A successor of Frederick the Great does not abdicate.
Kaiser Wilhelm II1
5–11 November 1918
Shortly after 7 a.m. on 8 November, Foch’s Chief of Staff, Maxime Weygand, noticed a red light moving slowly through the mist. It was all he could see of the train that was carrying the German Armistice Commission, and thus the fate of Germany, to the small station of Rethondes in the forest of Compiègne.2 The delegation had been hastily cobbled together by Prince Max two days earlier after he had received a note from President Wilson confirming that he was willing to make peace. Because the Allies had accepted the Fourteen Points (apart from reservations on the clause relating to freedom of the seas and over reparations), Foch was now authorized to communicate those terms with any German delegates.3 Groener told Max that they could no longer delay direct armistice talks and, with the Army threatening to collapse at any moment, they would have to cross the lines with a white flag. Prince Max baulked at doing this so soon, fearing that any terms would be too severe, but in the end he agreed, managing to persuade the leader of the Catholic Party in the Reichstag, the Secretary of State, Matthias Erzberger, to lead the delegation. He hoped that by sending Erzberger, a man of courage and integrity with a track record of working for peace, the terms could be softened.
Gradually the train came into view and then stopped with a hiss of steam. Shortly afterwards Weygand saw them. There were six of them in total, led by Erzberger, who was dressed in a long black coat. He was accompanied by a military representative, Major-General Hans von Winterfeldt, a diplomat, Count Oberndorff, and three military advisers.4 The men were already exhausted, but knew that hours of tense and detailed negotiation lay ahead of them. They had spent the night travelling and had been much delayed, such was the traffic on the roads leading to and from the front. They had crossed no-man’s-land under a white flag the previous evening and been picked up by a French patrol outside La Capelle in General Debeney’s sector. From there they had driven through the town of Guise, avoiding the shell holes and dead horses, and past the columns of troops – the grey-faced poilus – and trucks moving up to the front ready to continue the offensive. At the appointed time a guard showed them the way, along a boardwalk through a grove of trees, to the Marshal’s personal train, where they boarded and prepared to see what was on offer, to see whether Germany would receive her ‘peace of justice’ or not. The German Armistice Commission had arrived.
Foch was waiting for them. He was dressed in a long horizon-bleu coat and képi, leaning heavily on a cane, with a stern look upon his face. Beside him was Weygand, his loyal, attentive ghost, followed by Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss, Chief of the British naval detachment (who was accompanied by two other Royal Navy officers) and their interpreters. When they were settled, the Generalissimo began. His tone was sharp, his manner severe. He asked, what was the purpose of their visit? Erzberger looked across at Foch and replied that they had come ‘to receive the proposals of the Allied Powers looking to an armistice on land, on sea and in the air on all fronts’. Foch replied that he had no proposals to make and when Count Oberndorff queried this, with a confused look on his face, the Generalissimo snapped back.
‘Do you ask for an armistice? If you do, I can inform you of the conditions subject to which it can be obtained.’
Yes, Erzberger and Oberndorff nodded, they asked for an armistice.
