For Veteran's Day/Remembrance Day/Armistice Day; WWI in the Middle East Videos

For the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, on the 92nd anniversary of the end of the Great War that did not, in fact, end wars, some old video in a documentary found on YouTube. Little info provided on the source, but the narration's British and it's embeddable, so I presume I'm not infringing. Video includes such things as the Mesopotamia campaign, Allenby entering Jerusalem, etc. The Middle East as we know it begins with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Here are some actual videos of its death throes. Consider it an early bonus to my new feature, Weekend Historical Videos.









Let me end, as I did last year, with a comment I made then and a video of Last Post in honor of what the Brits still call Remembrance Day:

Though Turkey (well, the Ottoman Empire) left the war a little bit earlier than November 11 (the Mudros Armistice was October 30), it was the war that really made the modern Middle East as well, or perhaps laid the groundwork for most of the battles of today: the Balfour Declaration, Hussein/McMahon correspondence, and the sore that still plagues Armenians and Turks, not to mention Greeks and Turks, and most of the territorial disputes in the region. I've always wished I'd used the title The Peace to End All Peace, but David Fromkin got there first in a highly readable book on the postwar Middle East settlements. (Actually, the line was first used, I believe, in 1066 and All That.)For many years, and perhaps still in parts of Europe, people would observe two minutes of silence at 11 am on 11/11. If it has taken you two minutes to read this, perhaps you just did as well . . .

Unfortunately, the war did not end all wars, and may have made several inevitable. But remembrance may help, in some small way, to remind us of what was once one of the major observances in the Western world.