November 11 - "The Pity of War" - A Veterans Day Special Program of Poetry From WWI and WWII

Full Program

Today on Veterans Day we present a special broadcast to commemorate the 100^th birthday of Benjamin Britten whose great work the Latin Mass for the dead “War Requiem” was commissioned to consecrate the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral that was destroyed by German bombers in World War II. As result of the destruction and the death of close friends in the war, Britten became a pacifist and his “War Requiem” was inspired by the poems of Wilfred Owen who was killed in World War I, one week before the armistice that ended The Great War, “the war to end wars”, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, a day which was originally called Armistice Day, which today we honor as Veterans Day.

Today’s program is called “The Pity of War” and it was performed last night at the UCLA/Hammer museum in Los Angeles by British stage and screen actress Rosalind Ayers and her husband actor and director Martin Jarvis. They read a selection of poems from World War I and World War II that depict the horror and futility of war, not the jingoistic patriotic verse that accompanied these massive tragedies, the first of which ended in an Armistice ninety five years ago today, an armistice in which historians have observed the seeds of World War II were sown out of the punitive reparations imposed on Germany by the victorious allies, since at the very same spot the armistice was signed, 22 years later, Adolph Hitler staged the signing of France’s surrender to Germany in World War II.