1918 — The Armistice and the Peace That Wasn’t Peace

By the time the guns stopped, the war had already done its deepest work. Not only on borders, but on minds. What ended in November 1918 was the shooting. What did not end was the pressure that produced the shooting in the first place. That pressure simply changed form. It moved into treaties, reparations, revolutions, resentments, and the private aftermath carried by millions of damaged people who returned home to countries that no longer felt like the countries they had left.

In the autumn of 1918, Germany was collapsing from the inside outward. The Allied advances of the Hundred Days had pushed German forces back toward the Hindenburg Line and beyond. In a purely military sense, the German army was still capable of fighting in places, still capable of inflicting heavy losses, still capable of retreating in order rather than in total rout. But something more important had failed: belief. The soldiers knew the war was lost. The leadership knew it too. And the civilian population—hungry, exhausted, angry—could no longer carry the burden.

Germany’s allies were falling away at the same time. Bulgaria sought an armistice in late September. The Ottoman Empire followed at the end of October. Austria-Hungary, internally fractured and militarily weakened, was breaking into national components. When these pillars collapsed, Germany’s strategic position became hopeless. The war that had begun as a contest of alliances ended with one side watching its coalition dissolve.