This is the second consecutive Nov. 11 I have spent out of the U.S. In both cases I was in a former British colony. Hong Kong a year ago, Abu Dhabi now.

When you’re outside your home country, I believe you think more about history. You compare and contrast what you know or think you know to what others say or believe, or the history on display wherever you happen to be.

The original Armistice Day was Nov. 11, 1918, when World War I finally ended. A war little-noted in the United States, which is keen on World War II (still) and the Civil War (always and forever), but not quite so interested in the War to End All Wars.

World War I ended several things, all right. But it wasn’t wars.

We’re coming up on a century since the outbreak of World War I, on Aug, 1, 1914, We ought to pay it some heed.

I now am convinced it is the most important war since Waterloo ended the Napoleonic Era in 1815.

World War II was really just a coda to World War I, the final arbitration of a batch of grudges.

I have been thinking about this because 1) I just read John Keegan’s “The American Civil War” and 2) Armistice Day is soberly noted here, as it is every land where the British once flew the Union Jack.

World War I set Europe on a path to destruction, and a long pace down it. By 1918, almost no part of Europe (aside from the Iberian Peninsula) had escaped wide-spread death and destruction.

When it ended, Russia was ushering in the nightmare of 72 years of Communist regimes in central and easteren Europe; Germany was in chaos, with the Kaiser in exile and left-wing and right-wing extremists fighting in the streets and the stage set for a demagogue who promised a different ending if only Germany would embark on a “do-over”; Austria-Hungary, that creaky but cosmopolitan polity, had disintegrated, as had the Ottoman Empire; France had been bled nearly white and had seen the martial spirit beaten from it (as it was to be seen in 1940); and England was nearly bankrupt and also had incurred catastrophic fatalities.

The confident and optimistic Europe that was bringing technology and industry to the world was gone. The idea of “progress” as inevitable and inevitably good, was dead. And a the world hasn’t been the same since.

We Americans tend to forget a lot of this. We got in late (1917) and didn’t really get into serious fighting until 1918, and it was all over a few months later. The U.S. was the “winner” of the war, by default, because it hadn’t lost a generation of its best men nor spent its way into penury.

The U.S. Civil War was a disaster, but it wasn’t, as Keegan notes, an unnecessary one. In retrospect, the concept of slavery and states rights wasn’t going to be a negotiated settlement.

World War I, however, which ended at the 11th minute of the 11th hour of Nov. 11 … was unnecessary and still unforgettable, inextricably bound up with a world that has so often been cruel, violent and overtly murderous for the past century.