Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II lays a wreath at the Cenotaph (Greek for ‘empty tomb’) in Whitehall on Remembrance Sunday. The memorial to the Unknown Soldier was unveiled for the first time on November 11th 1920, and King George V laid a wreath at its foot.
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 .
Précis
After four years of conflict, hostilities in the Great War came to an end with the Armistice of Compiègne, signed at 11 o’clock on November 11th, 1918. The anniversary has been kept ever since, first as Armistice Day and then as Remembrance Day, and a memorial to the Fallen, the Cenotaph, now stands in Whitehall. (54 / 60 words)
