A small crowd gathered Sunday at the Fort Vancouver Parade Ground — again on the 11th hour, day, and month of the year — to commemorate Veterans Day, and also the signing of the armistice that ended the slaughter of World War I 100 years prior.
Around 20 people listened while Greg Garrett sounded taps on his antique bugle. They joined communities around the world in similar commemorations, as buglers played taps or, in Commonwealth nations, “Last Post,” around the same local time the original cease-fire went into effect.
Dr. David Carsten, an assistant scout master for Boy Scout Troop 479 and organizer for the fort’s annual Camporee event, learned of bugler groups planning to play taps to commemorate the armistice and holiday, and thought to call Garrett, a friend from church and skilled horn player, to play.
“I thought, we can’t miss this, it’s too important,” Carsten said. “It’s too important to forget this.”
Garrett, himself a former Scout, was happy to join.
Carsten rallied some local Scouts and contacted the National Park Service, which was eager to participate.
Considering the fort’s significance to the war, it made sense to bring the commemoration to the site, beneath the flagpole in the middle of the Parade Ground, Carsten said.
The war turned the engines of the Second Industrial Revolution and the era’s rapid industrialization toward the work of large-scale killing. The huge advances in industrial manufacturing afforded the turn-of-the-century Great Powers the tools to loose violence on an unimaginable scale, as the nations of Europe and elsewhere tried to carve out a new order amid Byzantine alliances and competing imperial designs.
The war machine manifested locally with the 30,000 troops stationed around the region to cut down then mill spruce for aircraft manufacture during the war.
Park service archaeologist Doug Wilson said loggers felled Sitka spruce in the Olympics and Coast Range mountains, which were brought to Fort Vancouver to be milled into aviation-grade lumber. The light and straight-grained spruce was ideal for the long beams in contemporary biplanes, and was shipped to aircraft builders back east and in Europe.
At its peak, the mill produced 1 million board feet of lumber daily, according to the park service.
When the armistice went into effect (starting at 11 a.m. Nov. 11, 1918) people celebrated across the world, Wilson said, including at the fort.
“There were thousands of troops arrayed on the parade ground on either side of us,” he said.
After the war, the mill was dismantled, many of its parts sold to local lumber companies. The excess spruce, no longer needed with the end of fighting, was largely sold as firewood, he said.
The war caused an estimated 40 million casualties, with an estimated 15 million to 19 million deaths. Figures for the civilian death toll range from about 6 million to 8 million, though counts vary as researchers include deaths connected to genocides against the Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians; food shortages due to blockades or unrestricted submarine warfare; the war’s exacerbating effect on the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic; and other suffering.
The war wiped out whole swaths of the population in some countries, with what was then Serbia seeing almost 17 percent to 28 percent of its people dead by the war’s end.
The troops at the Parade Ground in 1918, Wilson said, were celebrating the end of the war’s trench fighting and horrible bloodshed.
“In that sense, there is great hope associated with the end of war, that in the future, perhaps we can avoid war,” he said.
