Masters Commemorates Veterans Day and the 100th Anniversary of WWI Armistice

 
It was a somber occasion, with Upper School students gathering in silence on the quad to observe Veterans Day and the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.

During the ceremony, Head of School Laura Danforth spoke about the impossibility of imagining seventeen million lives, and asked students to “think about one face, one human life” as two members of the Masters community — Brian Cheney, Upper School history and religion teacher, and Alex Bentzien ’19 — recited “In Flanders Field” by John McCrae and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by John Donne, respectively.

 

Earlier, Upper School students and faculty had spent the morning in break-out sessions that focused on different aspects of American wars and Veterans Day. Session topics ranged from the Christmas Truce of 1914 and Latino soldiers in American wars to women in war and the eugenics movement during World War I. The day was led by Matthew Browne, Upper School history teacher, who had been planning the event with a group of students and faculty since last spring.  

 

Julia Mathas ’19, who was part of the group that helped plan the day’s events, led a break-out session that focused on 40 soldiers from the river towns in Westchester who fought in World War I. She did months of research on the individual soldiers to find out as much about their lives as possible and created service card mock-ups that provided information on each of them. Participants in her session were assigned to individual soldiers by being given that soldier's service card. They were then asked to use the information on the card to “embody” the soldier on their service card while participating in various activities.

At the end of the session, after participants had come to understand more about the soldier to which they were assigned, Mathas read off the names of the soldiers who had died in the war: 39 of the 40 died. Mathas said that the goal of her session was “to call emphasis to the individual. … Every single one of them meant something. Every single one of those lives mattered.”

Indeed, the day’s events worked to honor both the many and the individual. “When we study wars, we study them in the broader context,” explained Mathas. But those wars were fought by individuals, and “I wanted to remember them. … They did something really important and they gave their lives for it.”