On the morning of November 11, 1918,
fighter pilot and leading American ace Eddie Rickenbacker quietly ambled to the
hangar of his aerodrome in France. The night before, in anticipation of the
Armistice, all Allied flights were grounded. But Rickenbacker was not known as
a rule-follower. He told his crew to roll out his SPAD XIII fighter plane
"and warm it up to test the engines." He climbed into the cockpit,
took off, and headed to the trenches of the Western Front. Low clouds kept him
low, around five hundred feet. He could see flashes of rifle and machine gun
fire from the German trenches.
And then it was 11:00 A.M., the
eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I was the only
audience for the greatest show ever presented. On both sides of no-man's-land,
the trenches erupted. Brown-uniformed men poured out of the American trenches,
gray-green uniforms out of the German. From my observer's seat overhead, I
watched them throw their helmets in the air, discard their guns, wave their
hands. Then all up and down the front, the two groups of men began edging
toward each other across no-man's-land. Seconds before they had been willing to
shoot each other; now they came forward. Hesitantly at first, then more
quickly, each group approached the other.
Suddenly gray uniforms mixed with
brown. I could see them hugging each other, dancing, jumping. Americans were
passing out cigarettes and chocolate. I flew up to the French sector. There it
was even more incredible. After four years of slaughter and hatred, they were
not only hugging each other but kissing each other on both cheeks as well.
Star shells, rockets and flares began to go up, and I
turned my ship toward the field. The war was over.
In memoirs, diary entries, and letters, we
find that for the fighters of the First World War, the Great thing about the
War was its end. In victorious countries, schools let out, impromptu parades
and rallies erupted. These outbursts recognized victory, to be sure, but they
chiefly celebrated the end of the war. My own grandmother recounted to me, more
than once and each time luminously, the ecstatic celebration in her little town
of Murray, Kentucky, where school was cancelled and virtually everyone in town
gathered in the courthouse square to celebrate. In my recollection, she never
mentioned the word "victory" once. In Rickenbacker's squadron,
everyone from pilot to cook joined in a mad celebration, but not of victory,
"many of them shouting 'I survived the war! I survived the war!"
Rickenbacker,
third from left, and fellow officers of the 94th Aero Squadron.
In
the defeated countries, people at home were, if more subdued, at least relieved
for the end, but they were also incredulous that they had lost when only days
before, the newspapers had proclaimed they were winning. Above all, they were
apprehensive about what was to come. Spontaneity among the vanquished was more
often a matter of revolution, strikes, and mutinies, often accompanied by gun
battles in the streets of Berlin, Budapest, and other cities, as revolutionary
groups clashed with each other and with returning soldiers. Of course, some ten
or eleven million dead soldiers and sailors would never return to join in the
joy or the revolt on either side. Nor would the eight million civilian dead of
the war be rejoining their loved ones in any country.
But
the shooting war was in some ways hardly over. The Russian Civil War raged.
Sixteen countries, including the United States, invaded Russia to try to shape
the outcome of the brutal Russian war. The Greek army invaded Turkey. Poland
fought a regular war with the Soviets in 1920. Large-scale violence scarred
postwar societies in Ireland, on the German-Polish border, in the Middle East.
And the British maintained the Hunger Blockade on Germany for many more hungry
months.
Nor
was the notable wartime inflation at an end. This massive transfer of wealth by
belligerent governments through inflation impacted both winners and losers.
Immediately after the war, inflation escalated to society-bludgeoning
hyperinflation in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Austria, and the Soviet Union,
creating heightened poverty and misery.
Yet
the elites of the war, especially those on the winning side, were already
taking advantage of the war's drastic restructuring of international affairs
and domestic politics to plan for "the salvation of the empire," or
economic hegemony, or control of vast supplies of raw materials and fuel, or
"greater" Serbia (or Greece, or Poland, or Romania), or "a new
diplomacy." Intellectuals in the victorious countries likewise saw the war
as the "fulfillment" of domestic and social goals, a subject which
Murray Rothbard has analyzed in detail. Above all, the
international banking houses (many of them connected intimately with the
armaments industry (which had lobbied for, sponsored, and organized the complex
loans for "modernization" before 1914, and for war loans thereafter)
looked forward to the fees and the financial power which the interwoven loans
of billions presented. The famous scheme of reparations from Germany and Austria
enshrined in the Paris Peace would emerge from American banking agents on the
Finance Committee at the Paris Peace Conference. Before long, New York banks
would be loaning billions to Germany so that it could pay billions in
reparations to Britain, France, and Belgium, so that they could repay millions
in war debt to U.S. banks.
Nor
would the statist total war systems that had in some degree marked all the
belligerents cease on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The most extreme
of these systems--in the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany--would produce a new
phenomenon, totalitarianism, which would wreak havoc with the lives of millions
in their own countries and with those of many others throughout the twentieth
century and beyond. And even among the previously liberal regimes, total war
social and political organization would extend in many ways into the future.
