Armistice Day
Armistice Day is the anniversary of the end of the First World War on the 11th of November, 1918.
1918
King George V 1910-1936
Armistice Day is the anniversary of the end of the First World War on the 11th of November, 1918.
1918
King George V 1910-1936
Armistice Day is an annual commemoration of the end of the First World War in 1918. Public ceremonies are kept on the nearest Sunday, which is now renamed Remembrance Sunday in recognition of other conflicts.
IN 1908, Austria-Hungary attempted to snatch Bosnia from the fading Ottoman Empire, leaving Russia little choice but to leap to Serbia’s defence. Britain and France were already allied to Russia, but Germany weighed in on Austria’s side, and in 1914 the most devastating war in history broke out, spreading across all Europe and beyond.*
The world finally wearied of war in 1918, and on November 11th that year, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the Armistice of Compiègne in France brought a halt to hostilities. Six months later, on 28 June 1919, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended the state of war between Germany and the Allies.
Nine million combatants and seven million civilians had died. In 1919, a two-minute silence was observed in London on the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice, at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, “a silence” said one newspaper “which was almost pain”. A year later, King George V unveiled the Cenotaph in Whitehall as a lasting memorial to the Fallen.
See also The Outbreak of the Great War and posts tagged .