On November 11th, 1918, the armistice that marked the end of the First World War was declared.

In honor of this week's 100 year anniversary of the outbreak of that piece,

we have temporarily suspended our otherwise sacrosanct policy of randomly selecting our next

film in order to feature this anti-war cinema classic.

It's never a bad time in my estimation to reflect on the world shaping tragedy of World War I.

Although it might seem like a conflict from long ago,

there were plenty of lessons learned there that it would be a shame to have to learn again the hard way.

We spend a lot of time speculating whether the Holocaust could ever happen again, but

could prideful conflicts between nation states explode into a global war of attrition where an entire generation feeds itself into a meat

grinder? Well, how fertile is your imagination? I have to admit I worked for a while on this

intro and tried to put in some usual sass but it fell flat.

World War I has always felt very personal to me.

My grandfather and my grandmother met in France during the war.

He was an infantry officer and she was there to sing and entertain the troops.

She wrote a book about her experiences called Nightingale in the trenches, but no one's ever read

it because it is just a journal gossiping its entire length about

who the handsome officers were and how General Pershing couldn't dance the fox trot.

But she sang for the troops up at the front and was awarded a French order of merit.

My grandfather fought there.

And many years afterwards he wrote about the war on his portable typewriter, poems,

and stories.

First in the VA hospital in LA and then slowly withering away in a succession of

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