A Hundred Years After the Armistice
November 5, 2018 Issue
If you think the First World War began senselessly, consider how it ended.
By Adam Hochschild
For millions of soldiers, the First World War meant unimaginable horror: artillery shells that could pulverize a human body into a thousand fragments; immense underground mine explosions that could do the same to hundreds of bodies; attacks by poison gas, tanks, flamethrowers. Shortly after 8 p.m. on November 7, 1918, however, French troops near the town of La Capelle saw something different. From the north, three large automobiles, with the black eagle of Imperial Germany on their sides, approached the front lines with their headlights on. Two German soldiers were perched on the running boards of the lead car, one waving a white flag, the other, with an unusually long silver bugle, blowing the call for ceasefire—a single high tone repeated in rapid succession four times, then four times again, with the last note lingering.
By prior agreement, the three German cars slowly made their way across the scarred and cratered no man’s land between the opposing armies. When they reached the French lines, they halted, the German bugler was replaced by a French one (his bugle is in a Paris museum today), and the German peace envoys continued their journey. At La Capelle, flashes lit up the night as the envoys were photographed by waiting press and newsreel cameramen, then transferred to French cars. Their route took them past houses, factories, barns, and churches reduced to charred rubble, fruit trees cut down and wells poisoned by retreating German troops. “It appeared to me that the drive was intentionally prolonged in order to carry us across devastated provinces and to prepare us for the hardest conditions which the feelings of hatred and revenge might demand,” one of the German passengers later wrote. The envoys next boarded a railway carriage that had once belonged to Napoleon III, who was forced to surrender most of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War.
Finally, the train pulled into a clearing in the forest of Compiègne, near another train occupied by an Allied delegation headed by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied commander-in-chief, a diminutive Frenchman with an immense, shaggy mustache. The two groups met in Foch’s train, in what was formerly the dining car of a luxury sleeper service. The German delegation was headed by a civilian cabinet minister, but the high command was desperate to avoid blame for a humiliating end to the war, and the military representatives were relatively junior: a major general and a Navy captain.
The German Army had asked for peace talks because it knew that it was fast losing the war. Germany had already seen the surrender of its two major allies, Ottoman Turkey and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was rapidly fragmenting as one ethnic group after another declared its independence. The most powerful German commander, General Erich Ludendorff, had had a nervous breakdown, raging at his staff, drinking heavily, and suffering panic attacks; a hastily summoned psychologist advised flowers in his office and the singing of folk songs when he woke in the morning. He had resigned in late October, and fled the country wearing a false beard and blue spectacles. In rear areas, tens of thousands of German troops were deserting. On the Western Front, the Allies had been gaining ground since midsummer. And mutinous crews in the German Navy, ordered to sea for a suicidal last-ditch foray against the British, seized control of their ships, ran up the red flag, arrested their officers, and made common cause with rebellious workers and soldiers ashore.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/05/a-hundred-years-after-the-armistice
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