Delayed armistice cost needless deaths

We will shortly be celebrating the centenary of the end of fighting in the Great War. Before then, we should remember those who died needlessly in the days leading up to the armistice. The symbolism of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month appealed so strongly to the powers-that-were that they delayed the formal signing, even though it was known on the 9th November 1918 that the Germans had agreed to surrender. Indeed, fighting could have ceased on the 7th if the French high command had not been so intransigent when they were first approached by German negotiators.

The possibility of an armistice had begun the evening of November 7 when French soldiers of the 171st Régiment d’Infanterie near Haudroy were startled by an unfamiliar bugle call. Fearing they were about to be overrun, they cautiously advanced toward the increasingly loud blaring when out of the mantle of fog three automobiles emerged, their sides gilded with the imperial German eagle. The astonished Frenchmen had encountered a German armistice delegation headed by a rotund forty-three-year-old politician and peace advocate named Matthias Erzberger. The delegation was escorted to the Compigne Forest near Paris where, in a railroad dining car converted into a conference room, they were met by a small, erect figure–Marshal Foch–who fixed them with a withering gaze. Foch opened the proceeding with a question that left the Germans agape. ‘Ask these Gentlemen what they want,’ he said to his interpreter. When the Germans had recovered, Erzberger answered that they understood they had been sent to discuss armistice terms. Foch stunned them again: ‘Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make.’

That is from historynet.com, the online presence of a large publisher of history magazines. Being US-based, they naturally concentrate on the sacrifice of largely African-American lives in a pointless sortie on the very morning of the armistice, but we should remember all those on both sides who did not have to perish in those five days.