Foch ordered the terms, which had been agreed at Versailles four days earlier, to be read aloud. Although the reading only included the principal clauses, this took some time. The Allies demanded the cessation of hostilities within six hours of any agreement, the evacuation of occupied France and Belgium (including Alsace-Lorraine) within two weeks, and the surrender of thousands of machine-guns, artillery pieces and aircraft, as well as rolling stock and military stores. Weygand, who read these terms aloud, found this the most emotional part of the proceedings. When he explained that the Allies would also march into the left bank of the Rhine and occupy Mainz, Coblenz and Cologne, he noticed that General von Winterfeldt’s face turned ‘deathly pale’ and Captain Helldorf’s eyes filled with tears.5 Once the conditions had been read, Erzberger asked for an immediate suspension of military operations. He cited the growth of revolutionary spirit in Germany and the urgent need to prevent more people from suffering in these final hours. If the fighting could stop, he pleaded, the German Army could reform and re-establish discipline in the Fatherland. But Foch was unimpressed. Bolshevism was, he said, ‘the usual disease prevailing in beaten armies’ and Western Europe would look after itself. Therefore, there would be no suspension of military activity, no let-up in the offensives, until Germany had accepted the Allied demands. One of the German delegation, Captain Helldorf, was handed a copy of the armistice conditions, and then set out, on the long road back to Spa, to deliver them in person to the Supreme Command.6
As Erzberger’s team were getting to grips with the Allied demands, the German war effort began to collapse with alarming speed. In Berlin, Philip Scheidemann noted that ‘If hitherto one had only heard the cracking of the main joints of the Empire, now a cracking of the smaller ones was distinctly audible.’7 On 4 November, the day Wilfred Owen was killed, sailors mutinied at Kiel. Revolution then began to spread across Germany’s northern coast and within days Lübeck, Cuxhaven, Hanover and Hamburg fell to sailors flying the red flag of Bolshevism, demanding an immediate armistice and an end to military dictatorship. What troops there were on hand remained sullen and immobile, unwilling to fire upon their fellow Germans and waiting, uneasily, for the response from Berlin. On 8 November, as Prince Max tried desperately to hold the country together at the end of telegraph and telephone lines that flickered and failed like the struggles of a dying man, the Social Democrats issued their ultimatum. Unless the Kaiser and the Crown Prince went, they would walk out of the Government. That night Prince Max received word that the revolution was continuing to spread. Brunswick and Munich had already gone. The authorities in Stuttgart had handed over power to Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils and Cologne was expected to fall into revolutionary hands that night. It was even rumoured that sailors were marching on Berlin.
That evening, Prince Max, carrying the burden of an empire on his shoulders, spoke to the Kaiser, through a crackly telephone line. His abdication had become necessary to save Germany, he said.
‘We are steering straight for civil war,’ he warned. ‘I have struggled against admitting it, but the position is today untenable; the abdication would be received with universal relief and hailed as a liberating and a healing act.’
But the Kaiser refused to listen. He would remain at the head of his army and utterly rejected all calls for his abdication. When Prince Max offered his resignation, saying that he did not command the confidence of the Kaiser, Wilhelm refused.
‘You sent out the armistice offer,’ he raged, ‘you will have to put your name to the conditions!’
The Chancellor backed down, chastened and heavy with remorse. He would remain in office until the Armistice was signed.8
At Compiègne, the discussions continued into the following day, 9 November. Erzberger handed Foch a paper on the armistice conditions that had been drafted by his team. It contained a series of complaints and counter-arguments to Foch’s terms, warning of the danger that the Allied demands were too severe, and again stressing the urgent need to give the German Army a break so that it could return home and restore order. This would become a familiar German refrain, one that they would repeat with ever more desperation, but it impressed no one. Foch brushed it aside with his customary disdain, and kept asking Erzberger whether he had received an answer from Berlin and whether he had been empowered to sign the Armistice or not. Erzberger would look depressed and shake his head; no, he would reply, he had not heard anything. In the German capital the atmosphere was ‘oppressive and sultry’, like the moments before a storm. Scheidemann remembered how the big factories were ‘seething with excitement. The machines seemed to be working faster and the wheels grating louder. The shouts of the workers sounded angrier; the curses of the Spartacists and Communists against the Majority Socialists were more bitter; the furnaces grew hotter.’ Large meetings had been held across the city over the last few days and at the Reichstag the discussions over when the Kaiser would resign continued with ever greater urgency. Scheidemann even rang up the Chancellery that morning and asked if the Kaiser had gone. ‘Not yet,’ came the reply, ‘but we expect to hear at any moment.’9
9 November was the Kaiser’s last day at Spa. At midday his son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, arrived after having made the journey from his headquarters during the night. He was received by the Court Marshal, General von Gontard, whose face ‘wore a serious and very anxious look’. The Crown Prince immediately began asking questions about the situation, but all the general did was ‘to raise his hands helplessly’, a gesture that seemed to say far more than words could. He eventually found his father in the garden of his villa surrounded by a group of officers. ‘Never shall I forget the picture of that half-score of men in their grey uniforms, thrown into relief by the withered and faded flower-beds of ending autumn, and framed by the surrounding mist-mantled hills with their glorious foliages . . .’
