11 November 1918: the armistice that silenced the Great War at 11:00

Historical Anniversary · 11 November · 1918 Armistice

In short: in the early hours of 11 November 1918, in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne, Germany signed the 1918 Armistice with the Allies. It came into force at 11:00: “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”. After more than four years of fighting, the First World War had cost between 9 and 10 million soldiers’ lives, millions of civilian victims and more than 20 million wounded.

By Alejandro Noguera Borel, Director of Museo L’Iber.

At eleven o’clock on the morning of 11 November 1918, the 1918 Armistice came into force and the guns of the Western Front fell silent. In many sectors, the soldiers struggled to believe it. After more than four years of almost uninterrupted fire, the silence felt strange, almost unsettling. Some threw their helmets into the air; others simply sat down in the mud. On the far side of no man’s land, a few Germans climbed out of their trenches to look at the enemy standing up, safely, for the first time.

With this post, the Museo L’Iber blog closes the series on the First World War that we opened in June with the Sarajevo assassination of 1914. If that shot lit the fuse, the 1918 Armistice was the moment when the fire finally went out.

Why the 1918 Armistice was signed: Germany at breaking point

In the spring of 1918, Germany still believed it could win the war. Russia had left the conflict after the revolution and the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. The German high command, led in practice by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, moved its divisions to the west. It then launched the great Spring Offensive, known as the Kaiserschlacht (“Kaiser’s Battle”). It was Germany’s last gamble: the front had to be broken and Paris reached before American troops arrived in large numbers.

German troops advanced further than at any point since 1914, but they failed to achieve the decisive breakthrough. From the summer onwards, the initiative changed hands. On 8 August, at Amiens, the Allies attacked with infantry, artillery, aircraft and hundreds of tanks, the same tanks whose birth on the Somme we have already described on this blog. Ludendorff called it the “black day of the German Army”. The Hundred Days Offensive had begun, and it drove the German Army back week after week.

The collapse of Germany’s allies

Meanwhile, Germany’s partners collapsed one after another. Bulgaria signed an armistice on 29 September. The Ottoman Empire followed on 30 October at Mudros. Austria-Hungary, which was breaking up into new nations, signed at Villa Giusti, near Padua, on 3 November. At the end of September, Ludendorff himself had admitted to the Kaiser that the war was lost and that Germany had to seek peace.

Revolution at home

Inside Germany, hunger caused by the Allied naval blockade and the exhaustion of the population did the rest. In early November, the sailors at Kiel mutinied and the revolt spread to the major cities. On 9 November, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II was announced and a republic was proclaimed in Berlin. The next day, the former emperor crossed the border and went into exile in the Netherlands.

A railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne

The German delegation crossed the lines on 7 November. It was led by a civilian, the Catholic deputy Matthias Erzberger. With him were the diplomat Alfred von Oberndorff, General Detlof von Winterfeldt and Naval Captain Ernst Vanselow. On the morning of 8 November, they were received by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of the Allied armies, in his command train. It stood in a clearing in the Forest of Compiègne, near Rethondes station, far from prying eyes.

There was no negotiation in the strict sense. Foch, accompanied by his chief of staff, General Maxime Weygand, and by the British admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, handed over the Allied terms and gave the Germans 72 hours to accept them. The Germans managed to soften only a few details. Shortly after five in the morning on 11 November, in carriage number 2419D, the document was signed. By agreement between both sides, the signature was officially recorded at 5:00, and the ceasefire was set to take effect six hours later.

Terms of the 1918 Armistice: designed to stop Germany fighting again

The 1918 Armistice was not yet a peace treaty, but a ceasefire. Even so, its terms made it almost impossible for Germany to resume the war. Germany had to:

• evacuate Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine within fifteen days;
• withdraw from the left bank of the Rhine, which the Allies would occupy, with bridgeheads at Mainz, Koblenz and Cologne;
• hand over thousands of guns, machine guns and aircraft, as well as locomotives, railway wagons and lorries;
• surrender its submarines and intern its surface fleet;
• renounce the treaties imposed on Russia and Romania.

In addition, the naval blockade would remain in place until peace was signed.

Why did the 1918 Armistice come into force at 11:00?

Above all, the timing of the 1918 Armistice had a practical reason. In 1918, the ceasefire order had to travel along hundreds of kilometres of front by telegraph, telephone, radio and dispatch riders on horseback or motorcycle. The six hours between the signature and 11:00 were meant to be enough for the news to reach every unit. Paris time was used as the reference.

Nobody missed the coincidence of the three numbers, the 11th of the 11th at 11, and the press quickly turned it into a symbol. From then on, “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” was etched into Europe’s collective memory.

The last hours before the 1918 Armistice: dying after the war was already over

The bitterest part of this anniversary is what happened between 5:00 and 11:00. News of the signature spread through the headquarters early in the morning, yet in many sectors the attacks went on until the last minute. Some commanders wanted to gain ground before the ceasefire. Others simply carried out the orders they had been given. Others still did not want to appear to be easing off.

