1918

The year in brief

In the autumn of 1918 empires were falling. At the end of October a sailors’ mutiny set off revolution in Germany, and in Hungary Mihály Károlyi took power. A few minutes after five on the morning of 11 November, in Marshal Foch’s carriage in the Forest of Compiègne, Germany signed an armistice with the Entente, and at 11 a.m. the fighting on the Western Front stopped. The armistice, however, was not a peace. That day in Warsaw the Regency Council handed Józef Piłsudski command of the army. The borders of the new states still had to be fought for: Romanian patrols were crossing the Carpathians as the struggle for Transylvania began, and on 27 December, the day after Paderewski arrived, shots were fired in Poznań that started the Greater Poland Uprising.