Signed in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne at 5:45 a.m., the Armistice took effect six hours later. More than 9 million soldiers had died since 1914. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month became a fixed point of remembrance, observed ever since as Armistice Day or Veterans Day.
The document was signed by German delegate Matthias Erzberger and Allied supreme commander Ferdinand Foch inside a converted dining car parked on a railway siding deep in the Compiègne forest, chosen for its secrecy and distance from prying journalists. Foch reportedly refused to shake Erzberger's hand.
Even with the ceasefire fixed for 11 a.m., commanders on both sides kept fighting in the final hours—some to use up ammunition, others chasing one last objective or medal. American Henry Gunther, a private from Baltimore, is generally recorded as the last soldier killed, shot approximately 60 seconds before the guns went quiet while charging a German machine-gun post near Chaumont-devant-Damvillers.
When the appointed hour arrived, witnesses on both sides described an eerie, disorienting silence rolling across a landscape that had roared with artillery for years. Church bells rang in Paris and London; in Germany, a fragile republic replaced the collapsing Kaiserreich. The peace, formalized seven months later at Versailles, would prove far shorter-lived than anyone in the trenches dared hope.