Ethering Dawn

By Joseph Carvalko | 11 November 2025
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(Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)

I came to know a few men who fought in the Great War. My grand‑uncle George was gassed in the trenches and lived a shortened, painful life, dying in his fifties. When I was ten, our next‑door neighbor, Mr. White, handed me his old gas mask. I kept it close for years, a relic of terror and survival that became my first intimate connection to that distant battlefield.

This Armistice Day—November 11, now called Veterans Day in the United States—I honor those soldiers by turning memory into song. I chose Château Wood, part of the grounds of the Château de Hooge east of Ypres, Belgium, where the Ypres Salient marked one of the most contested landscapes of the Western Front. In that frozen winter of 1917, the place became a vision of shattered trees, devastated landscapes, the destruction of nature and humanity as two armies locked in a Sisyphean struggle, pushed interminably in opposite directions.

From the dark of night into the early dawn, they hurled themselves into no man’s land, where gas, shells, and bullets filled the same deadly air. Each soldier carried fear differently, yet all answered the same command. “Are you ready, men?” The question was both peremptory and rhetorical, demanding another charge into the abyss. Survivors retreated, only to wait again for the whistle, for the cycle of cold sweat, foreboding, revulsion, and abandon to repeat.

One hundred and eight years later, I imagine George among them—waiting for destiny’s heartbeat, listening to the terrified cries of boys turned men. Perhaps he stood in a trance prepared to die, looking at the rising dawn through the morning’s dew, across marshy bogs and shattered logs. I imagine an atmosphere thickened with vesicants, ethereal yet funereal. “Gas! Gas! Gas!” The cry echoed. “Are you ready, men?” The command returned. And again, they charged.

Again, they left behind the limbless and the deaf, the fallen and forgotten, scattered across pockmarked fields where crude wooden crosses marked graves among the weeds. Again, they fought in a land stripped of birdsong and silenced of dogs, where craters yawned like graves and the stench of phosgene and chlorine clung to the earth. Again, they charged—into a place where life itself seemed suspended, where memory demands we pause, remember, and honor.

https://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/THE-ARMISTICE.mp3.

Joseph Carvalko is an American lawyer, who for over four decades has represented numerous organizations and individuals, from billionaires to indigents. He has been actively engaged in organizations such as Amnesty International, as its Legislative Coordinator for the State of New Mexico; the Sioux City American Indian Center, board member/activist; and Chair Emeritus of the Technology and Ethics working research group, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, and Adjunct Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University, School of Law, teaching Law, Science and Technology. He has also worked as a technologist, where he’s been awarded 18 patents in various fields. Carvalko has authored over twelve books which include novels, poetry, law, science and the humanities. His articles appear regularly in a variety of publications and blogs. He lives on the U.S. east coast and in the New Mexico mountains.

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