Under a cloud of fog and drizzle, official delegates of the French, German, British, and American governments met at the Allied headquarters near Rethondes, France, at 5 A.M. on November 11, 1918 and finally signed the Armistice. The people of all Europe and the United States hoped and prayed that this was the end of the Great War. Two days earlier, on November 9, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany had abdicated and fled to the Netherlands. Prince Max of Beden, the newly appointed German chancellor, had immediately admitted defeat. Word swiftly passed along the front — at 11 A.M., all battles should stop. As the news flashed worldwide, the jubilant celebrations began.
Celebrating the Armistice
Church bells pealed from city to city across the European continent when they heard the news. Outside the doors of the Red Cross in Paris, the streets thronged with people flowing toward the city center, singing and cheering with flags bearing the stars and stripes or the French tricolor. Some folks started to sing France’s national anthem, the "Marseillaise," but were so choked with emotion that they had to stop. Old men sobbed, while soldiers stood blank-faced and numbed by the sight of the elated celebration that contrasted so terribly with the devastation they had witnessed at the front.
Florence Harriman, a Red Cross volunteer, recalled,
If I had walked a hundred miles I would not have been tired. But I did not walk; something seemed to carry us along. In the evening we were still going and at cafe after cafe, we listened rapturously over and over again to the girls who stood on the tables and sang the national anthems. The war was over, and it seemed as if everything in the world were possible, and everything was new, and that peace was going to be what we had dreamed about.
The bells rang on the American home front, too. "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was sung alongside choruses of the "Marseillaise," then Britain’s and Italy’s anthems. As the news spread from person to person in cities across the United States, there was dancing in the streets to celebrate that the Great War had ended.
But their jubilant celebrations were clouded by the memory of what the war had cost in terms of human lives. The losses had been staggering. The war dead totalled almost thirteen million people; more than twenty million were wounded or maimed. Many more were missing or held as prisoners. The dead, wounded, and missing included not only soldiers, but civilians of all ages.
Americans believed that their idealistic president, their war hero, had brought the war to a close with his Fourteen Points for Peace. Woodrow Wilson, hoping for "Peace without Victory," had indeed brought the warring nations together — a difficult task when the Allies were insisting on claiming the end of the war as a victory and demanding just retribution against the losers. But Wilson was about to discover that the Armistice would be easier to settle than passage of his Fourteen Points. The Allied nations, which had lost so much in the way of their humanity, their historical landmarks, and their homes, were hungry for punitive action against Germany and the other Central Powers responsible for the atrocities that had been committed during the war.
When President Wilson originally announced the war’s end, he proclaimed, "The arbitrary power of the military caste of Germany, which once could secretly and of its own choice disturb the peace of the world, is discredited and destroyed…." He vowed never to let war happen again.
