Armistice: When Is Over Over?
Armistice Day - which is marked today for the 109th time since the original ceasefire came into force in 1918 - continues to be widely recognised in the West, especially in the UK where a sober pomp (now mainly on Remembrance Sunday) still accompanies a highly popular commemoration. The reasons for this longevity are not entirely obvious, given that armistices are essentially ceasefires and don't officially end wars: peace treaties are necessary to achieve that. After all, over 73 years later, there is still an armistice in place in Korea, which shows no signs of halting the tensions between North and South, and it has not stopped the North intimidating the world with fresh nuclear tests and repeated missile-firings across its neighbours' territory. Equally, the division of Cyprus along the so-called Green Line, established after a 1974 ceasefire in the long-running conflict between the island's Turkish and Greek communities, has still not resolved the dispute. It's arguable that the 1918 armistice, while offering a merciful respite from four years of fighting for soldiers on all sides, was perhaps not quite the landmark moment its continuing commemoration suggests.
No End To The Fighting
In the first place, it did not instantly stop more bloodshed, for the ceasefire at 11 a.m. on 11 November only applied to the Western Front. So fighting continued in other theatres (this was a world war) until similar ceasefires could be arranged locally. On the German East African front, for example, it took another two weeks for the fighting to stop. In some places - the Baltics, Bolshevik Russia, the Middle East - the war and its effects lingered on with ferocious violence for several more years. Even on the Western Front, the casualty rate for 11 November surpassed the daily average, with almost 11000 dead, wounded and missing, of whom over 2,700 were fatalities. The figures don't tell us how many of these casualties came after the 11 a.m. deadline, or indeed between the signing of the armistice (5 a.m. that day) and the deadline. But it's clear that some parts of the front received the ceasefire order later than others, while some troops went on fighting regardless in order either to avoid having to haul back their spare shells (in the case of the artillery) or to seize yet more ground before they stopped firing - a charge levelled against General Jack Pershing and the American Expeditionary Force, which suffered some 3,500 casualties on the day, 320 of them deaths. Congress would later open an investigation into what exactly had happened with the AEF on armistice day.
Was Germany Let Off the Hook?
A more compelling argument against the armistice of 1918 is that it allowed the Germans to stop fighting at a point where, after the Allies' successful advance of the so-called '100 Days', their forces had utterly collapsed and were surrendering to the enemy in their tens of thousands - junior officers calmly leading their units out of their trenches to hand themselves in. This, of course, looked like a mass German surrender, which it was, but the fact that the Allied armies did not then march into Germany, pushing the Kaiser's troops before them in retreat, enabled the German army to say later that they had never been defeated. After the armistice, they could say, their soldiers had withdrawn (as the ceasefire agreement stipulated) from those territories they still held (in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine) and marched back to their home barracks in Germany in good order - witnessed by great crowds of German civilians who lined the streets cheering and waving to welcome back their men as if they had won the war not lost it. Thus were sown the seeds of the insidious lie, disseminated by post-war German conservative and right-wing groups, which came to be known as 'The Stab in the Back': Germany had been defeated not on the battlefield but by its own elected politicians (the left-leaning Social Democrat government), who had humiliated the country by signing first a defeatist ceasefire and then a crushing peace settlement in 1919. It was this false narrative that Hitler would later exploit to such good effect to repudiate Versailles and revive German nationalist ambitions. It's not difficult, in this light, to see how for both sides (Germany and the Franco-British alliance in particular) World War Two could be regarded as resolving 'unfinished business'.
The Ceasefire Dilemma
Of course, it's undeniable that the armistice in 1918 also saved many lives by stopping the fighting rather than letting it continue into another year (though, tragically, many who survived the battlefield died a short time later in the Spanish 'flu pandemic then raging). There is a dilemma here faced by warring sides: at least an armistice cuts short the killing so that negotiations can take place; on the other hand, if the ceasefire is not in good faith, is merely an excuse to stockpile more weapons and regroup, or to fortify captured territory, then it simply extends the war, making it even harder to stop. This is clearly one of Ukraine's present fears in its conflict with Russia: a ceasefire would be welcomed by hard-pressed Ukrainian soldiers and civilians alike, but is Putin to be trusted not to exploit it?
It Suited Both Sides in 1918
The armistice of 1918 worked because both sides needed it. The German army on the Western Front were genuinely on the ropes: Hindenburg had no choice but to try to end the fighting, otherwise the Allies might well advance all the way into Germany itself. But, in fact, the Allies were equally keen to stop: removing the Germans from territory they'd invaded was one thing, occupying Germany was quite another - it might entail many more months, maybe years, of fighting. And, besides, after four years the Allies' war-weary populations and exhausted economies couldn't take much more either. So both sides were happy to cut their losses. The fact that the Allies were the real winners of the war emerged in the subsequent Paris peace negotiations. The Allies made sure to maintain their naval blockade of Germany to put pressure on the Germans to accept the peace they were offered. In the end, they were given no option, could not even discuss the terms, could only sign them. In hindsight, that was probably a humiliation too far.
If you think you know about the two world wars, think again.
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