The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month will always be ‘the Armistice’, a moment when we try to imagine the silence falling over the western front as the guns fell silent after four years and three months of hellish slaughter. Less remembered is that the word implies only a temporary cessation of war, and although the Allies treated it as a surrender, a 21-year truce was all it turned out to be.
In October the Austro-Hungarian and German governments separately proposed an armistice to US Pres Wilson, preliminary to a peace conference based on his ‘Fourteen Points’. There was some delay occasioned by the fact that the Allies were emphatically not in agreement with Wilson's vision of a New World Order, Clemenceau fairly commenting that the good Lord himself had only ten points. Armistice with Austria-Hungary was signed in Vienna on 3 November and with Germany eight days later, in a railway carriage near Compiègne, hostilities ceasing six hours later. The terms were those of a surrender: German evacuation of all occupied territory; evacuation of the west bank of the Rhine; acknowledgement of the Allies' right to claim damages; surrender of submarines and internment of the German fleet; abrogation of the Treaties of Bucharest and Brest-Litovsk; destruction of German aircraft, tanks, and artillery; return of POWs and deported civilians; 150, 000 railway cars, 5, 000 locomotives, and 5, 000 trucks to be given to the Allies. The Allied blockade was to be maintained until the signing of the peace treaty at the Versailles conference.
The German government hid behind the fig leaf that surrender had not been unconditional, an important component of the ‘stab in the back’ myth that was to help Hitler to power. In fact its armies were spontaneously disbanding and its population starving and beginning to die of influenza in numbers soon to rival those of the war. The Allies were to insist on ‘unconditional surrender’ in WW II, giving Hitler's opponents no prospect of a better deal if they got rid of him.
— Paul Cornish/Hugh Bicheno
