In France, the painter John Singer Sargent had been travelling behind the lines since July looking for inspiration for the painting he had been asked to do for the British Ministry of Information. On 4 October 1918 he wrote to a friend: ‘For a long time I did not see any means of treating the subject given to me, of “British and American Troops Working Together”. They do this in the abstract but not in any particular space within the limits of a picture.’ He could still not find a subject, though the three months he had been allotted for the painting were corning to an end.’ I have wasted lots of time going to the front line trenches,’ he wrote to another friend six days later. ‘There is nothing to paint there—it is ugly, and meagre and cramped, and one only sees one or two men.’ He had gone to the Somme, still searching, when inspiration came. ‘In this Somme country I have seen what I wanted, roads crammed with troops on the march,’ he wrote. ‘It is the finest spectacle that war affords, as far as I can make out.’
In fact, it was not troops on the march whom Sargent decided to paint. With him on the Somme was another artist, Henry Tonks, who had been asked by the Ministry to do a painting on a medical theme. In search of this, he and Sargent went to a dressing station near Le Bac-de-Sud, on the Doullens Road. ‘There,’ writes Sargent’s biographer, ‘under a perfect autumnal sky, they saw soldiers blinded by mustard gas waiting for treatment. Sargent had at last found his picture, though it had nothing whatever to do with the terms of his assignment. Tonks said he did not mind; far from it.’231
Sargent took notes, returned to his studio in London, and began work on his painting. Entitled Gassed, it shows two groups of blinded and blindfolded soldiers, ten in the centre of the picture and nine in the distance, all standing in line, each group led by an orderly. Each blindfolded man has his hand on the shoulder of the soldier in front. Some are still holding their rifles. More than twenty men are lying in a field in the foreground, their eyes also bandaged. Others are lying in the field behind. There are no doctors or nurses to be seen. In the far distance, on the horizon, dwarfed by the men who have been gassed, a football match is in progress. The painting, of considerable power, was voted ‘Picture of the Year’ at the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1919.
***
On what had been the Salonica Front, now deep inside Serbia, in the first week of October, Austrian troops were still fighting despite Bulgaria’s defection. Ludendorff, however, recognised the danger presented to the Central Powers as Serbian and French forces pushed the front steadily northward, through Serbian Macedonia, towards the Danube and Belgrade. Yet in both Berlin and Vienna the instinct to brazen it out remained. On October 4 a German and Austrian ‘Peace Note’ was sent to President Wilson, asking him to agree to an armistice. It was made clear by both the Germans and Austrians that this was not a surrender, not even an offer of armistice terms, but an attempt to end the war without any preconditions that might be harmful to Germany or Austria. This was what Prince Max wished.
As Wilson studied the note, the war went on. On October 5, more than 3,000 Austrians were taken prisoner on the Salonica Front. Inside Germany the continuation of the fighting led to an increase in public discontent. On October 6, at Gotha, a conference of German Spartacists, whose leader, Karl Liebknecht, was in prison, demanded an end to the monarchy and the setting up of Soviets in Germany.
With the disintegration of Empires the struggle of subject peoples intensified. On October 7, in German-occupied Warsaw, a Regency Council, hitherto under German control, invoked President Wilson’s principles of self-determination and declared a ‘free and independent’ Polish State. Its authority was challenged, however, by two other Polish groups, the oddly-named Polish Liquidation Committee in Cracow, and the left-wing Provisional People’s Government of the Polish Republic, in Lublin.232 The Germans, unwilling to see the total collapse of their Polish conquests, kept Pilsudski in prison in East Prussia. The Ukrainians, determined not to lose East Galicia to a reconstituted Poland, established a Ukrainian National Council in Lvov, and fighting began between Poles and Ukrainians throughout the region.
***
Germany, in turmoil, had not yet succumbed to anarchy or decided to surrender. On October 7, as a Polish State was declared in Warsaw, a call for a final military effort on the battlefield was published in the Vossische Zeitung. Written by the industrialist Walther Rathenau, its aim was to give Germany the strongest possible position from which to negotiate a peace of equality rather than of defeat. ‘All men capable of bearing arms must be combed out of the offices, the guard rooms and depots, in East and West, at the bases and at home,’ Rathenau wrote. ‘What use have we today for Armies of Occupation and Russian Expeditions? Yet at this moment we have hardly half of the total available troops on the Western Front. Our front is worn out; restore it, and we shall be offered different terms. It is peace we want, not war—but not a peace of surrender.’
Struck by this line of reasoning, Prince Max asked Hindenburg and Ludendorff whether ‘adequate reinforcement’ would in fact be afforded by such a combing out of troops as Rathenau proposed. Ludendorff was sceptical: from a practical viewpoint ‘it would cause more disturbance than we could stand’, he replied on October 8. But Rathenau did not give up, writing to the newly-appointed Minister of War, General Scheüch, that if Germany evacuated the areas demanded by President Wilson, including the whole of Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine, this would ‘make an end of our capacity for defence and thus put ourselves at the enemy’s mercy’.
The argument for a German position of strength on the Western Front was becoming academic. On October 8, Wilson rejected the German Peace Note. A first condition of an armistice, he reiterated, was the evacuation of all occupied territories. The war would not end until there were no German troops on Belgian or French soil, and no Austrian or German troops in Serbia. That day, near Châtel-Chéhéry in the Argonne, an American soldier who had earlier been a conscientious objector on religious grounds, Sergeant Alvin C. York, was in action. His patrol having been surrounded and outnumbered ten to one, York, single-handed, killed as many as twenty-eight German soldiers and captured 132 others, bringing back thirty-five machine guns. Asked by a divisional general how many Germans he thought he had killed, York replied: ‘General, I would hate to think I missed any of them shots; they were all at pretty close range—fifty or sixty yards.’ Commenting on his fellow-soldiers’ shooting abilities he remarked: ‘They missed everything but the sky.’ He, however, was a mountaineer. ‘It weren’t no trouble nohow for me to hit them big army targets,’ he explained. ‘They were so much bigger than turkey’s heads.’
Also on October 8, the day of Corporal York’s exploit, the British launched an offensive on a twenty-mile front between St Quentin and Cambrai, the Second Battle of Cambrai. A smokescreen for the attack was created by the Royal Air Force, dropping phosphorus bombs. In one day, three British armies, with eighty-two tanks in support, advanced three miles and took 10,000 prisoners and 150 guns. An American division also advanced towards Cambrai, capturing 1,500 prisoners and 30 guns.
Within twenty-four hours of the start of the new offensive, the Hindenburg Line was finally overrun in its entirety. On October 9, Canadian troops entered Cambrai. The Duke of Wellington had taken the city’s surrender 103 years earlier, after the defeat of Napoleon. In 1870 the Germans had captured it: they had held it again since August 1914. Now it was a free French city once more. A British cavalry division, in an unprecedented eight-mile advance, reached the outskirts of Le Câteau, taking five hundred prisoners on its gallop forward.