The price was terrible. The historian Joseph E. Persico calculated that on that last day the Western Front saw some 11,000 casualties, counting dead, wounded and missing, including about 2,700 dead. According to Persico, that was more than on D-Day in 1944. Some names have become symbols:

• George Ellison, a British private, was killed at around 9:30 near Mons. He is buried in Saint-Symphorien cemetery, a few metres from John Parr, one of the first British soldiers to fall at that very spot in August 1914. Britain’s war began and ended, quite literally, in the same field.
• Augustin Trébuchon, a French private, fell at around 10:45 beside the River Meuse while carrying a message. His grave bears the date 10 November, like those of other Frenchmen killed that morning, perhaps to spare their families the bitterness of knowing they had died on the day of the armistice.
• George Lawrence Price, a Canadian private, died at 10:58, also near Mons.
• Henry Gunther, an American sergeant from Baltimore, charged a German machine gun at 10:59. The Germans knew the war would end in a minute and tried to wave him back; in the end, they fired. He is regarded as the last soldier killed in action in the First World War.

Shortly afterwards, a committee of the United States Congress investigated why attacks had been launched that morning. Nobody was punished.

The human cost of four years of war

The figures of the First World War are so vast that they are hard to imagine. Some 65 million men were mobilised. Between 9 and 10 million soldiers died and more than 20 million were wounded. Many were left maimed or disfigured for life: in France they were called gueules cassées, “broken faces”. To these must be added several million civilians killed by violence, hunger, disease and deportation, including the Armenian genocide. In total, the most widely accepted estimates put the death toll at between 15 and 20 million.

By country, the approximate military losses were:

• Germany: some 2 million dead;
• Russia: between 1.7 and 2 million;
• France: nearly 1.4 million, one in six of those mobilised;
• Austria-Hungary: between 1.1 and 1.2 million;
• British Empire: some 900,000;
• Italy: some 650,000;
• United States, a late entrant to the war: some 116,000.

Behind every figure were whole villages that lost almost all their young men. In France, few towns lack a war memorial bearing long lists of names. And in those same months the 1918 influenza pandemic, whose deadliest wave struck in the autumn of the Armistice, claimed tens of millions more lives around the world.

Neutral Spain: Alfonso XIII’s Oficina Pro Cautivos

Spain did not enter the war. Neutrality brought exports and profits to some sectors, but also inflation, shortages and serious social unrest, as we explained in our post on Alfonso XIII. Yet Spain’s most remarkable episode of the Great War was a humanitarian one.

In 1914, the king set up the Oficina Pro Cautivos (“Office for Captives”), also known as the European War Office, in the Royal Palace in Madrid. According to tradition, it began with a letter from a French washerwoman asking for help to find her husband, missing at the front. Because Spain was neutral, its diplomats could make enquiries about soldiers and civilians on both sides. The office traced missing persons and forwarded correspondence. It also arranged exchanges and repatriations of wounded and sick prisoners and obtained pardons, while Spanish inspectors visited prisoner-of-war camps. The General Archive of the Royal Palace holds some 182,000 files from this work, which UNESCO added to its Memory of the World register in 2025.

Neutrality also gave its name, unfairly, to the 1918 pandemic. Because the Spanish press was not subject to wartime censorship, it reported freely on the spread of the disease, and the world ended up calling it “Spanish flu”.

From the 1918 Armistice to peace: Versailles and a memory that lives on today

The 1918 Armistice had to be renewed several times before peace finally came. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the Sarajevo assassination. It was a harsh peace for Germany, and many Germans refused to accept it. Civilians had signed the armistice, and the German Army had not been defeated on its own soil. So the “stab-in-the-back myth” soon took hold. It claimed that the army had been betrayed from within. Erzberger, the man who signed at Compiègne, was assassinated by ultranationalists in 1921. Foch is credited with a prophetic remark about the treaty: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.”

Carriage 2419D had an extraordinary afterlife. On 22 June 1940, Hitler forced France to sign the armistice of its defeat in that same carriage, in the same forest clearing. He then had it taken to Germany, where it was destroyed at the end of the Second World War. Today, in the Rethondes clearing, a twin carriage recalls the scene.

How 11 November is remembered today

11 November is a public holiday in France and Belgium. In the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth it is Remembrance Day, with a two-minute silence at 11:00 and a red poppy worn on the lapel, inspired by the poem In Flanders Fields by the Canadian doctor John McCrae. In the United States it is celebrated as Veterans Day. On 11 November 1920, London buried its Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey and Paris honoured its Unknown Soldier, who was laid to rest beneath the Arc de Triomphe in January 1921. A flame has burned there since 1923 and is rekindled every evening.

The Great War in miniature at the Museo L’Iber

The museum’s collection lets visitors follow the First World War from the farewells of 1914 to the field hospitals of Verdun. Here are some of the pieces, and the makers who produced them.

