Demobilization

At a few minutes past ten o’clock of the morning of November 11, 1918, the Secretary of War in Washington received from General Pershing a communication informing the Government that eleven o’clock a.m. that day, French time, an armistice with Germany had gone into effect. No message more momentous had ever come to the American War Department. The World War was at an end. It was peace. It was victory.
Over there on that American front which had penetrated the supposedly impregnable Argonne and now commanded the enemy’s main line of communications at Sedan, boys in our own khaki wriggled, charged, fought, plunged ahead all the morning, like the players of some mighty football team gaining every inch of advance possible before an intermission; and finally, as the whistles shrilled and the great silence fell at last upon a theatre that had shaken and roared with the thunder of war for more than four years, they set their heels into the turf of a line that was to be held as a starting-off place if the armistice, too, should prove to be only an intermission and a period of recuperation.