Battlefields from which the British had been driven in 1914 and 1915, and again earlier in 1918, were entered and crossed almost without pause. An artilleryman, Colonel Alan Brooke, visited Lens on October 9. ‘Such ruin and desolation,’ he wrote. ‘I climbed on to a heap of stones which represents the place where the Church once stood, and I looked down on the wreckage. One could spend days there just looking down picturing to oneself the tragedies that have occurred in every corner of this place. If the stones could talk and could repeat what they have witnessed, and the thoughts they had read on dying men’s faces, I wonder if there would ever be any wars.’233
On the following day a British officer, the poet Wilfred Owen, who had returned to the trenches after his time in hospital in Britain, wrote to a friend from the front line: ‘The boy by my side, shot through the head, lay on top of me, soaking my shoulder, for half an hour.’ Yet, Owen added, he was ‘full of confidence’ when, ‘after having taken a few machine guns (with the help of one seraphic lance-corporal), I held a most glorious brief peace talk in a pill-box’. He had shot one German with his revolver at thirty yards. The rest had surrendered ‘with a smile’. Owen had earlier been invalided home with shattered nerves after serving for six months in the trenches in 1917, but he had wanted to go back, explaining to his mother: ‘I came out in order to help these boys; directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can.’ But trench warfare took its toll again, as he later wrote home: ‘My senses are charred; I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters.’
Among those killed in action earlier that week was the 21-year-old Charles Read. His brother Herbert, a writer and poet who had fought on the Somme, tried to express his feelings, of both pain and pride:
I curse the fate that sent us
a tortured species down the torrent of life
soul-exposed to the insensate shores
and the dark fall of death.
***
All the world is wet with tears
and droops its languid life
But death is beautiful with pride: the trees
are golden lances whose brave sway
assails the sadness of the day.
At sea, the relentless war went on, with a German submarine sinking the Kingstown-Holyhead ferry Leinster on October 10, drowning 176 passengers and crew, including several Americans.
***
On October 10 it was made known that 20,000 American troops had died in France in the previous two months, not in battle, but of influenza and pneumonia. Even as the armies prepared for what the Allies believed would be the final struggle, death stalked their ranks from within. But the exhilaration of imminent victory was hard to quell. On Allenby’s front, Damascus had fallen nine days earlier, and an Indian division had entered Beirut on October 8.
Dramatic events were taking pace in Serbia, after three years of Austrian occupation. The Austrian 9th Division, made up mostly of Bohemians and Moravians, was showing its fellow-Slav sympathies for the Serbs, and was no longer an effective fighting force. On October 10, Serb forces entered Nis, having advanced 170 miles in twenty-five days. The city had been defended by German troops. Near Prizren, a German army corps was reported lost in the mountains, as it tried to make its way to the Albanian coast.
Every nation in the Allied line was moving forward. On October 10 the American First Army under Pershing finally succeeded in driving the Germans out of the Argonne Forest. Yet the battle did not fare as well for the Americans as they had hoped, and there was no breakthrough. Ammunition, food and other essential provisions were still being held up by the congestion on the roads. In addition, the shortage of horses had become acute. Pershing calculated that he was short of at least 100,000 horses, but when he asked Foch if France could provide 25,000, he was told to get them from the United States. This proved impossible: there was not enough shipping space. ‘The animal situation will soon become desperate,’ Pershing’s senior supply officer reported.
Pétain’s reaction to the American supply difficulties was to suggest that Pershing’s First Army be dissolved, that the American effort should be limited to corps and divisions, and that those divisions which could not be adequately supplied should be distributed ‘among the French armies’. Already, of the thirty American divisions fit for combat, ten were serving with the French and British forces under French and British commanders, and only twenty under Pershing. But Pershing and his First Army fought on. They were not going to dissolve themselves, or accept that they were beaten by the problems of supply.
***
On October 11, German forces began a systematic withdrawal from the Western Front. But they had not given up fighting, and on October 12 Hindenburg sought to stiffen their resistance by his announcement that the granting of favourable armistice terms to Germany would depend upon a successful military resistance at the front. That day, the German Government accepted President Wilson’s condition for negotiations, the complete withdrawal of their troops from France and Belgium. Hearing this news in Constantinople, the German-born Zionist Arthur Ruppin noted in his diary how he ‘went for a long walk and continuously repeated to myself the one word: Peace! How much this means!’
Ruppin’s excitement, like that of millions of others, was premature. Before Wilson received the German acceptance of his terms, the British and French opened a new offensive inside Belgium, between Dixmude and Courtrai. In support, American bomber aircraft attacked German lines of communication deep within Belgium. In five days the new offensive had advanced eighteen miles, taking 12,000 prisoners and 550 guns.
German troops continued to fight for the French cities under their control, unwilling to withdraw without a struggle from regions they had ruled for more than four years. But on October 13, French forces under General Debeney and General Mangin drove them out of the city of Laon, liberating 6,500 French civilians, and, in triumph, advanced further northward. The liberation of Laon was a turning point: a city that had so often been within sound of the guns during earlier battles, but had faced the humiliation of occupation for more than 1,500 days.
At a meeting at a private house at Danny, in Sussex, on October 13, Lloyd George told his senior military and naval advisers, and several senior Cabinet Ministers, of his fears that if the Germans gained ‘a respite’ as a result of an armistice, ‘they might obtain time to re-organise and recover’. As the minutes of the meeting report, he then ‘raised for consideration the question as to whether the actual military defeat of Germany and the giving to the German people of a real taste of war was not more important, from the point of view of the peace of the world, than a surrender at the present time when the German armies were still on foreign territory’.
In Berne, Sir Horace Rumbold, who had served in the Berlin Embassy in 1914, was also worried that the Germans would make peace too soon. ‘It will be a thousand pities’, he wrote to the Foreign Office on October 14, ‘if we are called off before we hammer him completely on the Western Front. We ought to get him into his beastly country, for that is the only way of bringing home to him or to his population what war means.’ That morning, among the German wounded in the Ypres Salient was Corporal Hitler, temporarily blinded by a British gas shell near the village of Wervik. He was evacuated to a military hospital at Pasewalk in Pomerania.
That same day, the American First Army, with the Argonne Forest behind it, renewed its offensive on the Meuse. At first the battle did not go well. ‘Hope for better results tomorrow,’ Pershing wrote in his diary that evening, and added: ‘There is no particular reason for this hope except that if we keep on pounding, the Germans will be obliged to give way.’ But the Germans continued to shell the American positions with high-explosive and gas shells, and fought for every yard of ground. When, on October 15, Pershing visited the troops of the 3rd Division, then resting at Montfaucon, he found them ‘disorganised, and apparently disheartened’.234
With more than a million men under his command, and a front of eighty-three miles, Pershing divided his army, creating a Second Army. But its problems were still acute. The shortage of horses was immobilising the artillery. As many as 100,000 men were thought to have become ‘stragglers’, wandering about behind the lines, away from units which depended on them to make up the necessary strength for attack. Some men hid in dug-outs: the commander of the 3rd Division authorised the throwing of bombs into dug-outs if his men refused to come out.
