To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [190]
The negotiations had already begun. Spa headquarters arranged by radio with the Allies a local ceasefire at a point where a passable road crossed the front, and the German peace delegation traveled in three cars, with the lead vehicle flyi ng a white flag and a young officer on the running board blowing blasts on a trumpet. When they crossed the front line, a French bugler replaced him. French soldiers they passed asked, "Is the war over?" Soon the delegates were in the midst of a crowd of Allied reporters and photographers. "To Paris!" someone called out, in a mocking reminder of the signs chalked on the sides of German troop trains in 1914. The delegates transferred to French autos for the remainder of the trip, to the headquarters of Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France in a railway car in the forest of Compiègne. British officers were present, but yielded to their ally—some of its territory still occupied—the satisfaction of dictating the Allied terms to the German envoys.
Although the agreement signed several days later, over the protests of the shaken German delegates, was called the Armistice, in reality it was a German surrender. It was a most unprecedented one, however, for the surrendering army, despite being severely bloodied, remained well armed, several million strong—and almost entirely on the territory of its enemies. But with a near-starving Germany in turmoil behind it, and rear-area troops deserting, it could not fight on, even though only a few months earlier, almost at the gates of Paris, it had seemed poised to win the war. Triumphal German government propaganda had continued to the last minute—newsreels never showed troops retreating or surrendering—leaving many civilians thinking that, whatever their sufferings, the country's soldiers were on the verge of victory.
That illusion persisted long after the fighti ng stopped, because front-line army units returned home to march in orderly columns into German cities full of cheering crowds and banners of welcome. Politicians gave speeches praising them as heroes undefeated on the battlefield—which was, in a sense, true. All of this, of course, was the raw material out of which the Nazis within a few short years would build their deceptive but powerful legend of Germany's noble soldiers stabbed in the back and robbed of glorious victory by communists, pacifists, and Jews. And when, in 1940, they would overrun France in a new war to avenge this loss, Hitler would order that the French surrender be signed in the very same railway car.
In laying down the Armistice's terms on behalf of the Allies, Marshal Foch was representing a country that had suffered a staggering toll: 1,390,000 men killed. The marshal demanded that the German army withdraw from France, Belgium, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine that had been captured from France in 1870, from Russia, and from parts of Germany itself, particularly all land on the west side of the Rhine. Germany was also to pay the cost of stationing Allied troops there, and more. And all this preceded a more detailed and far more onerous peace treaty that would be forced on the Germans at Versailles months later.
Many people, even at this early moment, foresaw the dangers of such harsh terms. The retired Admiral of the Fleet John Fisher, the former First Sea Lord, was asked how long it would be until the next war. "Twenty years time," he replied. Surprisingly, someone similarly worried was a man who, whatever his limitations, had always had a shrewd sense of politics, Douglas Haig. Shortly before the fighti ng stopped, but when the shape of the Allied demands had become clear,