"The war to end all wars" ended a century ago. Wars continue.

11 November 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the signing, at Compiègne, in northern France, of the Armistice that ended the Great War, aka World War I, aka The War to End All Wars. Yet wars continue. As John McDermott sings in "The Ballad of Willie McBride" says, it all happened again... And again... And again.

General Robert E. Lee, a moral and upright man whose memory is now being trashed by the NPCs, said to General James Longstreet, as they surveyed the carnage of the Battle of Fredericksburg "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." But it seems we have grown too fond of it.

Perhaps it's because advances in technology have reduced the body counts. On "our side", at least. Or maybe it's the advances in medicine and hygiene which means that, nowadays, more soldiers and sailors and airmen die of wounds than of disease and starvation. Whatever it is, we seem to scarcely finish one war before starting another. Sometimes we don't even wait for the first war to end, so we can fight two or three or four wars all at the same time. All for freedom, democracy, equality, human rights, and generally to make the world a better place. For "our side", at least.

Not all of the thousands upon thousands who died fighting our "good wars" did so for the sake of freedom and all that. Some of them did, but some of them died because they obeyed orders and went unflinchingly to the death to which they were sent. It is those men and women -- the ones who didn't want to be there and shouldn't have been there in the first place -- whom Walt wishes to remember today.