***
Deaths from influenza continued to mount. On October 15 it was announced that 1,500 Berliners had died of the disease. Four days later, on the Western Front, the Canadian air ace, Captain Quigley, who had shot down thirty-four German planes, died of influenza. Not only Europe, but Africa and Asia were affected. In Bombay, more than a thousand Indians died. In the United States, the death toll was climbing. In Vienna, the 28-year-old Expressionist painter Egon Schiele was among those who succumbed to the epidemic. In London that month, 2,225 people died of ‘Spanish ‘flu’, as it was known, within a week: more than all the deaths from four years of German Zeppelin and aircraft raids.
***
On October 14, in Paris, the Allies recognised the Czechoslovak National Council, a group of determined exiles headed by Thomas Masaryk, as the Provisional Government of a future Czechoslovakia. Two days later, in a desperate attempt to preserve the unity of the Hapsburg Empire, the Emperor Charles offered complete federal freedom to all six principal nationalities of Austria: Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and Roumanians. This belated offer, the historian Elizabeth Wiskemann has written, ‘was spoken by nothing but a voice from the grave’. Even while they were seeking a means of placating the Allies, the Austrians could not bring themselves to detach the predominantly Roumanian areas of Transylvania from Hungary to Roumania.
Four days after the Emperor’s offer, the decisive blow to the survival of Austria-Hungary was struck when President Wilson insisted that ‘autonomy’ for subject peoples was no longer an adequate fulfilment of their national rights. Wilson now claimed that the United States had incurred obligations towards the Czechoslovak and South Slav peoples that went beyond autonomy, or a federal agglomeration, within the Empire.
As territorial offers and counter-offers touched on age-long national hopes, the fighting on the Western Front continued. On October 16, as the Americans were moving forward again on the Meuse, a brigade commanded by Douglas MacArthur struggled to take the Côte de Châtillon. Taking the hill, the brigade repelled repeated German attempts to take it back. In a battalion led by Major Ross, a corporal, Joseph E. Pruett, single-handed, attacked a German machine-gun post, then, emulating Alvin York, captured sixty-eight German soldiers. MacArthur later recalled the ferocity of the struggle. ‘Officers fell and sergeants leaped to the command,’ he wrote. ‘Companies dwindled to platoons and corporals took over. At the end, Major Ross had only 300 men and six officers left out of 1,450 men and twenty-five officers.’ But the hill was held. ‘Clouded prospects wherever one looks,’ a German company commander wrote that day. ‘Really has everything been in vain? Such a piteous finish.’
On October 17, advancing south of Le Câteau on a ten-mile front, American troops took 5,000 prisoners and sixty guns. That same day, British forces occupied the city of Lille without a single shot being fired. The German navy evacuated Ostend and Zeebrugge. But at the very moment when all seemed lost for the Central Powers, some German leaders appeared to part with reality. Grand-Admiral Tirpitz wrote that day to Prince Max urging ‘resolute reinforcement’ of the Western Front with every available man, and the ‘relentless prosecution’ of the submarine campaign: ‘Every German must understand that if we do not fight on, we fall to the level of wage-slaves to our enemies.’ Summoned by the Kaiser to discuss what reply to give to President Wilson, Ludendorff declared that the German army could, and should, fight on. An Allied breakthrough was, he said, ‘unlikely’. In another month winter would bring the battle to a halt. A skilful withdrawal to a new line, based on Antwerp and the river Meuse, would give the German Army the ability to plan for an offensive against the Allied line in the spring of 1919.
Prince Max was not convinced, but Ludendorff had no doubts. In Germany’s spring 1919 offensive, he said, Belgium must again become a battlefield ‘so that 1914 will be child’s play compared to it’. The German War Minister, General Heinrich Scheüch, said that he could probably provide up to 600,000 reinforcements for the battle of 1919, but he went on to warn that if Germany’s supply of oil from Roumania was cut off, the German army could only fight for another six weeks. This was the first note of realism in the current discussions. A second such note came on the following day, October 18, from Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who in a letter to Prince Max described the wretched condition of his troops, short of artillery support, ammunition, fuel, horses and officers, and concluded: ‘We must obtain peace before the enemy breaks into Germany.’
***
On October 18, Haig, who had earlier been confident of victory in 1918, told a War Cabinet committee that Germany would be able to hold its new lines on the Western Front well into 1919. But Germany’s warmaking powers were almost over. That day, under the terms of the September 30 armistice, the last German troops left Bulgaria. On the following day 1,200 German advisers and military specialists began to depart from Mesopotamia, together with their aircraft, guns and transport. In Austrian-occupied central Serbia, some German units remained in action, counter-attacking the Serb forces at Paracin, but most of the German forces that had been on the Salonica Front were still making their way across the mountains to the Adriatic.
That day, in a measure that ended Germany’s long-held hopes of bringing Britain to her knees by naval warfare, Admiral Scheer ordered all German submarines to return to their German bases. The last torpedo was fired by a German submarine on October 21, when a small British merchant ship, the Saint Barcham, was sunk in the Irish Sea, and eight crewmen drowned. They were the last of 318 British merchant seamen to be killed that month.
The whole of the Belgian coast was now in Allied hands. But still the German Government resisted the inevitable. On October 22, Prince Max insisted that Germany would not accept ‘a peace of violence’. Reparations had become a new feature of the armistice discussions: the Belgian Government made it known that week that it would demand almost £400 million from Germany, in compensation for damage done.235 In an attempt to lessen the mounting discontent, and republicanism, in Germany, the Kaiser agreed to a general amnesty of political prisoners. Liebknecht, an implacable opponent of the monarchy, was among those released. More than 20,000 people went to the station in Berlin to welcome him back. Lenin, watching these events from Moscow, declared in triumph: ‘Three months ago people used to laugh when we said there might be a revolution in Germany.’
On October 23 there was a mutiny in the Austrian army in Italy, when Croat troops behind the lines seized the port of Fiume. The mutiny was suppressed. Far more damaging to the fabric of the Empire than any Croat mutiny, on October 25 the Hungarian nationalist leader, Count Michael Karolyi, set up a Hungarian National Council in Budapest, the prelude to the complete separation of Austria and Hungary.
***
Throughout October, from his distant vantage point in the United States, President Wilson remained at the centre of the armistice discussions. In their most recent note, sent to Washington on October 20 but not received there until the 22nd, the German Government agreed to renounce submarine warfare. Sending this note back across the Atlantic to Clemenceau and Lloyd George on October 23, Wilson suggested that the Allies prepare their armistice terms.
Wilson’s position was one of considerable strength. The American army’s possible future role on the battlefield was alarming the Germans considerably. On October 24 the left-wing Arbeiter Zeitung drew its readers’ attention to the fact that 10,000 ‘fresh, well-fed, well-equipped’ American troops were reaching Europe every day, 300,000 every month, and it went on to ask: ‘Do the people wish to continue war under such circumstances, to sacrifice the lives of many hundred thousand men, thereby destroying the remainder of the nation’s manhood and imperilling their future?’ A year earlier, even three months earlier, such a question would have been tantamount to treason. Now it was seen as common sense.
