Our view of Veterans Day hasn’t been quite the same since we listened to the end of World War I. That was in 2018, when the Imperial War Museum in Britain released its recordings made a century earlier along the Moselle River, and other sites, on the front, as the clock ticked toward the hour of the 1918 armistice, 11 a.m. on November 11— 11.11.11 — upon which the enormous roar of battle suddenly, eerily, unforgettably fell silent.

Such a silence engulfed the front that for a few moments it sounded like a rush of air. After which, faintly at first and then unmistakably, one could detect the sound of  birds. The targeting microphones that had been operating on the front picked up the feathered flusterers chattering away in their bird language like there was no tomorrow. Or yesterday. The bird song of peace, we called it.

This created a mystery. Had the birds just popped up from a long silence to investigate what had caused the guns to fall still? Or was it a case where they had been chattering all along throughout the war, their chirping only masked by noise of the guns? In any event, what were these blasted birds talking about in the first place — the weather? Politics? Or the avian equivalent of gossip?

The Imperial War Museum’s recordings capture more clearly than anything we’ve heard a trick that war can play — the suddenness with which war can simply evaporate. We once heard our war-time crony Jack Fuller, now gone, alas, talk about a moment when he saw this in Vietnam. It was long after the war in which he and we served as combat correspondents for the GI daily, Pacific Stars and Stripes.

Fuller went on to become president of Chicago Tribune. At one point he went back to Vietnam in a Tribune jet. He spent some time looking at Saigon for the villa that had served as the Stripes bureau. He finally found it and went inside, where he was received by a nun. He wanted to find the room in which we’d had our bureau, lined with maps and crammed with radios, cartons of cigarettes, and flasks of whiskey. 

He discovered, where the door to our bureau had been, a felt curtain. The nun was reluctant to let him pull it aside, but she finally acceded, holding a finger to her pursed lips. When the curtain was opened, Fuller was stunned at what he saw — 25 or so toddlers, curled up on their straw mats for their afternoon nap. That is when he grasped that the war had gathered up its survivors and moved on.

We wonder when the moment of peace will come to Gaza. It was our first foreign dateline as a young reporter. It was in June 1967, shortly after Israeli forces entered the strip. We had an affecting conversation with refugees there. The peace for which they hoped may have proved elusive. We have learned, though, that peace, heralded by birds or infants, can break out suddenly, as it did 105 years ago on 11.11.11.