The Kaiser stood there as though he had suddenly halted with them in the midst of a nervous pacing up and down. He was passionately excited, and addressing himself to those near him with violently expressive gestures. His eyes were upon General Groener and His Excellency von Hintze; but a glance was cast now and then at the Field Marshal General [Hindenburg], who, with his gaze fixed in the distance, nodded silently.10
The Kaiser seemed to have aged; his face was emaciated and sallow. As Ludendorff had done before him, he raged at the situation he was now in, seeking a way out only to find that the maze was now closed, the doors bolted; the only option was to abdicate. Telegrams from Germany and Austria added to the sense of urgency and panic at Spa. That morning Prince Max had informed him that the King of Bavaria and the Duke of Brunswick had renounced their thrones, and that the ‘overwhelming majority’ of the cabinet believed abdication was the only way of avoiding civil war.11
Discussions over what should be done had been raging at both the Kaiser’s villa and the Hôtel Britannique all morning. All of Prussia’s great warrior caste were there; the surviving remnants of an empire that stood on the brink of collapse, including Hindenburg and Groener, Paul von Hintze, Colonel Heye, and the Crown Prince’s Chief of Staff, Count Schulenberg; all airing their views and arguing over whether the Army would stand firm or not. The sense of time and history hung heavily upon them, like the thick fog that blanketed the forested hills around Spa. Some talked of the Kaiser leading the Army back to Germany in person, a kind of reconquista, purging the Fatherland of socialists and anarchists and restoring discipline and honour. Others suggested that he should go to the front, join his men in the trenches and die fighting, although it was pointed out that not only would this be highly dangerous, but also that suicide was unchristian and might bring the accusation that the Emperor had taken an easy route out of his difficulties. It was left to Groener to introduce a sense of realism into the proceedings. He talked at length, calmly and firmly, saying that any kind of campaign into Germany would not be possible given the unreliability of the troops and the fact that most of the bridges and railway stations were now in the hands of rebels. If it were done then civil war would almost certainly be the result.12
Groener knew the game was up. He may have been outshone by the dazzling brilliance of Ludendorff, but he had a much greater, earthier understanding of what the German Army was really going through. While many units would probably continue to fight, at least for now, he believed that they would never raise arms against their fellow countrymen, let alone if the Kaiser remained on the throne. On 5 November he had received a letter from the commander of 192nd Infantry Division, Major-General Löffler, who wrote to him not as the Quartermaster-General, but as an old friend.
My dear Groener, I am writing to you because, from the General Headquarters, insight into the troops doesn’t penetrate deeply enough to measure combat strength by its actual value. As a result, a tone or a shade of vital importance can be missing or not distinct enough in the overall general impression. The strength of the troops is running out. You know me well enough to know that I am not a pessimist. My division hasn’t had a single day of rest since the beginning of May. For weeks and months on end only bivouacs have been possible. There has been no talk of proper sanitizing, delousing, and the like for just as long. At the same time, the troops have been taking part in the fighting and battles along the Aire River for three months; from there they stumbled into the Saint-Mihiel sweep shortly before the crisis there, and for the past eleven days they have been in sustained combat just east of the Meuse. Every man has been committed for the duration, almost without exception. The combat situation or the weakness of the troops after losses has not afforded the retreat of even the smaller companies. As a result of bloody losses of about 7,000 men since the middle of May, particularly in the ranks and in the infantry, the units are no longer as well-formed as before.
Löffler warned Groener that the end was near:
From what I have been able to gather, it has been the same with every other division. Yet we’ve done our part. Every day brings proof of that. The moment of overturning is, however, no doubt approaching. It is no longer a matter of weeks. Eventually there comes a time when every action fails due to fatigue. It is into this state that we are now entering.13
Groener would never be forgiven for what many diehards saw as his treachery on 9 November. They claimed that his pessimism, his defeatism, meant that the Kaiser received an incorrect view of the army’s capabilities and gave in when it should have fought on. General Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg, the Crown Prince’s ultra-loyal Chief of Staff and a former member of the Corps de Garde – a man who had clashed with Groener before – spoke for the diehards. He rubbished Groener’s claims and argued that the Army was holding and only needed rest. If it could be given an opportunity to refresh, to have ‘a good night’s sleep’, to reform its shattered ranks, then it would continue to fight, particularly once it had been told how shamelessly it was being betrayed by traitors and Bolsheviks at home. However, if an armistice was signed, he warned them that it would be very difficult to rouse the men to fight again.14 The Kaiser, as befitted his notoriously fragile character, was unsure. He was buoyed by Schulenberg’s staunch defence of the imperial throne and his words about the Army remaining loyal, but knew Groener was not a man to be taken lightly. For his part, the Quartermaster-General explained at length, again and again, that it was too late to restore order at home, that it would be hopeless to take up the fight against the rebels and that, in any case, the Army was no longer loyal to His Majesty.