Meeting at Senlis on October 25, the four senior Allied commanders, Foch, Haig, Pétain and Pershing, discussed what their armistice demands would be. The main concern of the generals was to make it impossible for Germany to renew the fighting at some future date after the armistice, perhaps in the early spring. To prevent this, they insisted on the surrender to the Allies of all German artillery and all railway stock. But there was no unanimity of thought about whether the Germans were, in fact, ready to surrender on such terms. Haig still thought that, although the Germans had been severely hurt in the recent battles, they had not been beaten, and would be able, on falling back, to create a new and effective front line. The Allied armies, however, were in Haig’s view ‘pretty well exhausted’. He then spoke of the American army in terms that upset Pershing. It was ‘not yet organised, not yet formed, and had suffered a great deal on account of its ignorance of modern warfare’. In the next battle it ‘cannot be counted upon for much’.
Ignoring this criticism, Pershing pointed out that, as the American lines of supply extended 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, the armistice terms ought to include the surrender of all German submarines. This was agreed. Foch, challenging Haig’s view that the Germans were not yet beaten, pointed out that since July 15 more than 250,000 German soldiers had been made prisoners-of-war, and 4,000 guns captured. The German army was retreating along the whole front. It was not only an army that had been ‘beaten every day for three months’, it was also ‘an army that is, physically and morally, thoroughly beaten’.
The German High Command was of the same opinion, and yet, at Spa, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, distressed by Wilson’s insistence that Germany must put forward its armistice terms, were on the verge of a final act of defiance. Turning their back on Wilson’s demand, they prepared a circular letter, which they dispatched by telegram, to all Army Group commanders, describing the armistice conditions as unworthy of Germany and unacceptable to the army, and ordering a ‘fight to the finish’. Wilson’s demand was ‘nothing for us soldiers but a challenge to continue our resistance with all our strength’. No Allied sacrifice would achieve ‘the rupture of the German Front’. Following a protest from one army commander the telegram was withdrawn, but not before a military wireless operator, who happened to be a member of the Independent Socialist Party, had transmitted its text from Kovno, where he received it, to the Reichstag members of his party.
***
Yet another Allied offensive opened on October 24, on the Italian Front. It began with a 1,400-gun bombardment of the Austrian positions around Monte Grappa. Fifty-one Italian divisions took part in the renewed attack, together with British, French, Czechoslovak and American units. The Austrian defence was tenacious, however: their seventy-three divisions were not yet ready to give up.
On the Piave, British troops took part in a fierce struggle for the island of Papadopoli. They were veterans of the Western Front, a fact that gave them a particular perspective. ‘On this occasion,’ one of their chaplains has written, ‘the novelty of the enterprise helped considerably to relieve the tension. There was something hideous and inhuman about a trench attack in France. The mud, the duckboards, the dead horses one passed on the way up, the sickening bark and roar of the guns, all combined to produce a sort of uncanny effect which one could only tolerate by suppressing all brooding on the situation. On this occasion, however, the situation was quite different. For months the firebrands in the battalion had been spoiling for a fight. The guns were all silent, the avenues of trees were all decked in the glories of their autumn foliage. Above all, the element of adventure which was involved in the passage of the river, and the fact that we were fighting against an enemy whom we had come rather to despise, combined to free men from the load of oppression which even the stoutest heart had felt a year ago on the Passchendaele Ridge.’
Crosse added: ‘The men were out to finish the war, to give the Austrians a knock-out blow for all the crimes they had committed since the fateful murder at Sarajevo, and everyone felt that, though the expedition was a gamble, the stakes were well worth the risk.’236 Papadopoli Island was captured, but heavy rain and flooding made any further advance impossible. In the mountains that day, the Italians re-captured Mount Asolone, which the Austrians had captured a year earlier, then lost it.
***
In Germany, on October 25, the newspapers published the cancelled Spa ‘fight to the finish’ telegram. Outraged, Prince Max went to see the Kaiser to demand that either Ludendorff resign, or the Government itself would resign. Travelling to Berlin, Ludendorff saw the Kaiser, and demanded that Wilson’s latest note be rejected. If the people at home would support the army in the field, he said, ‘the war can be maintained for some months’.
Ludendorff was supported by Hindenburg and, more importantly, by the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Scheer. The new Minister of War, General Scheüch, also supported him. But the Kaiser had been angered that Ludendorff had telegraphed direct to the troops, and at one point shouted at him, with anger and sarcasm: ‘Excellency, I must remind you that you are in the presence of Your Emperor.’
Realising that there was now no way that the war could be continued, or that he would be allowed to continue it, Ludendorff resigned. The warmaking nation had lost its War Lord. Hindenburg, the figurehead, remained, the Kaiser having refused his offer of resignation. But the Kaiser himself, the Supreme War Lord, had also become a figurehead, as Prince Max’s Government continued to seek terms acceptable to the Allies. Ludendorff’s successor as First Quartermaster-General, General Groener, was a realist who recognised that Germany had lost her ability to continue the war.
***
On the Turkish Front, the Arab forces under Sherif Hussein had reached the outskirts of the city of Aleppo, the northernmost Arab city in Syria. Allenby’s army was also near, his cavalrymen eager to crown their ride through Syria with the capture of the city. Defending Aleppo was Mustafa Kemal. On October 25, as the Arabs inside the city rose in revolt, determined to welcome their liberators as free men, Kemal urged his troops to fight street by street. The commander of the Arab forces opposing him in this struggle was a former Turkish army officer, Nuri es-Said.237
By nightfall Kemal realised that nothing more could be done to retain this last southern bastion of the Ottoman Empire, and he ordered his troops to pull out. He was aware that any further Arab or Allied advance would lead into the Turkish heartland. Just five miles north of Aleppo he turned, not only to face the advancing enemy but, in effect, to delineate the future southern frontier of Turkey. At Haritan, where he turned to fight, 3,000 Turkish and German troops under his command halted the advance guard of Allenby’s army, forcing two Indian cavalry units, the Jodhpur and Mysore Lancers, to withdraw.
On the Italian Front, the Austrians were still defending their mountain positions yard by yard. But a first sign of disintegration came on October 26, when three Hungarian divisions asked to be sent back to Hungary. Their request was granted, and within twenty-four hours they were gone. Turkey, the third arm of the Central Powers, was also in disarray. Allenby’s cavalry entered the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on October 26. The Turks retreated towards Anatolia. On the Mesopotamian Front, a thousand British cavalrymen had advanced eighty-three miles in two days.
