As if God had swept His omnipotent finger across the scene of world carnage and cried, ‘Enough!’ At 11 am the guns of the Western Front fell silent, all at once, for the first time in four years of continuous and brutal warfare. After a false alarm four days earlier, Allied and German delegations agreed to an armistice. Facing general defeat, mutiny, and domestic revolution, Berlin sought an exit from the war. Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated two days earlier; the Weimar Republic was struggling to be born. Sixteen million people had been killed.
Germany's allies had already exited the war. On November 11th Austria-Hungary's last emperor ceded some political power, although he did not exactly abdicate right away. Vienna had just signed an armistice with Italy and its empire was fragmenting into nations. Turkey had capitulated on October 30th. After an Allied victory and a major revolt, Bulgaria signed its own armistice on September 30th; tsar Ferdinand abdicated. A French-led army successfully invaded Albania, Montenegro, and Serbia. The Treaty of Versailles lay shortly ahead.
But the Great War's bloodshed and and the forces it unleashed hadn't ended.
The East African front saw fighting for two more weeks, as von Lettow-Vorbeck continued his guerrilla campaign against the British empire.
In the former Russian empire civil war raged. Fighting would include an Allied intervention and a Soviet invasion of Poland aimed at Berlin. Latvia would successfully fight for its independence, a war which ended in 1920. Hungary would experience a short-lived Communist government in 1919, as would part of the new state of Czechoslovakia. Back in 1918, on November 11th, British, Canadian, and American troops invading the USSR fought a small battle with Bolsheviks.
Post-Ottoman Turkey would revolt against an Allied-imposed treaty ("signed on 10 August 1920, in an exhibition room at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres porcelain factory") and go on to fight Armenia, France, Britain, and especially Greece through 1922, culminating in the forced resettlement of 1.6 million people and the creation of today's Turkish Republic.
Elsewhere in former Ottoman lands, Egyptians would revolt against British occupation in 1919, as would Iraqis in 1920.
After signing the armistice, German civilians would continue to suffer the Allied naval blockade for another half year. Germany's new republic would be wracked by civil disturbances for years. Fighting broke out around Berlin in December. A Spartacist uprising occurred in January 1919, along with a Bremen Soviet. Bavaria formed a Soviet Republic in April 1919. Freebooting militias, Freikorps, would fight left-wing movements and assassinate people, like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1919. Ruhr workers revolted in 1920. Poles and Silesians would revolt against Wiemar for three years.
Spain would go through civil unrest and revolts ("Three Bolshevik Years") culminating in a military dictatorship in 1923.
Italy would experience escalating unrest from left and right. In 1919-2910 Gabriele d'Annunzio led WWI veterans in seizing the city of Fiume, which has just been assigned to the new Yugoslav Republic. Italy would experience the first anti-fascist local revolt in 1921 then the imposition of Europe's first fascist national state in 1922.
Ireland, in the wake of the war's Easter Rising, would wage a war of independence from Britain (1919-1921), then fight a bitter civil war in 1922-23. During Cogadh na Saoirse Limerick created its own Soviet in 1919.
The United States, a late Allied power, was already undergoing its first red scare. The Battle of Blair Mountain would occur in 1921.
Meanwhile, "the Spanish flu" continued to kill millions more.
Back to 11/11/18: from Thomas Hardy.
In 1919 president Woodrow Wilson would proclaim Armistice Day as a holiday. In 1954 it would be renamed Veterans Day.
American artillery captain Harry Truman wrote to his wife Bess on 11/10/18: "Hope I get that letter tomorrow. Also hope the Hun signs the peace agreement."
One documentary: Armistice: The Endgame of World War One.
One computer game: "11-11 Memories Retold".
In 1940 a victorious Germany, led by a WWI veteran, ordered that year's armistice to be signed in the same railway car as 1918's.
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