Never forgotten

Remembrance Day marked 103 years since the Armistice to end World War I was signed in a French train carriage in Compiègne Forest.

That document and the even more severe Versailles Treaty the following year set up what historians have now labelled the impossible peace.

The irony of 20th century hindsight was the seeds of World War II were planted there and then.

As the signatures of the great powers were being inscribed on the formalisation of the peace, the famous French military commander Ferdinand Foch declared to anyone who would listen: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”

He was off target by just 65 days.

World War I saw about 40 million military personnel and civilians killed.

By the time World War II was over, as many as 85 million people lay dead, Europe was in ruins and the number of displaced persons roaming the continent and Asia tallied in the tens of millions.

There have been wars since — just as brutal, but not as big — in Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War, and insurrections and civil wars across the Balkans, South-East Asia, South America, Africa, the sub-continent and the Middle East.

Australians have been in nearly all of them, continuing the proud tradition that had its beginnings in the Boer War and which crystallised into a national identity in the crushing defeat of Gallipoli before being resurrected on the Western Front by men such as John Monash.