***
On October 26, three Turkish negotiators reached the island of Mudros, in the Aegean, to begin armistice talks. With them was General Townshend, who had been held in captivity near Constantinople since the fall of Kut two and a half years earlier, and whom the Turks asked to help them in securing an armistice. The talks were held on board the battleship Agamemnon, which three and a half years earlier had been among the British warships bombarding the Dardanelles. As on the Western Front, so in the Aegean, the opening of talks was not paralleled by any halt to the fighting.
Forty-eight hours after the arrival of the Turkish negotiators at Mudros, British troops reached the Bulgarian port of Dedeagatch, ten miles from the Turkish border, with the declared intention of invading Turkey-in-Europe. Other British troops were approaching Adrianople, a former Turkish city that had been ceded to Bulgaria in 1913.
Fighting and talking were continuing in tandem on all fronts. On the Italian Front a ferocious struggle was under way. One Austrian counter-attack captured six hundred Italians. On October 27, Italian and British troops managed to cross the Piave. It was the turning point of the battle, with more than 7,000 Austrians being taken prisoner. Mutiny was in the air, as parts of two Austrian divisions refused to counter-attack. The Emperor realised that he could not expect anything but withdrawal, retreat and flight. ‘My people are neither capable nor willing to continue the war,’ he telegraphed to the Kaiser that day, and he added: ‘I have made the unalterable decision to ask for a separate peace and an immediate armistice.’
It was not only the Austrians who were unwilling to continue the war that day. Aboard the German High Seas Fleet, an order to go to sea for a final, desperate attack on the British Fleet electrified the Admiralty when it was decoded in London, but the order was resisted by the German sailors. Admiral Scheer did his utmost to convince the men to fight. ‘An honourable battle by the fleet—even if it should be a fight to the death—will sow the seed of a new German fleet of the future,’ he said. ‘There can be no future for a fleet fettered by a dishonourable peace.’
The sailors were not to be persuaded. ‘We do not put to sea, for us the war is over,’ they chanted. Five times the order to leave port was given and five times it was ignored. Stokers on board those ships that were at sea extinguished the fires in the boilers. A thousand mutineers were arrested, immobilising the fleet. ‘Our men have rebelled,’ the Fleet’s commander, Admiral von Hipper, wrote in his diary, ‘I could not have carried out the operation even if weather conditions had permitted it.’ Angry that the Imperial Navy had failed to challenge the British that day, the former Chief of the Navy Staff, Admiral Tirpitz, wrote in retrospect: ‘The German people do not understand the sea. In the hour of its destiny it did not use its fleet…. Whether our grandsons will be able to take up the task again lies hidden in the darkness of the future.’
On the Western Front, an American artillery battery was moving from one front-line zone to another on October 27 when, as its commander, Captain Harry Truman, later recalled, ‘the French edition of the New York Herald was distributed along the line. Headlines in black letters informed us that the armistice was on. Just then a German 150 shell burst to the right of the road and another to the left.’ A sergeant remarked: ‘Captain, those goddam Germans haven’t seen this paper.’
***
On October 28 Austria asked the Allies for an armistice. The initiators of the confident opening of hostilities against Serbia in 1914 were at the end of their military and political tether. During the day, the Italians took 3,000 Austrian prisoners on the Piave. In the evening the Austrian army was ordered to retreat. At the Adriatic port of Pola, four young Austrian naval officers went on board a German submarine, asking for passage to Germany. ‘What for?’ they were asked. ‘We should like to fight for Germany to the end!’ they replied.
In Prague the Austrian request for an armistice led to a final upsurge in Czech national activity. Meeting in the Gregor Hall, the National Council of Czechoslovakia, which had been formed there three months earlier, assumed the powers of a government, gave orders by telephone to the Austrian officials in the Hradcany Castle to transfer power to it, took over control of the streets, and proclaimed the independence of the Czech State. That evening the Austrian troops in the Castle laid down their arms and the civil servants their pens. Without borders, without international recognition, without the approval of Vienna, with little more than a capital city under its control, a Czech national entity had come into being.
On October 29, as the Austrian troops retreated from the Piave to the Tagliamento, more than six hundred Italian, French and British aircraft struck at the long, slow retreating columns of men, stores and guns. It was a savage bombardment, against which the Austrians had no protection. Several thousand bombs were dropped, and more than 50,000 rounds were fired at the retreating army by the Royal Air Force alone. A nineteen-year-old British officer, Bernard Garside, later recalled reaching the scene of the air attack. ‘All along the road were broken vehicles and all the litter out of them, dead horses sometimes with limbs off or bellies ripped open, corpses of men on the road and in the fields where they had run to escape the machine guns and bombs from the planes, all the litter from men’s pockets for some reason. I don’t want to go into what I saw too much, but it was terrible.’ It was a repetition of the attack on the Turkish forces in retreat to the river Jordan a month earlier.
The Austrian armistice was not to come into effect until November 4. Meanwhile the retreat continued, and with it the Allied bombing.
***
On the Western Front, General Pershing was still worried about the German ability to start the war up again in the spring. His opinion, given on October 30, was that the Allied advance should continue until the German army surrendered. ‘An armistice’, he warned, ‘would revivify the low spirits of the German army and enable it to reorganise and resist later on.’ But Pershing’s plea for unconditional surrender was dismissed by Lloyd George and Clemenceau, who were now confident of imposing strong, virtually crippling terms on Germany, even if its army did not lay down its arms on the field of battle. Foch, too, did not fear a German military revival of the sort which Pershing feared. ‘I am not waging war for the sake of waging war,’ Foch told Colonel House, Wilson’s emissary. ‘If I obtain through the armistice the conditions that we wish to impose upon Germany, I am satisfied. Once this object is attained, nobody has the right to shed one drop more of blood.’
The armistice talks with Germany would go on. So too would the fighting. On October 30, Tirpitz wrote to Prince Max: ‘The enemy, who can well estimate our strength, will not treat us any more mercifully if we disarm prematurely, but all the more roughly and brutally, since to the sensation of victory will be added a feeling of contempt for us.’ Tirpitz was confident that if Germany decided to reject the Allied terms ‘the sudden need to resume the fight will have the greatest psychological effect’, to Germany’s advantage. If Germany rejected the proferred peace terms, he believed, there would be ‘terrible disappointment’ among the ‘war-weary masses of the enemy peoples’, which would be matched by ‘the increasing strength of the heroic resistance on our front’. Prince Max rejected this call for continued confrontation and a prolongation of the war.
***
On the Western Front, the fighting continued. Among the British troops in action in the last days of October was the poet Wilfred Owen, advancing with his battalion through French villages from which the Germans had just pulled back. Owen was resentful that the Allied leaders had turned down the earlier tentative German requests for negotiations. ‘The civilians here are a wretched, dirty, crawling community, afraid of us, some of them, and no wonder, after the shelling we gave them three weeks ago,’ he wrote on October 29 to his fellow-poet Siegfried Sassoon. ‘Did I tell you that five healthy girls died of fright in one night at the last village? The people in England and France who thwarted a peaceable retirement of the enemy from these areas are therefore now sacrificing aged French peasants and charming French children to our guns. Shells made by women in Birmingham are at this very moment burying little children who live not very far from here.’ It was rumoured that Austria had surrendered. ‘The new soldiers cheer when they hear these rumours, but the old ones bite their pipes, and go on cleaning their rifles, unbelieving.’