At one point, when Groener had, once again, reaffirmed his belief that Schulenberg did not understand the difficulties of the situation and that the army’s loyalty had gone, Wilhelm lost his temper. He walked up to Groener – ‘his eyes blazing with anger’ – and said that he must prove his statement by asking the army commanders.15
‘The army,’ said Groener, now also becoming angry, ‘will march back to Germany, peacefully and orderly, under its commanders and commanding generals, but not at the command of Your Majesty because it no longer supports Your Majesty.’
Groener’s stand took courage; more courage than he was ever given credit for. He later admitted that he spoke ‘rather more sharply’ than he should have done; his patience failing him ‘in the face of such unrealistic notions’. ‘Even this brusque word from me was no more than a warning from the bottom of my heart to the Kaiser not to clutch at straws,’ he wrote. ‘If one of the men present had gunned me down at that moment, it wouldn’t have come as any surprise to me, since these words were a monstrosity in a circle such as this, in which only old Hindenburg (and only with the greatest of difficulty) mustered up the levelheadedness to see things as they really were.’ It may have been more prudent for Groener to have kept quiet, but his words were necessary to banish what he called the ‘political fantasy world’ that the Kaiser and his staff, as well as loyalists like Schulenberg, inhabited. Groener’s dour realism, combined with his understanding of what it was really like at the front, may not have won him any friends at Spa, but the thousands of German soldiers in the trenches had cause to thank him. Finally, after all the dreams and illusions of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the German Army had found a sense of reality and objectivity. The man from Württemberg had delivered the coup de grâce.16
The Kaiser was understandably shaken by what Groener had said. He muttered something about getting this in writing from his generals, but it never came to that. Instead a group of chosen officers who had arrived at Spa that morning were consulted. It had originally been intended that fifty soldiers from the three main army groups should attend meetings on the state of the Army, but only thirty-nine had made it, with many being delayed on the roads, itself an indication of the crumbling supply lines behind the front. Wilhelm Heye, the Chief of Operations at OHL, was given the delicate task of speaking to them. After they had assembled, some still in their muddy uniforms, almost all exhausted, he asked them a series of questions. Whether they realized it or not, the future of the empire rested on their answers. What was their attitude to the Emperor and to Bolshevism? Were they willing to march back behind the Kaiser and re-conquer the homeland? Amid a stunned, uncomprehending silence, a vote was held. On the question of whether it would be possible to regain control of Germany alongside the Kaiser, only one officer said yes, a Major von Kretschmann, Adjutant of 36th Infantry Division in Sixth Army. But his was a lone voice. Twenty-three officers were against it, while 15 were unsure. On the second question, of whether they would be willing to fight against the Bolsheviks, 8 officers thought not, 19 were doubtful, but 12 thought that a period of rest was essential before any further campaign was begun.17 Heye took their replies and reported to the Kaiser. An immediate armistice was essential, he said. ‘The troops remain loyal to His Majesty, but they are tired and indifferent and want nothing except rest and peace. At the present moment they would not march against Germany, even with Your Majesty at their head. They would not march against Bolshevism. They want one thing only – an armistice at the earliest possible moment.’18
Sometime around 1 p.m. the Kaiser finally agreed to abdicate from the imperial throne, but not as the King of Prussia; a constitutional nonsense, but one which salvaged some of his pride. He sent a short telegram to Berlin and told them that the Armistice Commission was now empowered to conclude an agreement with the Allies immediately. He offered to resign from the imperial throne, but would remain as King of Prussia with Hindenburg taking over as Supreme Commander. ‘The Army Commanders and the Supreme Command,’ he stated, ‘are of the opinion that the abdication of the German Kaiser and Supreme War Lord at this moment will provoke the gravest convulsions in the army, and they can therefore no longer assume responsibility for the Army holding together.’19 As the telegram was being drafted, the Kaiser and his staff had lunch, although, as the Crown Prince later noted, it was not a happy one.
