Armistice Day. What the courage actually cost.

My son knows the date. He knows what happened. What he didn't know — until I told him — was what the ceasefire sounded like. I read him a description from a soldier's diary: the silence at 11am, after four years of artillery. The absolute silence. Nobody moved. Everyone waited to believe it was real.

He was quiet for a long time. Then: 'Were they happy?' I said: I think some of them were too tired to be happy. They were relieved. Relieved is different from happy.

He thought about this. Then: 'Did they know it was really over?' I said: not at first. It took weeks to believe. Four years of guns is hard to replace with silence. You keep waiting for the guns to start again.

This is the kind of conversation that Armistice Day makes possible. Not the statistics — 17 million dead, 20 million more in the pandemic that followed — but the specific texture of the human experience inside the statistics.

My son knows the date. He knows what happened. What he didn't know — until I told him — was what the ceasefire sounded like. I read him a description from a soldier's diary: the silence at 11am, after four years of artillery. The absolute silence. Nobody moved. Everyone waited to believe it was real.