The war would go on, even as the German and Austrian armies were in retreat, and areas that had been under German control for four years were being liberated. On October 30, Colonel Alan Brooke visited the military cemetery at Douai, maintained by the German army since the end of 1914, ‘looking at all the graves, French, English, Russian, Italian and German all equally well cared for’. In the middle of the cemetery, the Germans had put up a large stone monument. ‘On the three corner stones are three medallions with the French, English and German crests, each face turned towards the respective country.’ At each frontal face at the top was written ‘Pro Patria’ and at the bottom on each side, etched in stone:
A LA MEMOIRE DES BRAVES CAMARADES
DEN GEFALLEN KAMERADEN ZUR EHRE
IN MEMORY OF BRAVE COMRADES
On the Italian Front, the fighting continued. On October 30 more than 33,000 Austrian soldiers were taken prisoner. On the Western Front, a German division refused orders to go into battle. In Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Government continued to seek an armistice with the Allies.
The Hapsburg Empire was collapsing. The Czech National Council in Prague having declared the independence of Czechoslovakia on October 28, on the following day, the Slovak National Council, meeting at Turciansky Svaty Martin, associated itself with the previously non-existent entity, while at the same time insisting on the right of ‘free self-determination’ for the Slovak region.238
Also on October 29, in Agram, the Croatian Parliament declared that Croatia and Dalmatia were henceforth part of a ‘national sovereign State of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs’, a state that, like Czechoslovakia, was a new feature on the map of Europe. In the Slovene city of Laibach and in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, similar declarations linked these regions with the emerging South Slav State of Yugoslavia. In tune with the times, the German name Agram was changed to the Slav name Zagreb, and Laibach to Ljubljana.
On October 30 the Austrian port of Fiume, which two days earlier had been declared (from Agram) to be part of the South Slav State, declared its own independence, demanding union with Italy. In Budapest, the Hungarians grasped the hour of their own separate existence, as the King-Emperor invited Count Karolyi to form a government. Karolyi did so; then, with Charles’s agreement, he ended the links that had joined Austria and Hungary together since 1867, and demonstrated Hungary’s newfound independence by opening armistice negotiations of his own with the French forces in Serbia. During October 30, with ‘Austria-Hungary’ a thing of the past, Charles gave the Austrian Fleet to the South Slavs and the Danube Flotilla to Hungary. In Vienna, workers and students demonstrated against the monarchy itself. That evening the Austrian armistice delegation arrived in Italy, at the Villa Giusti near Padua.
***
On the battleship Agamemnon, off the island of Mudros, the Turkish and British negotiators, headed by the commander of British naval forces in the Eastern Mediterranean, Admiral Wemyss, were working out the last details of the Turkish armistice, which was to come into effect at noon on the following day. General Townshend participated in this final defeat for Turkey.
The signing of the armistice ended the war in Mesopotamia, which had brought his former army to the gates of Mosul. During the four years of the British campaign in Mesopotamia, the deaths in action and from disease amounted to 1,340 officers and 29,769 men. The war in Palestine and Syria had also ended, with British troops already north of Aleppo, at the very edge of the Turkish heartland of Anatolia.
Under the terms of the armistice of Mudros, Turkey had to open the Dardanelles and Bosphorus to allied warships, accept the military occupation of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus forts, agree to the demobilisation of the Turkish army, release all prisoners-of-war, and evacuate its vast Arab provinces, all but a fragment of which were already under Allied control. A few months later The Times commented: ‘The weakness of the armistice lay in that it did not bring home to the Turks in Anatolia the completeness of the defeat they had sustained and that no adequate provision was made for the security of the Armenians.’
***
October 30, the day of Turkey’s capitulation, saw another dramatic development, the departure of the Kaiser from Berlin to Spa. From the distance of that Belgian resort town he let the politicians discuss his possible abdication in favour of his young son, with Germany to be ruled by a Council of Regency. A majority of the political parties in the Reichstag favoured such a course. They were agreed that the Kaiser would have to sacrifice himself so that his dynasty might survive. But when the Prussian Minister of the Interior, Dr Drews, went to Spa to put this point to the Kaiser himself, he was indignant. ‘How comes it that you, a Prussian official, could reconcile such a mission with the oath you have taken to your king?’ he asked.
With Hindenburg’s full support, the Kaiser declined to abdicate. General Groener, who was also present during the Kaiser’s interview with Dr Drews, and had been noisily emphatic (loudly so, as Drews was hard of hearing) that his sovereign should not abdicate, had another proposal to make. The Kaiser he said, after Drews had gone, ‘should go to the front, not to review troops or to confer decorations, but to look for death. He should go to some trench that was under the full blast of war. If he were killed it would be the finest death possible. If he were wounded the feelings of the German people would completely change towards him.’ Hindenburg thought this a bad idea. The Kaiser’s views are not recorded.
On the Western Front, the Allied offensive continued with swift advances everywhere. On October 31 the British reached the river Scheldt. Elsewhere, preparations were being made for a final offensive. ‘It is a great life,’ the poet Wilfred Owen wrote home that day from his dug-out near the village of Ors, on the Sambre Canal, the next objective for him and his men. ‘I am more oblivious than alas! yourself, dear mother, of the ghastly glimmering of the guns outside, and the hollow crashing of the shells. There is no danger down here, or if any, it will be well over before you read these lines. I hope you are as warm as I am….’
On October 31, in the Adriatic port of Pola, the South Slavs took over the Austro-Hungarian warships that the Emperor had handed to them. Then, to their horror, they saw an Italian torpedo-boat, which had refused to accept that these warships were no longer part of an enemy fleet, torpedo the battleship Viribus Unitis while it was at anchor. Several hundred sailors were drowned. That same day, Serbian troops reached the heights above their capital, Belgrade, having marched all the way from the Salonica Front in less than six weeks, liberating their towns and villages. From their vantage point above Belgrade they could see an armada of boats taking the Austrian troops across the Danube to the Hungarian shore. On the following day they opened fire on the Hungarian monitors patrolling the Danube. More than four years earlier, the First World War had begun by the Austrians shelling Serb positions on these very heights.
***
A new American offensive was planned for November 1, on the Meuse. The preparations were intense, but the men were listless. Douglas MacArthur described how they ‘drearily kept themselves in readiness for their next call to front-line duty’, and, within sight of the Côte de Châtillon which they had captured with such heavy losses two weeks earlier, could not get ‘those nightmarish days’ out of their minds. Those training them tried to create a new zeal with slogans and exhortations. ‘The best way to take machine guns is to go and take ’em! Press forward.’ ‘There is no excuse for failure.’ ‘No man is ever so tired that he cannot take one step forward.’