That silent meal, in a bright, white room whose table was decked with flowers but surrounded only by bitter anguish and despairing grief, is among the most horrible of my recollections. Not one of us but masked his face, not one who did not make fitful attempts, for that half-hour, to hide his uneasiness and not to talk of the phantom that lurked behind him and could not for a single moment be forgotten. Every mouthful seemed to swell and threaten to choke the eater. The whole meal resembled some dismal funeral repast.20
If the Kaiser felt some pride in remaining stubborn to the end, in never giving in completely to his opponents, and ensuring that he would stay with his army, it was to be short-lived. Just after 2 p.m., as the Kaiser’s last supper was being cleared up, General von Plessen, the General-Adjutant, called His Majesty away. An urgent communiqué had been received from Berlin. The abdication of His Majesty both from the imperial throne and as the King of Prussia (as well as that of his son) had just been announced by Prince Max. Scheidemann had even proclaimed the republic from the Chancellery.
There was a moment of stunned, disbelieving silence, which soon gave way to panic and loud protests as the news got around. There had been some great mix-up, some foul play, some horrific accident, that meant the wrong information had got out. Furious telegrams and phone calls began issuing from Spa as the Kaiser and his staff desperately tried to clarify his position and ensure that the correct information was passed on. The Kaiser was not abdicating from the throne of Prussia, they stated, and he would remain with the Army. Groener, as unruffled as ever, pointed out that there was little they could do in this situation. They sent a formal protest, but the news could not be reined in, no one was listening any more. The Kaiser, now broken in heart and spirit, was then told that there were increasing concerns for his personal safety. There were fears that groups of soldiers were making their way to Spa and rumours that the troops defending him were shaky in their loyalty. Heavy-hearted, and now recognizing that there was no way out, the Kaiser agreed to enter exile in Holland. It was arranged that he would head for the border at five o’clock the following morning. As he was leaving, he bid farewell to Groener, curtly and angrily.
‘You are a Württemberg general; when I am no longer Kaiser, I will have nothing more to do with you.’21
The reign of the Hohenzollerns, once the most feared throne in Europe, had come to an end, not under a great wave of blood and revolution, but fitfully, in confusion, with a whimper.
As Foch had made clear, until the German delegation signed the Armistice, the war would go on, and so it did. For the British and French Armies in the north, progress was steady, but becoming ever more difficult. Wet weather made the roads difficult to pass and the extensive destruction left by the retreating German Army only added to the problems facing Haig and Pétain’s forces. Almost everywhere soldiers got used to the sight of lorries lying helplessly in deep shell holes or stacked up behind the lines unable to move along the sodden roads. Walter Guinness, a staff officer with 66th Division, noted with resigned fatalism the ‘downpours of rain’ they had on 6 November as they were getting ready to cross the Sambre. On one march to the front, with his uniform wet through and water pattering on his tin helmet, Guinness found ‘much difficulty in distinguishing between the shallow puddle and the shellholes four or five feet deep and it was quite impossible even to ride at more than a walk’. Getting food up to the front was a constant worry. The night before they had had to wait four hours at divisional HQ for a sober meal of bully beef and dried bread as the mess lorry had taken six hours to cover the six miles from their supply dump. ‘Everyone in the battle is soaked to the skin,’ he admitted, ‘which of course stops things even quicker than bullets.’22
The weather was a constant annoyance, but it was the extensive destruction which the Germans had meted out to French villages, roads and railway tracks in their efforts to impede their pursuers that slowed the Allies down more than anything. A report by the British First Army complained that:
The roads on the whole front of the Army, although numerous on the map, are seldom fit for heavy traffic under the most favourable conditions, and the enemy had destroyed both roads and railways very thoroughly. There was scarcely a bridge over a stream or canal which had not been destroyed and few cross-roads at which a crater had not been blown.23
The following day, Guinness complained about the number of wrecked bridges and railway crossings they came across, as well as delayed-action mines that exploded, which again cut their supply lines, and in some places threatened to sever the delivery of food up to the troops in the lead; a situation exacerbated by the need to feed the thousands of destitute civilians they had liberated. The amount of labour that it took to repair the destruction caused during the German retreat was remarkable. It was dangerous, backbreaking and exhausting work. William Woods, serving with the Canadian Corps, remembered one railway where every second rail joint had been blown up. ‘This time, the railroad troops took over and cut the rail ends with hand hack saws, a man on each end of the saw. Another crew came along with two man-power drills and drilled the new rail ends . . . There was one dud still in place as we passed. They had used Minenwerfer trench mortar shells apparently exploded electronically.’24
