to the same
places and fight another war for freedom. That war would claim over 416,000
American lives.
Sometimes we forget about the long span of
history and what it means. Our 241 years of history is really a short span, but
we have ample evidence of how much we owe to God’s providence and blessing for
preserving us as a nation. We are grateful for our freedom and the price that
has been paid to preserve it from those who would take it from us. We are a
blessed nation, and we acknowledge God’s hand of mercy upon us.
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