In the week before the American attack, three batteries of 14-inch naval guns, the standard armament for a battleship, were mounted on railway wagons and, from a distance of twenty-five miles, fired their 1,400-pound shells into the German defences. Two days before the attack began, American artillerymen, using mustard gas for the first time in action, fired 36,000 rounds of gas shells, forty-one tons, at the four German divisions facing them. Of the twelve German artillery batteries in the nearest sector to the Americans, nine were destroyed. Then, after an intense two-hour artillery barrage in the early hours of November 1, the Americans advanced. Low-flying American planes machine-gunned the German defences that had survived the bombardments. High-flying American bombers struck at German lines of communication, stores and troop concentrations behind the lines.
‘For the first time the enemy lines were completely broken through,’ Pershing commented. The Germans fled. An American private, Rush Young, recalled: ‘The roads and fields were strewn with dead Germans, horses, masses of artillery, transport, ammunition limbers, helmets, guns and bayonets.’ By the end of the day it was clear that the Germans would not be able to regroup or counter-attack. That same day, November 1, just north of the Aisne, near the villages of Banogne and Recouvrance, French troops advanced into what had been the first of the three lines set up behind the Hindenburg Line.
In Berlin, political activity was intensifying, with the demand for an end to the monarchy being voiced with particular force by the Spartacists. The Kaiser’s comment about the demand, at Spa on November 1, to an emissary from Prince Max, was: ‘I wouldn’t dream of abandoning the throne because of a few hundred Jews and a thousand workers’, and he added bitterly: ‘Tell that to your masters in Berlin.’ Prince Max was untroubled by the Kaiser’s point of view. He had already informed the United States that the German Government was awaiting the armistice terms.
Like the Ottoman Empire whose armistice came into effect on October 31, the Hapsburg Dominions had also disintegrated. On November 1 the city of Sarajevo, where the heir to the Hapsburgs had been assassinated four years and five months earlier, declared itself a part of the ‘national and sovereign State’ of the South Slavs. That same day the people of Ruthenia declared their independence.239 Revolution was breaking out in Vienna and Budapest. The former Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Tisza, had been murdered in Budapest by Red Guards on October 31. On November 2, German reinforcements transferred from the Eastern Front to the Western Front mutinied rather than go into action. In Vienna, a Hungarian infantry regiment stationed at the Imperial Palace of Schönbrunn deserted its post and returned to Hungary. That same day, in recognition of the collapse of the Central Powers and all that they stood for, the Lithuanian State Council rescinded the election of the Duke of Württemberg as King.
The Allied Supreme War Council, still suspicious of the German will to conclude an armistice, discussed that day, and then approved, plans for an invasion of Bavaria in the spring of 1919. This was to be conducted mainly by the Italians, with some French and British support. The warmaking powers of the Allies were at their height: that October nearly 5,000 machine guns had been produced in Britain, with a further 5,000 being manufactured for the month of November.
The Austrian armistice was signed on November 3, and was to come into effect the following day. In Vienna, Red revolution continued. ‘The time is near when the first day of the world revolution will be celebrated everywhere,’ Lenin declared on November 3 in Moscow, at a mass rally in support of the Austrian revolutionaries. In Kiel 3,000 German sailors and workers raised the red banner. The Governor of Kiel, Admiral Souchon, the man whose guns had opened fire on the Russian Black Sea ports in 1914, bringing Turkey into the war, ordered Officer Cadets loyal to the Government to suppress the revolt. Eight of the mutineers were killed, but the revolt went on.
On November 3, on the Italian Front, the Italians entered the city of Trent. Among the 300,000 Austrian soldiers taken prisoner in the Trentino was Ludwig Wittgenstein. That day, the Allies agreed to a formal German request for an armistice on the Western Front, but the fighting there continued. On the Italian Front, all fighting ended at three in the afternoon of November 4. Having crossed the river Tagliamento just before the armistice was to come into effect, a chaplain in the British 7th Division commented: ‘On the right the sounds of firing were heard. This we believe to have come from the tiny American contingent, which at the eleventh hour had fulfilled their ambition of getting into the front line and were not going to be done out of their battle by any unsoldierly passivity on the part of the enemy.’ That night, a British artillery officer, Hugh Dalton, later recalled ‘the sky was lit up with bonfires and the firing of coloured rockets…. One could hear bells ringing in the distance, back towards Treviso, and singing and cheering everywhere. It was an hour of perfection, and of accomplishment….’240
That day, on the Western Front, British and Canadian troops attacked along a thirty-mile front between Valenciennes and Guise. The New Zealand Division led the attack on the ancient walled town of Le Quesnoy, less than five miles from the Belgian border. The Germans defended the town in force, driving off the New Zealanders, who then decided to surround the town, leave it besieged, and attack German artillery positions further east. There too, however, at the villages of Jolimetz and Herbignies, German resistance was strong. The New Zealanders then dropped leaflets on Le Quesnoy calling on the German soldiers in the town to surrender, but they refused to do so. The New Zealanders then tried a direct assault, using at one point a thirty-foot ladder up which they clambered in single file. Entering the town at last, they captured 2,500 prisoners and a hundred guns.
In the British assault on the Sambre Canal on November 4, an attempt by engineers to throw a temporary bridge over the canal was prevented by heavy German artillery and machine-gun fire. Almost all the engineers were wounded, and the canal was unbridged. The poet Wilfred Owen was seen encouraging his men to try to get across on rafts. ‘Well done!’ and ‘You are doing well, my boy,’ an officer in his company recalled him saying. The rafts proved unsuccessful, however, so planks and duckboards were put together. At the water’s edge, helping his men in this task, Owen was hit and killed. Earlier he had written:
Voices of boys were by the river-side
Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad.
The shadow of the morrow weighed on men.
At the place where Owen was killed, near the village of Ors, the canal remained unbridged. His battalion eventually crossed on an existing bridge a few miles lower down. On his tombstone in the village of Ors are inscribed the words of one of his poems:
Shall life renew
These bodies?
Of a truth
All death will he annul.
In the original poem, the second sentence also ended with a question mark.
***
By the end of November 4, the British forces on the Western Front had advanced five miles, capturing 10,000 prisoners and two hundred guns. Among those killed, and buried in the same cemetery as Owen, were two of the four men awarded the Victoria Cross that day, Lieutenant-Colonel James Marshall and Second-Lieutenant James Kirk. On Marshall’s headstone are the words: ‘Splendid in death when thou fallest courageous leading the onslaught.’ Kirk’s headstone is inscribed with the words of Jesus: ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’
Among the soldiers wounded on November 4 was Carroll Carstairs, one of the Americans who had volunteered to fight with the British army while America was still neutral. A Yale graduate, he had enlisted in December 1914. During the November attack he was hit in the hip by a machine-gun bullet and lay in a shallow trench. ‘Gunther ran out to me. As I looked round he fell and I saw the rip at the back of his jacket where the bullet had gone out. He died almost at once. A private soldier shot through both arms fell at the same time, and together we lay until the battle had gone ahead and the stretcher bearers turned up. I was in too much pain to be picked up, and dragged myself on to the stretcher.’