9 November may have been a day of high drama in Berlin and Spa, but along the Western Front it was relatively quiet. The German armies were now in headlong retreat, still demolishing bridges and mining towns, still blowing up wells and firing off thousands of gas shells, but now with no hope of reversing the great tide of the war. That morning Major Carl Degelow, decorated hero of the Fatherland and renowned fighter ace, was awarded the Pour le Mérite. He had been summoned to the headquarters of Fourth Army by its commander, General der Infanterie Sixt von Armin. Degelow had claimed his last kill on 30 October, but by then the German Air Force was on its knees, lacking spare parts and ammunition, and suffering from a chronic lack of fuel, the few surviving pilots unable to contest the skies any more. ‘All around us we could see the war effort collapsing,’ he wrote sadly. ‘Although our ever-eastward trek was officially designated a “regroupment”, we knew the end was coming. The first rumours of communist-inspired take-overs of other units had already infiltrated our ranks. Horror stories of “soldiers’ councils” that condemned their officers to death made the blood run cold. It was therefore a time when strict discipline had to be enforced. When Headquarters issued an order, unit commanders such as myself were responsible for carrying it out – or suffering the consequences of a court-martial.’ Degelow later realized that he had been bestowed with the last Pour le Mérite ‘before the monarchy and all the pageantry of the once great German Empire passed into history’.25
More and more German soldiers were now giving in, packing up their equipment and heading to the rear, or surrendering in droves to Allied patrols. Increasing numbers of them were also on the verge of mutiny, forming local soldiers’ committees and negotiating conditions with their officers. On the Meuse, General von der Marwitz went to see Gallwitz on 10 November and told him that an armistice must be signed as soon as possible. The loss of the Barricourt Heights and the collapse of his divisions a week earlier had been an alarming portent of what was to come. His troops were no longer reliable and he had received news that a number of companies had refused to go into the line.26 He had good reason to be concerned. US divisions had reached Sedan on the night of 6–7 November, thus severing one of Germany’s two ‘arteries’ on the Western Front and making a major retreat now inevitable. On most sectors, there was no organized resistance as such to hold up forward patrols, only a handful of machine-gunners and snipers, and of course the usual smattering of mines and booby-traps. In any case, the Allies had enough problems clearing up the vast array of materiel – trucks, supplies and ammunition – that had been dumped in their path. The day after Captain Helldorf had come back through French lines on his way to Spa, Debeney’s First Army gained sixteen kilometres of ground. Its war diary recorded that there were ‘Numerous fires behind the enemy lines. The Germans beat a retreat in a great hurry throughout the day; their rearguards only gave weak resistance, and left behind considerable equipment.’27
The final hours witnessed more of the same, familiar struggles to get forward, more bad weather, endemic shelling that periodically swept across the front, and yet more terrifying moments of combat that could change a man for ever. A Marine, John Ausland, serving with 2nd US Division, came face to face with the enemy during a patrol on 10 November. His men were part of a number of American units that had been ordered to begin crossing the Meuse, which snaked its way northwest of the Argonne, before striking into Germany’s coal-producing areas. As their platoon was forming a skirmish line, they were shaken by the clatter of machine-gun fire coming from somewhere up ahead. Ausland’s men started running towards the sound, firing their rifles and Chauchats at the hip, when one of their men was shot. ‘The skirmish line was moving steadily to my right,’ he remembered, ‘so I kept right on going abreast of them . . . About 200 feet past the machine gun I saw a pair of hands come up out of the weeds then the head and then the whole German.’ Ausland was determined to kill him.
I suppose it was only a man or two, surely not the whole battalion, but the idea was firmly in my mind that I had to kill him, and as I walked toward him I aimed my rifle at him. When I got so close that the rifle was only 18 inches from his face I stopped. I don’t know why, but I was going to pull the trigger, and he knew I was, and he knew his hour had come. His hands came down and he mumbled something in German, and the look that came into his eyes I will remember forever.
