Armistice Day Six Hours: The Final Hours of World War I

The easiest way to understand the last morning of the war is to picture two clocks. The first is the diplomats’ clock. It stopped at about 5:00 a.m., when the last signatures went on the paper. The second is the soldiers’ clock. It kept running for six more hours, and on it every minute could still cost a life.

In spring 1918 Germany had looked close to winning. With Russia out of the war, it moved divisions west and launched the Spring Offensive on 21 March, gaining more ground than either side had managed since 1914. But the attacks exhausted its best troops, and American soldiers were now arriving in France in huge numbers.

On 8 August 1918 the Allies struck back at Amiens. The German commander Erich Ludendorff called it the “black day” of the German army. It began what became known as the Hundred Days Offensive: a rolling series of Allied attacks that pushed German forces back across France and Belgium. On 26 September the American First Army opened the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the largest American operation of the war, which continued until the last morning.

Germany’s allies then fell away one by one. Bulgaria signed an armistice on 29 September. The Ottoman Empire signed one at Mudros on 30 October. Austria-Hungary signed at Villa Giusti on 3 November, effective the next day, as its empire split into new states.

At home, Germany was coming apart. Sailors at Kiel mutinied in early November and revolt spread to other cities. On 9 November the Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, announced the Kaiser’s abdication and a republic was proclaimed in Berlin. Wilhelm II crossed into the Netherlands the next day. The German delegation now in France was negotiating for a government that had changed under it.

The German delegation, led by the Catholic Centre Party politician Matthias Erzberger, crossed the lines and arrived in the Forest of Compiègne, about 80 km north-east of Paris, on the morning of 8 November. Marshal Foch received them in his own railway carriage, a converted Wagons-Lits dining car, number 2419 D, parked on a siding near Rethondes. Foch had chosen the spot for its seclusion.

There was little real negotiation. Foch read out the Allied terms and gave Germany 72 hours to accept. The delegates asked for an immediate ceasefire while they talked; Foch refused. The fighting went on during all three days of talks.

The German side won a few changes, including fewer machine guns to surrender and some relief on food supplies, but nothing fundamental. Late on 10 November, with Berlin’s authorisation, they prepared to sign. The final session began after 2 a.m. on 11 November. The Armistice was agreed at 5:00 a.m. and signed in the minutes that followed; 5:00 is the time the document records. It would take effect at 11:00 a.m. Paris time, which was noon in Germany.

Four men signed for Germany: Erzberger, the diplomat Count Alfred von Oberndorff, Major General Detlof von Winterfeldt and naval Captain Ernst Vanselow. Two signed for the Allies: Foch and Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss.

By 1918 the Western Front stretched about 700 km, from the Belgian coast to Switzerland. Millions of men were spread along it in armies, corps, divisions, brigades, battalions and companies, many of them out of reach of any telephone. An order to stop had to go from Foch’s headquarters to each national commander, then down every link in the chain, finally by field telephone, runner or messenger to men in shell holes.

That was the reason for the gap. Foch’s order was short: “Hostilities will be stopped on the entire front beginning at 11 o’clock, November 11th.” Troops were to stay on the line they reached at that hour and not advance beyond it without further orders.

News travelled faster than orders. At 6 a.m. in Paris, US envoy Edward House cabled President Woodrow Wilson: “Armistice signed 5 o’clock this morning. Hostilities to cease 11 a.m. today.” Within hours the news was spreading by radio and telegraph around the world, while in the Meuse valley men were still being killed.

What the order did not say was just as important. It did not tell commanders to stop attacking before 11:00. So each commander decided for himself. Some held their men in place for the morning. Others, reasoning that the war was still legally on and that ground taken now would be ground held under the Armistice, kept attacking.

In his book Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour, the American historian Joseph Persico estimated that 10,944 men became casualties on all sides on 11 November 1918, of whom 2,738 died. His figures are an estimate built from unit records, not an official count, but they are the ones most often quoted.

Exact figures are hard for three reasons. Some units recorded deaths only by date, not time. Men wounded before 11:00 died of their wounds later that day, or weeks afterwards. And, as Trébuchon’s case shows, the French Army recorded soldiers killed on 11 November as having died on the 10th. No order for this has ever been found; the most common explanation is that it spared families, and the army, the idea that men had died on the day of victory.

General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, distrusted the Armistice. He had argued that the Allies should fight on until Germany surrendered unconditionally, so that no one in Germany could later claim the army had not been beaten. He did not order his divisions to stand down before 11:00, and several American units attacked that morning, some across the Meuse.

Supporters of the decision made two arguments. First, the war had not ended until 11:00, and an army that stopped early risked giving the enemy an advantage if talks broke down. Second, ground held at 11:00 would set the line from which Germany had to withdraw.

Critics asked the obvious question: what was worth a man’s life in a war that everyone knew would end at a fixed time that morning? In 1919 a subcommittee of the US House Military Affairs Committee held hearings on the last-day casualties. Pershing defended his generals. The hearings produced no action, but the question never went away, and it is why the six hours are still argued about today.

It is fair to remember that the decision was not only American. British, French and Canadian units also attacked that morning. None of the Allied high commands ordered a halt before 11:00.

The Armistice ran to 34 articles. It was designed so that Germany could not restart the war even if peace talks failed. It had to evacuate occupied land, hand over much of its heavy weaponry and transport, and accept Allied troops on the Rhine.

The Armistice ended the fighting between Germany and the Allies on the Western Front. It did not end every war that grew out of 1914.

In East Africa, the German commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck had fought a guerrilla campaign for four years and was advancing in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). He learned of the Armistice from a British messenger only days later, stopped fighting, and formally surrendered at Abercorn (now Mbala) on 25 November 1918. His was the last German force in the field.

The peace itself took far longer. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination in Sarajevo, and came into force on 10 January 1920. Until then the Armistice was simply renewed. In eastern Europe, fighting over new borders, the Russian Civil War and wars involving Poland, Turkey and others went on for years.

After the war carriage 2419 D became a national relic. It was put on show in Paris and, from 1927, in a memorial building at the Compiègne clearing, known as the Glade of the Armistice.

On 22 June 1940, after Germany defeated France, Adolf Hitler had the carriage pulled out onto the same spot and made the French sign their own armistice in it. The carriage was then taken to Germany and displayed in Berlin. It was destroyed near the end of the Second World War. The museum at Compiègne today shows a carriage of the same series, fitted out as the original was.

More than a million Indian soldiers served overseas in the First World War, in France and Belgium, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli and East Africa. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records around 74,000 Indian war dead. Indian infantry had helped hold the line in France in 1914 and 1915, and Indian cavalry served there until early 1918.

Their memorial stands in the middle of New Delhi. India Gate, originally the All India War Memorial, had its foundation stone laid in 1921 and was opened in 1931. It carries the names of more than 13,000 soldiers of the undivided Indian Army. Many of the men who survived 11 November 1918 came home expecting political reward for their service; the disappointment fed the national movement of the years that followed.

The time chosen for practical reasons became the most famous minute of the war. On the first anniversary, 11 November 1919, King George V asked people across the British Empire to stop for two minutes’ silence at 11 a.m. The silence is still kept on Armistice Day and on Remembrance Sunday. In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson issued the first Armistice Day message the same day.

Britain buried its Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920, and unveiled the permanent Cenotaph in Whitehall that day. The US made 11 November a legal holiday, Armistice Day, in 1938. In 1954 Congress renamed it Veterans Day to honour veterans of all wars. Across the Commonwealth it is Remembrance Day, marked by the red poppy.