100 Years After WWI Began, Europe Remembers Its End

LONDON — In Britain, there were commemorative poppies by the hundreds of thousands, bright red ceramics that filled the moat of the Tower of London.

In France, there were names, hundreds of thousands of them, too, engraved in a solemn ring on a hillside that was once a theater of war.

In Belgium, schoolchildren and military pipers joined others in a procession to the memorial marking the onetime killing fields of Flanders.

On Tuesday, Europeans paused for a just a moment, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, to remember the moment the guns fell silent to end World War I in 1918. In London, the clock of Big Ben signaled the beginning of two minutes’ silent reflection that stopped traffic as crowds gathered in Trafalgar Square.

This year, because it is the centenary of the beginning of the war, the remembrance was particularly poignant, culminating in months of preparation, exhibits and re-examination of a murderous conflict that redefined the very notion of mechanized carnage that killed millions.  Read More at NYTimes