This Day in World War 1 History: NOVEMBER 11, 1918 : WORLD WAR I ENDS

At 11 o’clock in the morning of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the First World War–known at the time as the Great War–comes to an end.

By the end of autumn 1918, the alliance of the Central Powers was unraveling in its war effort against the better supplied and coordinated Allied powers. Facing exhausted resources on the battlefield, turmoil on the home front and the surrender of its weaker allies, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice with the Allies in the early days of November 1918. On November 7, the German chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, sent delegates to Compiegne, France, to negotiate the agreement; it was signed at 5:10 a.m. on the morning of November 11.

Ferdinand Foch, commander in chief of all Allied forces on the Western Front, sent a message by telegraph to all his commanders: “Hostilities will cease on the entire front November 11 at 11 a.m. French time.” The commanders ordered the fighting to continue throughout the morning of November 11, prompting later accusations that some men died needlessly in the last few hours of the war. As the historian John Buchan has written of that memorable morning: “Officers had their watches in their hands, and the troops waited with the same grave composure with which they had fought.” As watch hands reached 11, “there came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which observers far behind the front likened to the noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges [mountains] to the sea.”

From Visually.

The Great War took the life of some 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded. Civilian casualties caused indirectly by the war numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle. At the peace conference in Paris in 1919, Allied leaders would state their desire to build a post-war world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such devastating scale. The Versailles Treaty, signed on June 28, 1919, would not achieve this objective. Saddled with war guilt and heavy reparations and denied entrance into the League of Nations, Germany complained it had signed the armistice under false pretenses, having believed any peace would be a “peace without victory” as put forward by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points speech of January 1918. As the years passed, hatred of the treaty and its authors settled into a smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted–to an arguable extent–among the causes of the Second World War.

But that would all come later. On November 11, 1918, the dominant emotion for many on and off the battlefield was relief at the coming of peace, mixed with somber mourning for the many lives lost. In a letter written to his parents in the days following the armistice, one soldier–26-year-old Lieutenant Lewis Plush of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF)–eloquently pondered the war’s lasting impact: “There was a war, a great war, and now it is over. Men fought to kill, to maim, to destroy. Some return home, others remain behind forever on the fields of their greatest sacrifice. The rewards of the dead are the lasting honors of martyrs for humanity; the reward of the living is the peaceful conscience of one who plays the game of life and plays it square.”

Article Details:

November 11, 1918 : World War I ends

• Author

  History.com Staff

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  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  November 11, 1918 : World War I ends

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/world-war-i-ends-2

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  November 11, 2015

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This Day in World War 1 History: NOVEMBER 10, 1928 : REMARQUE PUBLISHES ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

On this day in 1928, the first installment of All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque’s acclaimed novel of World War I, appears in the German magazine Vossische Zeitung.

Remarque (born Erich Paul Remark) was born in 1898 in lower Saxony to a family of French ancestry; he enlisted in the German army at the age of 18 and headed to fight on the Western Front, where he was wounded five times, the last time seriously. Returning to Germany after the war, he changed his name back to the French spelling and worked various jobs–teacher, stonecutter, race-car driver, sports journalist–while working on his first novel.

The protagonist of that novel, All Quiet on the Western Front–its German title, Im Westen nichts Neues literally translates as In the West Nothing New–is Paul Baumer, a young German soldier fighting in the trenches of World War I. The story opens in 1917, when half of Baumer’s company–many of them schoolmates from back in Germany–has been killed in battle. Over the course of the book, Paul himself is injured and hospitalized, goes home on leave and returns to the front, only to be killed a week or so before the armistice in 1918.

From November 10 to December 9, 1928, All Quiet on the Western Front was published in serial form in Vossische Zeitung magazine. It was released in book form the following year to smashing success, selling a million and a half copies that same year. Although publishers had worried that interest in the Great War had waned more than 10 years after the armistice, Remarque’s realistic depiction of trench warfare from the perspective of young soldiers struck a chord with the war’s survivors–soldiers and civilians alike–and provoked strong reactions, both positive and negative, around the world. Eventually translated into over 20 languages, the novel was adapted into an acclaimed American film in 1930.

With All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque emerged as an eloquent spokesperson for a generation that had been, in his own words, “destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells.” Remarque’s harshest critics, in turn, were his countrymen, many of whom felt the book denigrated the German war effort, and that Remarque had exaggerated the horrors of war in order to further his pacifist agenda. Not surprisingly, the strongest voices against Remarque came from the emerging National Socialist (Nazi) Party, an ultranationalist group in Germany led by the future fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, All Quiet on the Western Front became one of the first “degenerate” books to be publicly burnt.

Remarque would go on to publish nine more novels, all dealing with the horror and futility of war and the struggle to understand its purpose. His last novel, The Night in Lisbon, was unsparing in its condemnation of World War II as Adolf Hitler’s attempt to perpetrate the extermination of Jews and other “nonpeople” on behalf of the “master race.” After his German citizenship was revoked in 1938, Remarque emigrated to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1947. A frequent participant in New York City nightlife in the 1930s and a companion for several years in Hollywood of the actress Marlene Dietrich, Remarque lived for most of his later life at Porto Ronco, on the shore of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland. He died at Locarno in 1970 with his wife, the actress Paulette Goddard, at his side.

Article Details:

November 10, 1928 : Remarque publishes All Quiet on the Western Front

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  November 10, 1928 : Remarque publishes All Quiet on the Western Front

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/remarque-publishes-all-quiet-on-the-western-front

• Access Date

  November 10, 2015

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  A+E Networks