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Soldiers of the Great War

The guns fell silent 90 years ago today. Between the time that the terms of the Armistice were signed in the predawn hours of November 11, 1918 and the moment it came into effect at 11 o'clock that morning, the Western Front registered as many as 11,000 casualties, including a conservatively estimated 320 Americans killed and 3,200 wounded.

Today fewer than a dozen veterans of the Great War survive, and just one doughboy: 107 year-old Frank Buckles of Charles Town, West Virginia. They are a justly celebrated few. Mr. Buckles was awarded a L&eacute;gion d'honneur by then-French President Jacques Chirac, and President Bush received him in the Oval Office earlier this year. British and Commonwealth veterans have been feted with similar honors. Erich Kaestner, the last veteran of the Kaiser's Army, died in January.

There's a tendency to talk of these men mainly as our "last links" to the war that was meant to end all wars. But they are also living reminders that much worse was still to come, because the victors failed to prevent the rise of the totalitarian regimes in Russia and Germany, the fascists in Italy and the militarists in Japan, and because the U.S. withdrew from its global responsibilities. Not least among the victims of those errors was Mr. Buckles himself, who spent three years as a civilian prisoner of the Japanese when he was trapped in the Philippines during World War II.

Now we are at a similar pass in Iraq, where the U.S. has effectively defeated Sunni and Shiite insurgents on the battlefield. But whether this costly achievement will hold depends largely on our willingness to support the Iraqi government and steel it against its own fascistic challengers, particularly Iran. If there's one lesson to be learned on this Armistice Day, it's of the price that's paid when we allow victory to slip from our grasp.

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