World War I never featured big in my Dutch education as the Netherlands stayed neutral, except for stories about the many refugees.

This however is an impressive project, at the centennial remembrance of the end of World War I. The Imperial War Museum has an image that shows sound registrations from around the time of the cease fire at 11:00 on November 11th 1918. It’s a ‘sound ranging’ image, a recording of sounds on photographic paper, which was used to determine the location of enemy guns. Together with Coda to Coda the IWM turned that image into a sound interpretation. So we can hear the minute around the actual cease fire. Put the volume up and listen a minute. It’s nothing short of amazing.

Of course taken on its own, as a single artefact, this is but a romantic notion of the end of war. As my friend Bryan Alexander extensively documents in his posting “When the guns stopped, but the future kept happening“, 11 November was hardly the end of violence across Europe.