Armistice in the Compiegne forest

November 11, 1918

At eleven a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, a bugle sounded cease-fire along the Western Front. Men looked up from their trenches, stunned. Ten million soldiers were dead, twenty million wounded. Four empires had fallen. The peace, Marshal Foch remarked, was only an armistice for twenty years. He was off by two months.