The Armistice of 11 November 1918

A few minutes after five o’clock on the morning of 11 November 1918, in the office carriage of Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s train, standing on a siding in the Forest of Compiègne near Rethondes station, Germany’s representatives signed an agreement on the cessation of hostilities with the Entente powers and the United States. For the Allies it was signed by Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, and by the British First Sea Lord, Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss. For Germany it was signed by the Secretary of State Matthias Erzberger, the diplomat Count Alfred von Oberndorff, Generalmajor Detlof von Winterfeldt and Kapitän zur See Ernst Vanselow. Six hours later, at 11 a.m. French time, hostilities ceased on the Western Front. After four years and more than three months, the war that its participants called the Great War was over. Yet the armistice was neither a peace nor a formal surrender. The manner in which it was concluded and the terms that Germany had to accept became one of the dominant themes of German politics for twenty years.

The road to the Forest of Compiègne

It was Germany that asked for an armistice, on its own initiative. On 29 September 1918 at Spa the Supreme Army Command – Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff – told Emperor Wilhelm II that the war could not be won and that the front might collapse at any moment. Bulgaria had just capitulated, and since August the Allies had been attacking without pause on the Western Front. The generals demanded an immediate request for a cease-fire and a government based on a majority in the Reichstag. During the night of 3–4 October the new chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, sent the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, a note asking for an armistice and a peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

The exchange of notes lasted almost the whole of October. Wilson set ever harsher conditions: an end to submarine warfare, the evacuation of occupied territory, and in the end he made it clear that he would not deal with Germany’s “military masters and monarchical autocrats”. At the end of October Ludendorff, alarmed by what the Americans were demanding, wanted to break off the talks and fight on, but on 26 October the Emperor accepted his resignation. He was succeeded by General Wilhelm Groener. Meanwhile Germany’s allies were falling one after another: Turkey signed an armistice on 30 October, and Austria-Hungary on 3 November, having broken up into national states in the last days of October, while in Hungary power had passed to the Aster Revolution. In Germany itself, ever since the mutiny of the sailors of the High Seas Fleet, revolution had been spreading from port to port, and on 4 November it took control of Kiel.

The armistice terms were drawn up by the Allies. On 25 October at Senlis Foch heard the views of the commanders-in-chief. The British commander, Douglas Haig, urged moderation, since in his view the German army was not yet beaten and could hold a new line. The American, John Pershing, opposed an armistice altogether and preferred a march on Berlin. Foch argued for terms that would deprive Germany of the ability to resume the fight without requiring any further bloodshed. On that basis the prime ministers in the Supreme War Council adopted the text of the terms at Versailles on 4 November. On 5 November the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, informed Germany that Marshal Foch would receive its duly authorised representatives.

The government put Erzberger at the head of the delegation; he was a deputy of the Catholic Centre Party and the author of the peace resolution of 1917. The chancellor hoped that a civilian known to favour peace would be better received than a Prussian general. On the evening of 7 November cars flying white flags crossed the front line near La Capelle. The delegates were taken by train to the Forest of Compiègne. They did not know where they were going, and the windows of the carriage were covered.

Three days in the forest

At around nine o’clock on the morning of 8 November the Germans stood before Foch. The Marshal asked coldly what they wanted. When Erzberger replied that they had come to hear the Allies’ proposals for an armistice, Foch answered that he had no proposals. Only when the Germans declared that they were asking for the terms of an armistice did Foch’s chief of staff, General Maxime Weygand, read out the main points. Foch gave the delegates 72 hours to reply; the deadline would expire at 11 a.m. on 11 November. He also turned down their request for an immediate halt to the fighting while the talks went on. Erzberger warned that the German army was disintegrating and that the country was threatened by Bolshevism, but the Marshal replied that this was the concern of the vanquished.

Strictly speaking, there were no negotiations. Foch appeared before the Germans only at the first and the last sessions. They discussed the details with Weygand and with the British Rear Admiral George Hope, and every request had to be submitted in writing. On 9 November they handed Weygand their observations. In them they argued that too short a period for the evacuation, the surrender of rolling stock and the continuation of the blockade would plunge the country into chaos and famine, and that the army needed weapons to keep order. Weygand replied that the disintegration of the German army was the result of the victorious Allied offensive, and that the Allies would not give up what they had won.

Meanwhile the state in whose name the delegates had come was ceasing to exist in its existing form. On 9 November in Berlin the chancellor announced the Emperor’s abdication on his own initiative and handed his office to the Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert, while Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic from a balcony of the Reichstag. On 10 November Wilhelm II crossed the Dutch border. According to some accounts the French showed the delegates Paris newspapers carrying the news of the abdication. For a time the Germans did not know whether anyone in Berlin was still in a position to send them instructions.

