The Truce That Changed the World
Zoey Reade on celebrating the 100 Year Anniversary of the World War I Armistice
By Zoey Reade
It happened aboard a private train in the wilds of France over the course of three days. It was “the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month” that the agreement known as the Armistice of Compiègne ended fighting on land, sea and air between the Allies and the Germans in World War I.
It took four years and 37 million human lives for the nations to arrange and to consent to meet for the agreement.
WWI — A Brief History
World War I began in 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was next in line for the Austro-Hungarian empire, by a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. As a result of the shooting, the Austro-Hungarians began enlisting and rallying supporters to wage a war against the Serbs. In a desperate attempt, Serbia plead with Russia for assistance. Austria-Hungary took this as an offense, declaring war on Serbia. Thus Europe began to collapse.
August 4th, 1914 marked the first battle of WWI. German troops invaded the stronghold city of Liege, Belgium. While Europe began to war against each other the U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, decided to take the neutral route. However, after the German U-boats sunk the Lusitania, which had thousands of U.S. citizens, and many other U.S. cargo ships, America decided to join the fight.
There started the struggle between Allied Powers, which consisted of the United States, France, Russia, Italy and Britain, and the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.
As the war waged on, all nations became exhausted, struggling to fight for their cause. Eventually the Ottoman Empire was forced to sign an armistice after suffering the loss of the defeated Bulgarians. Next in line to sign was Austria-Hungary, which left Germany with depleted resources. This eventually forced the Germans to meet with the Allies, thus resulting in the Armistice of Compiègne.
Through war-battered France, German military officials were escorted by car to a private train cabin owned by Ferdinand Foch, which was located in the forest of Compiègne. After three days of negotiations, the Germans agreed to sign the Armistice, causing all hostilities to end. On November 11th, 1918 at 11:00 a.m. in Paris, it was proclaimed that all fighting was to stop. When fighting military personnel received word, all gunfire ceased and soldiers reported that the battlefields had gone silent.
The Armistice was prolonged three times until the Treaty of Versailles was drafted and signed, which officially signaled the end of the war. All throughout the United States and Europe, civilians and soldiers alike were celebrating the glorious end of the “war to end all wars.”
The Consequences
The ultimate question we ask ourselves is, why? Why is this relevant or applicable to today? Why should we care?
I believe the answer is found in several areas.
One of them begins with a saying by American Founding Father, Patrick Henry: “I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.” We cannot predict what is to happen in the future without understanding what our past has been. History is a story of repeated offenses and victories that we can learn from. We learn from them so that we do not repeat the struggles that our ancestors endured. We learn so that we can do better.
Perhaps World War I served as a reminder, not just to the United States, but to the entire world of the horrors that can come from hatred and animosity. British novelist Nick Harkaway explained that, “The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialized slaughter, fear and appalling human suffering.” It was a tragic lesson for the world to learn.
The second answer comes from appreciating what was done for us. We appreciate and honor the soldiers who fought to protect and sustain our freedoms. It is a costly ordeal to protect the right to exercise our freedoms — and we owe it to the men and women who fought and still fight to make America a reality.
President Theodore Roosevelt once said, “No nations can be great unless its sons and daughters have in them the quality to rise level to the needs of heroic days.”
It is for that reason we need to understand and appreciate the men, women, battles, triumphs and history of World War I. It is so that we may understand how to rise to heroic levels when time calls upon us to do so.
