by Lloyd, Nick
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.
Epilogue
No more slaughter, no more maiming, no more mud and blood and no more killing and disembowelling of horses and mules – which was what I found most difficult to bear. No more of those hopeless dawns with the rain chilling the spirits, no more crouching in inadequate dug-outs scooped out of trench walls, no more dodging of snipers’ bullets, no more of that terrible shell-fire. No more shovelling up bits of men’s bodies and dumping them into sandbags; no more cries of ‘Stretcher-bear-ERS!’, and no more of those beastly gas-masks and the odious smell of pear-drops which was
deadly to the lumps, and no more writing of those dreadfully difficult letters to the next-of-kin of the dead.
Lieutenant R. G. Dixon1
The Armistice brought forth mixed feelings. Of course there was joy – joy that one had survived – but the immensity of the war with its endless slaughter and waste brought only a kind of numbness, like the unearthly wall of silence that broke out along the Western Front at eleven o’clock on that fateful November morning. For four and a half years, Europe had been ablaze. At least ten million soldiers had died. Perhaps another twenty million had been wounded or scarred for ever. Large parts of Poland, the Balkans and Western Europe had been utterly wrecked. The devastation was probably worse in northeastern France, where the German retreat had left a ghostly zone of razed villages and burning towns. Roads and tracks had been torn up; bridges had been felled; mines had been flooded; factories had been stripped down and transported to Germany. But perhaps more lasting than the physical destruction and human carnage produced by the war was the destruction of the certainties of an earlier age. Four empires – Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey, the Kaiser’s Germany and Austro-Hungary – had collapsed into a sea of conflicting nationalities and ethnic groups all vying for power and influence. The Armistice may have brought the fighting to an end, but, in one form or another, the war would go on.
For many it was, initially at least, hard to grasp that the fighting was actually over. One British soldier remembered that:
The full impact of the cease-fire took a long time to sink in. The War had become so much a part of our lives that it seemed impossible there would from now on be no need to carry a tin hat and a gas mask everywhere, nor a rifle, nor to walk about slightly bent ready to fall flat at the whine of an approaching shell. The mind was incapable of immediately grasping the tremendous single fact that the fighting was over . . .2