The Uhlan’s Departure

The Uhlan’s Departure is a small signed artist’s scene by Bischof. A German uhlan, a light cavalryman traditionally armed with a lance, says goodbye to a woman before leaving for the front. It sums up August 1914: millions of men left home convinced they would be back “before the leaves fall”.

Barracks life, by CBG Mignot

The barracks kitchen scene, with French soldiers in kepis and madder-red trousers, is by CBG Mignot, the Parisian toy-soldier house whose story we told in our post on the French Revolution in miniature by CBG Mignot. It is one of their classic boxed dioramas, with the scenery painted inside the box. That eye-catching uniform proved a death trap in the first battles of 1914, and in 1915 the French Army replaced it with the horizon blue seen at Verdun.

Verdun: ambulances and stretcher-bearers

Our diorama of the Battle of Verdun (1916) does not depict the clash of troops but what came afterwards. It shows horse-drawn ambulances bearing the red cross, stretcher-bearers in horizon blue and Adrian helmets, and the tents of a dressing station. It brings together figures by Lucotte, the 18th-century French house regarded as the pioneer of the solid lead soldier, which merged with CBG in 1928, by CBG Mignot and by Les Petits Soldats de France. At Verdun, between February and December 1916, nearly 300,000 French and German soldiers died.

The Christmas Truce of 1914

Long before any armistice was signed, the soldiers themselves had shown that peace was possible. At Christmas 1914, in several sectors of the Western Front, above all between the British and the Germans, men climbed out of the trenches. They swapped tobacco and gifts, buried their dead together and, in places, played football. The commanders made sure it never happened again. Our diorama, shown in the header image, with figures by Scale Link and Hecker & Goros, brings together a German, a British and a French officer in the snow: the three armies that, four years later, would still be facing each other on 11 November 1918.

Closing our First World War series

In August 1914, the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey said that the lamps were going out all over Europe. We ended our post on Sarajevo with that phrase, and with its echo we now close this series. On 11 November 1918 the lamps were lit again, but they shone on a different world. Four empires had vanished: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman. The map of Europe and the Middle East was redrawn, and badly healed wounds paved the way for the next war. That is why the 1918 Armistice is not just the end of a war: it is one of the keys to understanding the whole 20th century.

At the Museo L’Iber, the figures of the Great War remind us that behind every toy soldier there was a real person. Staff maps and vast statistics often hide the Ellisons, the Trébuchons and the Gunthers.

If you want to learn how this story began, you can watch the talk Causas e inicios de la Primera Guerra Mundial (in Spanish) on the museum’s YouTube channel, given by Alejandro Noguera Borel, Director of the Museo L’Iber.

And if you want to see the war as it was photographed by those who lived through it, you can download the catalogue Crónica de la Gran Guerra: l’Arxiu de Tànger (Museu Valencià d’Etnologia, 2015), by Alejandro Noguera Borel, Pablo San Juan and Carlos Traspaderne, from our Publications section. It accompanied the exhibition held between October 2015 and February 2016 and brings together the stereoscopic photographs by P.-A. H. Givord found in Tangier.

Frequently asked questions about the 1918 Armistice

Where was the 1918 Armistice signed?

In Marshal Foch’s railway carriage number 2419D, standing in a clearing in the Forest of Compiègne, near Rethondes (France). Foch and the British admiral Wemyss signed for the Allies, and Matthias Erzberger and three other delegates signed for Germany.

Why did the armistice come into force at 11:00?

It was signed shortly after five in the morning, and six hours were allowed for the ceasefire order to reach every unit at the front. The symbolic coincidence, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, turned that moment into a symbol of European memory.

Who was the last soldier killed in the First World War?

He is considered to be the American sergeant Henry Gunther, killed at 10:59 on 11 November 1918, one minute before the ceasefire. On that last day, there were some 11,000 casualties on the Western Front.

Would you like to see history told in miniature? Buy your ticket to the Museo L’Iber and explore the great episodes of military history in our permanent collection, from Antiquity to the 20th century.

Sources

• Conditions of the Armistice with Germany, 11 November 1918 (full text): German History in Documents and Images (GHI Washington).
• The signing at Compiègne and its protagonists: The National Archives (United Kingdom) and Musée de l’Armée (Paris).
• Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, Random House, 2004 (casualties on the last day and the cases of Gunther, Ellison, Trébuchon and Price).
• The Oficina Pro Cautivos: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War and Library of Congress.
• The Battle of Verdun and the Christmas Truce: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• Alejandro Noguera Borel, Pablo San Juan and Carlos Traspaderne, Crónica de la Gran Guerra: l’Arxiu de Tànger, exhibition catalogue (October 2015–February 2016), Museu Valencià d’Etnologia, Valencia, 2015. ISBN 978-84-7795-743-0.
• General overview: Hew Strachan, La Primera Guerra Mundial, Crítica, 2004 (original edition: The First World War, 2003); David Stevenson, 1914-1918. Historia de la Primera Guerra Mundial, Debate, 2013 (original edition: 1914-1918: The History of the First World War, 2004).

Images

• Photographs of pieces and dioramas from the Museo L’Iber collection.