The answer came on the evening of 10 November. A radio message arrived in which the German government stated that it accepted the terms and authorised Erzberger to sign the armistice. It was signed “Reich Chancellor” and bore an agreed number confirming its authenticity. A second message instructed the delegates to record a reservation that some of the terms would condemn the population of unoccupied Germany to starvation. Later a coded telegram from Hindenburg arrived. The Supreme Army Command had already made it clear to the government that the armistice must be signed even if the terms could not be softened. Many historians stress that it was the generals who had demanded the armistice and ordered it to be concluded, and that the civilians in Berlin and at Compiègne merely carried out what the army could no longer avoid.

The night of 10–11 November

The final session began at around 2.15 a.m. Weygand read out the text article by article, while the delegates tried to win further concessions. They obtained a few, because some of the original demands exceeded what Germany actually possessed. Instead of 30,000 machine guns they were to hand over 25,000; instead of 2,000 aircraft, 1,700; instead of 10,000 lorries, 5,000. Instead of 160 submarines, which the German navy did not have, they were to surrender all those in existence. The deadline for evacuating the occupied countries was extended from 14 to 15 days, and for the left bank of the Rhine from 25 to 31 days. The neutral zone on the right bank was narrowed from 40 to 10 kilometres. The armistice was to last 36 days instead of 30.

The clause on the troops in the east was also changed. Germany was to withdraw from the lands of the former Russian Empire not immediately but only when the Allies considered it appropriate in view of the internal situation of those territories. The Allies feared that once the Germans left, the lands from the Baltic to Ukraine would be taken over by the Bolsheviks, who a year earlier had seized power in Petrograd. According to Polish tradition, Roman Dmowski also lobbied for this change.

According to Foch’s report, agreement on the final text was reached at 5.05 a.m. and the signatures were affixed at 5.10. Other accounts put the agreement at around 5.12 and the signing at around 5.20, but the parties agreed that five o’clock would be regarded as the time of signing. To save time, only the last page was retyped at once, and the signatures were put to it. Finally Erzberger read out a statement on behalf of all four delegates. In it they warned that the short time allowed for evacuation and the surrender of means of transport might make it impossible to fulfil the terms, and that the agreement as a whole threatened the German people with anarchy and famine. He closed with a sentence that was remembered: “A nation of seventy millions suffers, but it does not die.”

The terms

The agreement had 34 articles. On the Western Front, hostilities on land and in the air were to cease six hours after signature. Popular chronologies sometimes state that Germany was given 72 hours to evacuate the occupied territories. This is inaccurate: 72 hours was the time Foch allowed for accepting the terms, and the deadlines for evacuation were longer. Within 15 days Germany had to leave Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine, and any soldiers who failed to leave in time would become prisoners of war. Within a further 16 days – 31 days in all from the signing – it had to evacuate the left bank of the Rhine. This area was to be occupied by Allied troops, and on the right bank bridgeheads with a radius of 30 kilometres were to be established around Mainz, Koblenz and Cologne. Germany was to bear the cost of maintaining the occupying forces.

The German army had to hand over 5,000 guns, 25,000 machine guns, 3,000 trench mortars and 1,700 aircraft, and the railways 5,000 locomotives and 150,000 wagons, together with 5,000 lorries. All Allied prisoners of war were to be sent home immediately, without reciprocity; German prisoners were to wait until peace was concluded. In the east Germany had to withdraw its troops from the territories that had belonged before the war to Austria-Hungary, Romania and Turkey. It renounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Soviet Russia and the Treaty of Bucharest with Romania, and the Allies were given free access to the evacuated territories through Gdańsk (Danzig) or by way of the Vistula.

At sea, Germany was to surrender all its submarines within 14 days, and to disarm and intern in neutral or Allied ports 6 battlecruisers, 10 battleships, 8 light cruisers and 50 of the most modern destroyers of the High Seas Fleet. It also had to open the way into the Baltic to the Allies. The naval blockade of Germany remained in force, although the Allies announced that they would see to the country’s supply to the extent necessary. The armistice was concluded for 36 days, with the possibility of extension. The agreement did not settle borders or reparations, but it took away Germany’s ability to resume the war. That was exactly what Foch wanted.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

Immediately after the signing Weygand sent Foch’s order to the commanders-in-chief: hostilities would cease along the whole front at 11 a.m. French time on 11 November, and Allied troops would not go beyond the line reached at that hour until further orders. In Germany it was already noon by then. The news reached the front during the morning, but the fighting went on until the last moment. Many commanders wanted to seize the most advantageous positions in case the armistice did not hold, and batteries fired off their stocks of ammunition. By the estimate of the American author Joseph Persico, nearly 11,000 men on both sides were killed, wounded or went missing on the last day of the war, around 2,700 of them killed. These figures are only approximate.

