The Armistice

 

 By the year 1914 European culture had arrived at its highest point. But the nations were jostling for supremacy, like kids on the playground. Kids with guns. It was a fight to the finish and four years later all the participants were either dead or wounded and that high civilization is still in limbo.

  On this day in 1918 the nations came together to stop the fighting so they could work on a peace treaty. The Allies, Britain, France, and the United States, had the upper hand. Germany and Austria had done well at first. Before the U.S. entered the war Germany had to fight off Russia too. When Russia fell into revolution and withdrew from the war, Germany might have come out on top. But Germany foolishly drew the U.S. into the war.

  By the Fall of 1918, the Allies were approaching German lines in a pincer movement. The German people were on the verge of starvation and were sick of the war, though the army was ready to keep fighting. A revolution took place in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated and Germany became a republic. 

  The armistice negotiations took place in a railway carriage that belonged to General Foch, commander of the French Army. The carriage was taken to a secluded spot in the Forest of Compiègne fifty miles north of Paris to avoid the press. The Germans and the Allies signed the armistice agreement at 5:45 am on November 11th but the cease fire wasn’t official until 11:00 am. It was like two gunfighters trying to  agree  who would put his gun down first. In that five hour gap 2,738 more soldiers died, adding to the almost nine million who had already been killed on both sides.

  The rail carriage the armistice was signed in was later put in a museum in Paris, then returned to a new building in the forest where the armistice had been signed. A Glade of the Armistice was constructed around the building celebrating the defeat of Germany.

  When the German Army defeated France 22 years later, Hitler had the carriage removed from the building and returned to the exact spot where it had been in 1918 so a new Armistice of Compiègne could be signed. Hitler then had the glade obliterated and moved the carriage to a museum in Berlin.

  In 1945 as the Allies were moving through Germany, the carriage was removed to a more secure location. As the Allies approached that spot, the German soldiers burned the carriage. When the war was over, the French found an identical carriage and put it in a new building with a new glade. 

  After World War II, for the sake of a better peace, the Allies built their defeated enemies up instead of humiliating them. It’s too bad we forgot that lesson after we won the Cold War.

Carriage of Shame

who would put down his gun first