The 'emotional charge' in the armistice document

Only one copy of the armistice treaty remains, but does it get the respect it deserves?

THE ONLY COPY of the armistice agreement that ended 1,561 days of butchery, during which 9.4 million men were killed, lies in a vault in the French military’s historical service in the Château de Vincennes. “It’s A4 format, with blue print, bound in Bordeaux leather. It’s not visually impressive,” says Nathalie Genet-Rouffiac, a military historian and chief archivist.

Next Tuesday, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, exactly 90 years after the agreement took effect, Europe will commemorate the end of the “Great War”. The French president Nicolas Sarkozy, prince Charles and his wife Camilla, grand duke Henri of Luxembourg, the presidents of the European Commission and Parliament, the president of the German state of Saarland and a host of diplomats, deputies, and military attachés will gather at the fort of Douaumont, on the battlefield of Verdun, to lay wreaths and make speeches.

Some will be asking themselves if the world is not in danger of forgetting its first total war. Nicolas Sarkozy alluded to that fear on March 17th, when France buried Lazare Ponticelli, the last poilu, as French soldiers of the first World War are known. “Memory is fragile when death has passed,” Sarkozy said. “There will be no one to tell his grandchildren and great grandchildren about the terrible story of life in the trenches.”

Before he died at age 110, the Italian-born Ponticelli was a well-known figure in France. Many survivors of the war refused to talk about the horrors they had seen, but Ponticelli felt honour-bound to keep the memory of his fallen comrades alive. Tears flowed down his cheeks as he told of a wounded man caught in the barbed wire between French and German lines.

“He was screaming, ‘Come and get me. I’ve lost my leg’,” Ponticelli recounted. “The stretcher-bearers didn’t dare go out. I couldn’t stand it any more, so I went with a pair of wire cutters. First I came across a German with his arm in a sling. He raised two fingers, and I understood he had two children. I dragged him towards the German lines. When they started shooting, he screamed at them to stop. I left him near his trench. He thanked me. Then I went back to the wounded Frenchman. I dragged him to our lines. He embraced me and said, ‘Thank you, for my four children’. I never found out what happened to him.”

As part of next week’s commemorations, the French ministry of defence will put all its first World War campaign diaries online. The files of 1,325,000 Frenchmen killed in the war are already available on the internet and, over the next decade, the records of all 8,500,000 French poilus will be digitised. “Often, the first photograph of an ancestor is of a poilu,” says Genet-Rouffiac. “Many French people’s family histories start with the first World War.”

The magnitude of the first World War makes our present crises seem almost minor. The sense of doom was famously summed up by the British foreign minister Sir Edward Grey as the war started: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Within the space of a few months, four huge empires – the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman – collapsed. A quarter of the students at Oxford and Cambridge were killed. The war’s legacy is still felt in the Balkans and in the Middle East, where borders were drawn up by the French and British victors. And it established the US as the dominant economic and political power of the 20th century.

The armistice of November 11th, 1918 was signed in marshal Ferdinand Foch’s railway carriage, which he used as a mobile headquarters, in the forest at Rethondes. (Hitler insisted on receiving the French surrender in the second World War in the same carriage.) Foch, who signed as supreme commander of the Allied armies, predicted: “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”

The protagonists of the first World War would play key roles in the second. In the 1914-1918 conflict, Winston Churchill was lord of the admiralty; Hitler was wounded in the Somme; and Charles de Gaulle was taken prisoner at Verdun.

OVER THE PAST decade, a battle has raged among French historians. The central question is whether the poilus were patriotic soldiers who believed in what they fought for, or victims of a cruel and inept government bureaucracy. Put differently, who were the heroes – those who obeyed orders, or those who said no to an absurd war?

The semi-official, patriotic line is favoured by the Historial de la Grande Guerre (historial.org), a museum and research centre established at Péronne castle in northern France in 1992. “The mystery is that in huge numbers, the cannon fodder accepted to be cannon fodder,” explains Annette Becker, a professor at the University of Paris and co-director of the Péronne centre.

The opposing vision is espoused by a group of academics and history buffs who have taken the name Research and Development Information Centre 14-18 (crid1418.org).

The fate of hundreds of Frenchmen shot for desertion or insubordination is central to the row. Socialist former prime minister Lionel Jospin created controversy during commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the armistice by suggesting that 26 soldiers “shot as an example” in June 1917 be “fully reintegrated into our collective national memory”. The conservative right, including Sarkozy at the time, opposed their rehabilitation on the grounds that it would be unfair to the millions who kept fighting. Last May, Sarkozy’s government announced that the files of disobedient soldiers will be re-examined on a case-by-case basis.

The history of the first World War lives on in other ways. A few years ago, the military’s historical service was contacted by the German state of Baden-Württemberg because authorities there were inaugurating a museum to an unsung German hero, Matthias Erzberger, who signed the armistice agreement in marshal Foch’s railway carriage.

Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated two days before the armistice and fled to Holland. The Weimar Republic had started. No one in the German army would sign the agreement, so it fell upon Erzberger, who had made a pacifist speech in the Reichstag, to do so. This was the beginning of the German myth that the army was undefeated, but was betrayed by revolutionaries and socialists. Erzberger would be assassinated by army officers three years later. His killers became Nazis, and were protected by Hitler.

Because Hitler destroyed the German copy of the agreement, the state of Baden-Württemberg asked to borrow the French copy for the inauguration of Erzberger’s museum. The document was displayed for two weeks, after which Nathalie Genet-Rouffiac hand-carried it back to the military archives in Vincennes.

Genet-Rouffiac was deeply impressed by the reverence the Germans showed for the agreement. “Sometimes historians lose the emotional charge that should be attached to documents,” she says. “I had to see what it meant to the Germans for it to gain new meaning for me. The war has become a grief we share, no longer something that divides us.”

At a dinner with high-ranking German officials, a French diplomat asked Genet-Rouffiac what the armistice agreement was worth. “I said it has no market value, because it is unique, and it would be impossible to sell it,” she replied. A German state minister corrected her: “It cost millions of lives.”