But
little of all this could be foreseen as the German Armistice representative,
Matthias Erzberger, made his way to the Forest of Compiègne in November 1918,
with a little band of Germans commissioned with ending the fighting. Erzberger
was the leader of the Progressive branch of the German Center Party, the
political party of German Catholics. Early in the war, Erzberger was as
enthusiastic about "fulfillment" of German dreams through war as most
German politicians were. But he came to see that the aggressiveness of all
sides, including the German reintroduction of unlimited submarine warfare, was
producing an unlivable world. He managed to push a Peace Resolution through the
German parliament in mid-1917, calling for peace negotiations. But the
chancellor (a front man for the military dictatorship of Hindenburg and
Ludendorff) had been able to rob the Resolution of any meaning.
Matthias
Erzberger in 1919. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1989-072-16 /
Kerbs, Diethart / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
Yet
by August 1918, the German High Command was demanding that civilian politicians
save Germany by making peace, by ending the war which the generals and imperial
bureaucrats had lost. A liberal prince from Baden assembled a moderately
liberal cabinet (including Erzberger) at the beginning of October and sent
messages to Woodrow Wilson, proposing cease-fire negotiations on the basis of
Wilson's famous Fourteen Points peace proposal from the previous January.
Wilson hesitated, since the Allies were now driving the Germans from their
positions on the Western Front. But at last the Allies agreed to talk. A highly
reluctant Erzberger was appointed head of a negotiating team which he assembled
hastily: a brigadier general, an upper diplomat, a naval officer, and two
translators.
The
small group drove--yes drove--to the trench lines, reaching the French outposts
in darkness on the evening of November 7, and by the middle of the night had
been conducted through the desert of the Western Front to a train at Tergnier,
south of St. Quentin. The train conveyed the Germans over the thirty miles to
the middle of the Forest of Compiègne. A French railway car soon arrived,
carrying the Allied Commander-in-Chief, French Field Marshall Ferdinand Foch
and British First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Rosslyn Weymyss, and their staffs.
Foch, with
cane, and his Compiegne team.
In
the morning, Erzberger and his small group walked to the French railway car.
Foch and Weymyss appeared. Foch asked, "What do you want of me?" And
the three-day conversation began. Before Erzberger had left Germany, Chancellor
Max of Baden had written to Erzberger, "Obtain what mercy you can,
Matthias, but for God's sake make peace." This Erzberger proceeded to do,
though Foch refused to budge on any issue. Erzberger wired Berlin that the
terms were draconian, essentially disarming the German military and providing
for Allied occupation of all German territory west of the Rhine. Berlin
replied: accept the terms. Erzberger did so, and the Armistice was arranged for
November 11, at 11:00 French time. Diplomats from the Allied countries
immediately started making arrangements to gather in Paris in January for the
peace conference.
On
reflection, as Paul Fussell made clear in his masterpiece, The Great
War and Modern Memory, the multi-layered ironies of the conflict created
the war's most lasting legacies. And none of the ironies was quite as striking
as the fact that those groups of politicians, bureaucrats, generals, and
bankers on all sides who created the war and directed it, had had a mortality
rate of zero, more or less, at least until the Spanish Flu emerged late in the
war to kill with a little less social and demographic selectivity.
It
is fitting to end this short contemplation of November 11, 1918, with a song
that emerged from the soldiers who fought the war, performed in a recent recording by a modern
musical organization that thrives on ironies, both present and
past, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. The performance is a spare and
thoughtful rendition of a British soldier's ditty from the war, "Hanging
on the Old Barbed Wire," a reference to that little-celebrated fate of
Great War fighters who made it to the killing zone of the enemy's barbed wire
in No Man's Land, only to be killed by the interlocking machine gun fire which
everyone knew would be zeroed in on that simple but effective obstacle.
If you want to find the General
I know where he is.
He's pinning another medal on his chest.
I saw him, I saw him,
Pinning another medal on his chest
I know where he is.
He's pinning another medal on his chest.
I saw him, I saw him,
Pinning another medal on his chest
If you want to find the Colonel
I know where he is.
He's sitting in comfort stuffing his bloody gut.
I saw him, I saw him,
Sitting in comfort stuffing his bloody gut.
If you want to find the Seargent
I know where he is.
He's drinking all the company rum.
I saw him, I saw him,
Drinking all the company rum.
If you want to find the private
I know where he is.
He's hanging on the old barbed wire.
I saw him, I saw him,
Hanging on the old barbed wire,
Hanging on the old barbed wire.
Like
many soldiers' perceptions, this simplistic view did not tell the whole truth
(in most armies, lieutenants died at a higher rate than privates since they led
the attacks "over the top," for example) and it did not extend to the
political and economic structures which created the war to begin with. The
German sailors in Kiel, who had by early November already started the German
Revolution of 1918 by carrying out a mutiny at the Kiel naval base, understood
only peace. And they called for it in the shorthand expression: "We want
Erzberger!" (And a footnote. Matthias Erzberger would pay dearly for his
courageous call for peace negotiations and his grim duty in carrying out the
first step when he was assassinated by an ultra-nationalist terrorist group in
1921.)
Yet there was a kernel of truth in the cynical but simplistic perceptions
of many Great War soldiers. The personal bravery and the sacrifices on all
sides belonged chiefly to the soldiers. The postwar costs would be paid by
societies which had had little to do with bringing about the massacres. The
victory was in the hands of gentlemen in ornate rooms in the financial and
political capitals of the "great powers," the representatives of the
modern state, an entity which collectively perceived the results of the war as
its own fulfillment.
Hunt Tooley teaches History
at Austin College. He is the author of The Great War: Western Front and
Home Front.