At around 9.30 a.m., near Mons, Private George Ellison was killed; he is regarded as the last British soldier to fall in the war. At 10.45 a.m. Augustin Trébuchon, the last Frenchman to be killed, died on the Meuse. At Ville-sur-Haine, at around 10.58 a.m., a German marksman shot the Canadian Private George Lawrence Price. One minute before eleven the American Private Henry Gunther, who had earlier been demoted from sergeant (his rank was restored posthumously), was killed attacking a German position; he is considered the last soldier to die on the Western Front. In France the graves of soldiers killed on 11 November were later marked with the date 10 November.

At 11 a.m. the front fell silent. There were no great scenes of rejoicing in the trenches. The soldiers, exhausted after months of continuous advance, met the silence with relief and disbelief. Here and there Germans climbed out of their trenches, bowed to their opponents and walked away. In Paris, London and New York crowds celebrated all day. In the morning Foch and Wemyss went to see the Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, and at 11 a.m. salvoes of artillery and church bells announced the end of the war to Paris. In the afternoon Clemenceau read out the armistice terms in the Chamber of Deputies. That evening he is said to have remarked that they had won the war and now had to win the peace, which might prove more difficult.

An armistice, not a peace

The Armistice of Compiègne did not formally end the war. It was a 36-day cease-fire, which was extended three times, each time at Trier: on 13 December 1918, 16 January 1919 and 16 February 1919, the last time indefinitely. At each extension the Allies made new demands. In February 1919 Foch also compelled Germany to stop fighting the insurgents in Greater Poland. Despite the revolution, the evacuation went smoothly: the Supreme Army Command, which had moved from Belgium to Kassel, brought more than a million soldiers home within the set deadlines. From 1 December French, British, American and Belgian troops moved onto the left bank of the Rhine, and in the first half of December they occupied the bridgeheads on the right bank. This was the start of the occupation of the Rhineland, which was to last until 1930. The state of war between Germany and the Allies was ended only by the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, which came into force on 10 January 1920.

For Poles, 11 November has a special significance. The day before, Józef Piłsudski had returned to Warsaw from prison in Magdeburg, and on 11 November, the day of the armistice in the west, the Regency Council handed him command of the armed forces while Germans were being disarmed in the city. That is why the date later became National Independence Day. Germany’s defeat, sealed by the armistice, opened the way to Poland’s rebirth, but the borders of the new state still had to be fought for.

The long shadow of Compiègne

In Germany, preoccupied with revolution, the armistice was received with relief but without an understanding of its significance. The German army was still standing on foreign soil and, although strategically beaten, had not been routed in the field. The war had not reached the territory of the Reich, and the troops came home in good order. On 10 December Ebert welcomed returning units in Berlin with the words that no enemy had defeated them. Many Germans therefore never saw the defeat with their own eyes. This state of mind became fertile ground for the stab-in-the-back myth, according to which the undefeated army had been betrayed by politicians, socialists and Jews. Hindenburg, who in September 1918 had himself demanded an armistice, repeated the story before the National Assembly’s committee of inquiry in November 1919. The generals who had lost the war shifted the responsibility for defeat onto the civilians who had been obliged to sign for its consequences.

Erzberger, “the man of Compiègne”, became for the nationalists the symbol of the “November criminals”. In August 1921 he was shot dead by members of the far-right Organisation Consul. The slogan of struggle against the “November criminals” was taken up by the nascent party of Adolf Hitler, for which the Weimar Republic had been the product of treason from the outset. Revision of Versailles – above all, throwing off the limits on armaments and the occupation of the Rhineland – became the aim of every German government. Hitler achieved it in March 1936, when he sent troops into the demilitarised Rhineland in breach of the treaties.

Foch himself believed that the armistice had been good but that the peace that followed it was too weak. Without the permanent separation of the Rhineland from Germany, he thought, France could not feel secure. The remark attributed to him, that the Treaty of Versailles was not a peace but an armistice for twenty years, is known mainly from later accounts, but it proved accurate.

The clearest testimony to the significance of 11 November is what happened in 1940. After the defeat of France, Hitler had the carriage taken out of its museum and placed on the very same spot in the Forest of Compiègne. On 21 June 1940 he sat in it, in the chair Foch had occupied in 1918, listened to the preamble and left, just as Foch had done twenty-two years earlier. The next day General Wilhelm Keitel and General Charles Huntziger signed the Franco-German armistice there. The Minister of Defence in the government that accepted those terms was Weygand, the same general who in 1918 had read Foch’s terms to the Germans. The Germans destroyed the clearing in the forest and took the carriage to Berlin as a trophy. Towards the end of the war it was destroyed in Thuringia. In the devastated clearing only the statue of Foch was spared.