But Ausland did not fire. One of his platoon ran up, out of breath, and told him to shoot, but he did not; he just grabbed the prisoner by the arm and pushed him to the rear, swearing at him in German. Through a thick fog they eventually reached their objective, a farmhouse, and dug in for the night. Ausland was exhausted and slept so soundly that he woke at noon the following day, thus missing – to his eternal frustration – what he called ‘the greatest moment in the world, to date, since that first Easter morning’.28
11 November dawned fine and cold, with a white frost covering everything. Wild rumours were doing the rounds at the front. Leutnant Karl Urmacher, retreating with his artillery battery, heard from a soldiers’ council that Foch had been assassinated, that Bolshevism had triumphed in England and France, and that Raymond Poincaré and Albert, the King of Belgium, had also been killed.29 None of this was true, but it lent a sinister air to the feelings of despair, depression and fear that were running through the German Army. At Foch’s railway carriage at Rethondes, Matthias Erzberger had received word from the German Government between seven and eight o’clock the previous evening. The new Chancellor, Friedrich Ebert – the leader of the majority Socialist Party – had taken over from Prince Max and acted immediately, informing Erzberger that he was empowered to sign the Armistice as soon as possible. Erzberger’s team spent an exhausting night with Foch and Weygand drawing up a definitive text of the Armistice agreement and then, once they were satisfied, agreed that it would come into force at 11 a.m. French time. This was only completed around five o’clock in the morning, which meant that there were only six hours to telegraph the news to the front and ensure that the fighting stopped.
In places the killing and maiming continued with seconds to go. The American Captain T. F. Grady was met by a runner at 10.30 that morning who told him that hostilities would cease in half an hour. At 10.55, with just five minutes left, a company on his right flank was hit by a high-explosive shell that killed twelve men.30 One of the last Allied soldiers to die was Private George Lawrence Price, serving with 2nd Canadian Division on the outskirts of the Belgian city of Mons. His detachment of 28th Battalion, led by Major B. Ross, was advancing through the streets, occasionally skirmishing with groups of German soldiers who would fire a few rounds and then scatter. Because they were so far forward, news that hostilities would cease that morning had not reached them. Shortly before eleven o’clock, they arrived at their objective for the day (the canal) when Private Price, who was a runner, asked one of his friends, Private Arthur Goodmurphy, whether he would be interested in investigating a number of brick houses further up ahead. ‘They looked like a wonderful place to stick a machine gun out of, you know,’ said Price, ‘or a sniper or a rifle or anything like that.’ Initially, Goodmurphy was not keen, but Price eventually persuaded him and they crossed the bridge without coming under fire, accompanied by three other men from their section.
Once they were on the other side of the canal, however, a German machine-gun opened up on them, forcing them to take cover. With one way totally impassable owing to the gunfire (which ‘knocked bricks off the house’), Price and Goodmurphy retraced their steps to see if there was another route out. Price had just muttered something about ‘how the Hell they were going to get back’ when a single rifle shot rang out. Goodmurphy wrote:
All of a sudden, bang, one shot came from one of these houses up on, way up the end of the street. It wasn’t an accidental shot, it was a sniper like, you know, got him right through the back and through the heart. He fell dead right in my arms there. I laid him down behind the fence. If there had been two there, he’d have got both of us. There should have been two there you know. If he’d fired at me he’d have got me, there was no doubt about that, he hit what he shot at.
When Major Ross found out he ‘blew a fuse’.
‘The war’s over . . . the war’s over!’ he shouted.
‘Well I can’t help that,’ replied Goodmurphy.
‘What the hell did you go across there for, you have no orders to go across there?’
‘We went across to see what was in those brick houses there, they look like good spots for somebody to pick us off there.’