Carstairs was then carried, as he later wrote, ‘for a mile or two over broken country by two medical corps men and two German prisoners. It seemed we would never reach the end of our journey. Every step was a jolt and every jolt intense pain. We reached a field which looked like a battlefield, so many wounded lay about—British and Germans. I heard someone say, “That house is mined” which explained our being put down in a field. It was now late in the afternoon. I was so cold that my fingers stuck out stiff and numb and I couldn’t move them. I had milk chocolate in my pocket and gave it away. It was dusk when a horse ambulance picked me up. The bridges blown up, horse ambulances were being used to ford the stream.’
On reaching the Casual Clearing Station, Carstairs ‘was put down in a courtyard, while a Padre said, “Anyone want any tea? If you’ve been shot in the stomach, don’t drink it as it will kill you.” I drank five cups of tea and felt revived.’
***
Behind the lines, the German naval mutiny was spreading. On November 4, at Kiel, thousands more sailors, many factory workers and 20,000 garrison troops joined the 3,000 mutineers of the previous day. Several thousand sailors travelled from Kiel to Berlin, to raise the flag of mutiny there. On November 5 the sailors in Lübeck and Travemünde declared their adherence to the revolution. On the following day the sailors in Hamburg, Bremen, Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven did likewise. From his military headquarters at Spa, the Kaiser considered sending combat troops to retake Kiel, but was dissuaded from doing so by those around him.
On November 4 the Allied commanders met to plan their next attacks. The French were to launch an assault into Lorraine in ten days’ time, on November 14. The Americans agreed to provide six divisions for this task, provided that they constituted a separate American army. Meanwhile, inside Germany and Austria the calls for revolution were growing. ‘Germany has caught fire and Austria is burning out of control’ was Lenin’s comment on November 6. That day, in Berlin, the German socialist leader Friedrich Ebert proposed that the Kaiser, who was still at Spa, should abdicate ‘today, or at the latest, by tomorrow’.
***
The American army, continuing its successful November 1 offensive on the Meuse, reached the bank of the river opposite Sedan on November 6: in the rapidity and confusion of the advance, Douglas MacArthur, commanding an infantry brigade, was taken prisoner by his own side. Thinking he was a German officer, vigilant American sentries brought him in at pistol point. The mistake was quickly discovered, once MacArthur had taken off his unusual floppy hat and long scarf. It was a day of growing confusion, conflicting orders, units marching one into another, and a rapidly growing, chronic shortage of supplies. In one division horses were in such short supply that men had to be harnessed to wagons to pull them towards the front. But chaos in the rear areas, combined with warnings that the medical personnel were at ‘the breaking point’, could not mask the scale of the victory. That same day Canadian troops entered Belgium, taking 1,750 German prisoners on the soil that Germany had occupied for just over four years.
Returning to Spa on November 6 after four days at the Front, General Groener warned the Kaiser in person, and the Chancellor by telegram, that an armistice must be signed at the latest by Saturday the 9th. ‘Even Monday will be too late,’ Groener warned. His survey of the situation, based on his personal experiences of the past few days, was a grim one: the fleet was in mutiny, revolution was imminent, and the Government’s authority had fallen so low that troops would refuse to fire on revolutionaries.
On the following morning, November 7, the German armistice delegates gathered at Spa. The Centre Party leader, Matthias Erzberger, a member of Prince Max’s Government, had with great reluctance agreed to lead the delegation, thereby (as we now know) signing his own death warrant. So uncertain was it that Erzberger would actually have the courage to cross into the French lines that a virtually unknown officer, General von Gündell, had been told to be ready to take his place. That morning Foch received a wireless message from the German Supreme Command, giving the names of the envoys, and asking that, ‘in the interest of humanity’ their arrival in France ‘might cause a provisional suspension of hostilities’. Foch ignored this request. At midday the delegation left Spa for the front, crossing on to French-controlled territory. There, they were told that the negotiations would take place in the Forest of Compiègne.
On the battlefield the soldiers were still fighting, as they had done every day for more than four years. But news of the arrival of the German delegates on French soil stimulated a sudden rumour behind the lines that the war was over. That afternoon, in Brest harbour, French sailors threw their caps in the air to exuberant cries of ‘Fini la guerre!’ and guns fired in celebration. An American journalist in the port, Roy Howard, who was about to sail for America, telegraphed to the United Press office in New York that the armistice had been signed at eleven that morning and that hostilities had ceased at two in the afternoon. He added for good measure that American troops had ‘taken Sedan’ that morning.
Because of the five-hour time difference, Howard’s telegram arrived in New York in time to be taken up by that day’s afternoon editions:
PEACE
FIGHTNIG ENDS
was the bold headline of the San Diego Sun that day, the compositor having misspelt ‘fighting’ in his enthusiasm. In hundreds of towns throughout the United States celebrations began. In New York, Enrico Caruso appeared at the window of his hotel and sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ to an ecstatic crowd. In Chicago an opera rehearsal was halted when a Belgian tenor burst on to the stage and cried, amid tears of joy, ‘Stop! Stop! Peace has been declared’, whereupon the orchestra played first ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and then the national anthems of all the Allied belligerents.
During the afternoon and evening of November 7, the news of the signing of armistice was reported in Cuba, the Argentine and Australia, leading to widespread celebrations and rejoicing. When the news reached Washington, excited crowds converged on the White House, calling for the President. His wife urged him to show himself on the portico and greet the crowds. Knowing that the news must be false, he declined to do so. Meanwhile, a telegram reached Howard from the United Press office in Paris: ‘Armistice report untrue. War Ministry issues absolute denial and declares enemy plenipotentiaries to be still on way through lines. Cannot meet Foch until evening.’
On the Western Front, the advance of the Allied armies continued throughout the day, but so did German resistance. When patrols of the American 42nd Division entered the villages of Torcy and Wadelincourt, just across the river Meuse from Sedan, they were forced back by intense German artillery and machine-gun fire.
***
In Berlin the majority Socialist deputies in the Reichstag were demanding the Kaiser’s resignation. When that was refused, they resigned en bloc from the Reichstag and called for a general strike throughout Germany. In Munich, Kurt Eisner, a Prussian Jew and follower of Lenin, who in his professional life was the theatre critic of the Münchener Post, declared the establishment of a Bavarian Soviet Republic. In Cologne, revolutionary sailors seized the city, raising the Red flag as it had earlier been raised at Kiel.
The Kaiser was in despair at the collapse of his country, and of the imperial system which had been created by his grandfather and Bismarck a half century earlier. When Prince Max begged him over the telephone to abdicate, he shouted his refusal down the line. Late on the evening of November 8, Admiral von Hintze reached Spa, to tell him that his beloved navy would no longer obey his orders. The Kaiser, who for four years had been the symbol of the warmaking zeal of the Central Powers, was broken, his proud imperial world in ruins.