Farewell to arms set for 11am on November 11th. Symbolic moment of the end of the Great War

Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. To bring the Great War to an end in 1918, a strong symbolic charge was not spared to establish the moment in which the weapons had to be silent, but the blind human ambition to take the lead in the last shot fired in that epochal conflict was not spared. Fate added another eleven: that, in thousands, of the dead and wounded of the last six hours of fighting that went from the signing of the armistice to the moment of the ceasefire. The negotiations began on November 9 in the forest of Compiègne, France, in a train carriage. Austria-Hungary had left the scene on the 4th by signing the surrender of Villa Giusti into Italian hands, the Kaiser’s Germany no longer had the strength to continue fighting due to the internal situation no longer being manageable and the army now on its knees despite being still outside the borders of the Reich.

The end of four empires and the wind of revolution

In Berlin, Munich, Kiel and eight other German cities, red flags had begun to wave, calling for revolution as had happened the year before in Russia; mutinies had occurred in the departments and several centers, such as Aachen, and strategic railway hubs, were under the control of the insurgents. At 11 o’clock on November 9th, a telegram arrived on the table of William II, while he was talking with his commanders to crush the revolt with the army, informing him that the soldiers in Berlin had deserted en masse and that the situation was not it was more manageable: the first of a series of disconcerting notes. That was the day of the collapse, which Chancellor Prince Max of Baden tried to stem by announcing the Kaiser’s abdication, establishing the regency and passing his office to the socialist Friedrich Ebert. The Spartacists had seized power in the capital and Karl Liebknecht had proclaimed the German Socialist Republic. Soviets were formed among the troops. At 5pm William II had decided that the next day he would go into exile in Holland. Not even the fear of revolution and the spread of Bolshevism in Europe, specters raised by the Catholic diplomat Matthias Erzberger to mitigate the armistice clauses, moved the determination of the delegation commanded by Marshal Ferdinand Foch in Compiègne. The Allied offensive had been underway for a hundred days and Germany was now like a beaten boxer, weakened by hunger and prey to the social spasms that were passing through its body with 70 million souls. The conditions for the armistice were very harsh and the new German government could not help but accept them on the night of November 10th: at 5am the following day in Compiègne, in the vagon-lit converted into an office, the signing ceremony took place with the end of the armistice of hostilities by 11.

The last one fallen in the blind race to fire the last shot

The Europe that had opposed the central empires was shaken by an electric discharge of euphoria, the joy brought the people to the streets and the soldiers on the field to rejoice, yet there were soldiers who welcomed the news with disappointment: as happened in 1914, they were impatient to go and fight, and more than then there was the desire for revenge for the brothers, friends, comrades who fell on the battlefields of France and Belgium in the ocean waters; the Germans, who remained faithful to their duty and their oath, welcomed the news in the trenches as a betrayal of their losses and their sacrifices, a stab in the back that Nazism led by an Austrian corporal who carried orders in a Bavarian infantry unit, Adolf Hitler , would have laid the foundation of German military policy and the revenge that gave rise to the Second World War. At 11am on November 11th the Austrian empire no longer existed: Hungary was gone, the birth of Czechoslovakia had been proclaimed two weeks ago and that same day also the rebirth of Poland. The German empire was only nominal and there wasn’t even an emperor, who would never return to his homeland. The epic of the Hohenzollerns was also over forever, after that of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs and the sultans of Constantinople. An entire world had disappeared.

While waiting for the clocks to strike 11 o’clock, at the front the dominant desire was for everything to end, but there was also a minority feeling of personal ambition of wanting to write a page of history even for those who did not want to enter into that history at all and in fact he wanted to get out alive. The Canadian infantryman George Lawrence Price was waiting to be able to burst into a liberating scream at exactly 11am, when a roar will cross half of Europe along all the fighting lines, instead a Mauser shot, perhaps fired by a German marksman or perhaps a banal stray bullet, he killed him in the village of Ville-sur-Heine in Belgium: he was probably the last casualty of that war, at 10.58. Or the American sergeant of German origins, Henry Nicholas John Gunther, who is said to have been mowed down by a volley at 10.59am in Chaumont-devant-Damvillers in France. At the same time, in another point on the front, a German machine gunner continued to empty his magazines without hitting anyone in the enemy trench; when the bullets were exhausted, he did something that left the South African soldiers speechless: he stood at attention behind his weapon, took off his helmet, saluted and left. The armistice had come into force.

The Compiègne wagon, scene of two armistices

Peace would be signed at Versailles in 1919, imposed on Germany, giving rise to another Nazi propaganda topic: the diktat. In 1914 that conflict which had cost more than 15 million deaths among soldiers alone, which had decimated a generation and devastated Europe, was called the Great War because it was thought that there would not be another one. Precisely in the space of a generation, and precisely because of the sick fruits of that peace and the inability to build an international system that would avoid a large-scale conflict, the conditions for the Second World War were laid. The former corporal Hitler would have remembered Compiègne and the carriage of Germany’s humiliation, forcing the French at 6.50 pm on 22 June 1940 to sign another humiliating armistice with roles reversed on that very train brought back to exactly that place in the forest.