Price died at 10.58 a.m., two minutes before the Armistice, leaving Goodmurphy distraught. ‘We never even thought about the war being over then you know. What we thought about was getting back to join our unit, you know, in case these guys pulled off an attack on us or something. We wanted to be on the other side of that river. Oh they said there was a rumour that the war was going to be over that day, just a rumour you know like, we had them before you know . . . we didn’t even think that the rumour was even a decent rumour you know, because we had heard it before.’ In the end, Price had been correct; it was a good spot for a sniper.31
On certain sectors of the front, it is possible that fighting continued for several hours after the Armistice – American accounts sometimes refer to combat up to 12.30 p.m.32 – but along most of the front eleven o’clock saw the end of hostilities. In the final few minutes, as furious runners and overworked wireless operators spread the word, the guns of both sides blasted away into the morning, shells shrieking through the sky and pounding into roads and tracks, trenches and dug-outs, villages and towns, as they had done for four years. And then it came, the Armistice; silent and hollow, strange and mysterious. The front-line soldiers, crouching in their shell holes or sheltering in ruined buildings, looked at each other from beneath their helmets as the firing ceased and the roar of shellfire abated. For many, they remained where they were, unsure of what would happen next, convinced perhaps that it was all some kind of treacherous ruse and that soon the shelling would resume and the killing would begin all over again. As a doughboy, Private Frank Groves, recalled:
At the front our days and nights were filled with the sounds and smells of the bombardment. Never were we free of it and we had learned to live with it. On November 11 at 11.00 a.m. those sounds and vibrations abruptly stopped. The quietness that followed was awesome; you could feel it – almost smell and taste it. There was no singing, no shouting, no laughter; we just stood around and looked and listened.33
Behind the lines, the news rarely provoked outright celebration. When the battery commander, Major F. J. Rice, got up that morning and was on his way to the regimental mess for breakfast, one of his men told him that ‘it was all over sir’. Orders had come in that hostilities would cease at 11 a.m. ‘All the officers took it very calmly,’ he recalled. After breakfast they managed to get their hands on a bottle of port and shared it with their NCOs. When they saw one of the sergeants walking across the gun park, they shouted out the news. The man merely halted, saluted, and said ‘very good, sir’, before continuing on, seemingly as unconcerned as ever.34
The American First-Lieutenant Clair Groover of 313th Infantry Regiment – the junior officer who had survived the assault on Montfaucon – remembered how the quietness that followed the Armistice ‘got to you’. ‘It was so unreal, that it disturbed you emotionally,’ he admitted. ‘Some of the hardest officers wept. It was so unusual that you would walk around without being shot at.’ Within moments he noticed German soldiers getting up out of their positions and moving out into the open. One of them came over and told him, with tears in his eyes, that his brother had been killed the day before and that he would like permission to locate and bury the body. Groover agreed. That night ‘all the troops along the line were treated to the greatest display of fireworks ever set off. Both sides were setting off their entire pyrotechnic supply of rockets, Very candles, red, blue, green, were sparkling in the air. The first few scared you and you would flatten out on the ground, forgetting that it was all over. That night there were camp fires all along the lines.’ That was it; it was over. ‘It was the end of the shooting war.’35
For Allied commanders, 11 November would be a memorable day, when the realization of what they had achieved began to sink in. Douglas Haig held a meeting in Cambrai with his army commanders and they discussed the importance of continuing the advance towards the German frontier, as well as the difficulties that might now arise with the troops. ‘Very often the best fighters are the most difficult to deal with in periods of quiet!’ said Haig. He suggested that it was the duty of all officers to keep their men occupied and to maintain training schedules. Afterwards the men were taken outside and filmed by a moving picture company, which the generals found very amusing. Haig told General Plumer, Second Army commander and his most senior officer, to ‘go off and be cinema’d’, which he did obediently, standing before the camera ‘trying to look his best, while Byng and others near him were chaffing the old man and trying to make him laugh’.36 The French Commander-in-Chief, Philippe Pétain, spent the day at the Grand Quartier Général in Provins, where he joined his commanders and staff officers in the local theatre, a ‘tiny and shabby, bare and cold’ building. Local soldiers and civilians had improvised a performance, and afterwards Pétain read out the victory communiqué, while a soldier ‘declaimed heroic poetry from the stage’.37
Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Generalissimo and man who had masterminded the campaign on the Western Front since the spring, left Rethondes for Paris at 7 a.m., with the Armistice conditions in his pocket. He handed them personally to Clemenceau later that morning before returning to his home, an apartment along the Avenue de Saxe, where joyous, victorious crowds awaited him. He was not, however, in the mood for celebration. He had sent Weygand to bed earlier, after being exhausted from thirty-six hours of continuous work, and spent the night sitting in his rocking chair, a rug across his knees, a lit cigarette between his fingers; deep in thought. He greeted Clemenceau with the prophetic words:
‘My work is finished. Your work begins.’38
It was a task that would remain with France for the next twenty-two years.