At eleven o'clock on the morning of 11 November 1918 the cease-fire sounded along the western front. It was the end of the first world war, which had killed not less than 10 million persons, had brought down four great empires and had impoverished the continent of Europe. The defeat of Germany, so long invincible to more than half the world, had been registered at dawn that day in the Armistice of Compiègne. Its heavy terms were in the main those proposed by Marshal Foch, the Allied generalissimo, and lay between the views of the British Field-Marshal Haig, who overestimated the German capacity for continued resistance and advocated more lenient conditions, and those of the American General Pershing, who had argued in favour of refusing an armistice and maintaining the Allied advance. This matched the attitude of the former president Theodore Roosevelt and a popular American demand for unconditional surrender. As it was, one month after the armistice, Ebert, head of the first government of the new German republic, greeted returning German formations at the Brandenburger Tor with the words: ‘No foe has overcome you … You have protected the homeland from enemy invasion.’

No less important in the long run than the terms of the armistice were the preconditions governing its signature. When the German government had applied to President Wilson on 4 October 1918 for an armistice it had adroitly proposed that peace negotiations, and not only those for an armistice, should be based upon the ‘fourteen points’ of his address of 8 January 1918, as amplified in his subsequent pronouncements.