Armistice Day

Armistice Day, international holiday observed each year on November 11 to commemorate the end of World War I.

The titular armistice was signed at 5:45 am on November 11, 1918, at Compiègne, in the region of Picardy, France. The agreement took effect at 11:00 am, thus officially ending the war on the Western Front “on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”

From the beginning, countries around the world marked the peace’s anniversary. In Great Britain the royal family hosted the first official Armistice Day events at Buckingham Palace. In the United States Pres. Woodrow Wilson likewise proclaimed the first Armistice Day in 1919, although Congress did not formally recognize it until 1926. In France Armistice Day was first observed in 1920, becoming a public holiday in 1924.

Many countries that observe Armistice Day have common rituals or memorials. For example, since 1919 services around the world have included a short silence starting at 11:00 am. The idea for this moment of silence is credited to an Australian resident of London named Edward George Honey. A veteran of the war himself, Honey strongly felt that the sacrifices made by his fellow soldiers deserved more sombre recognition than what he had seen in the streets on November 11, 1918. Honey wrote to the London Evening News on May 8, 1919, suggesting that each year’s events include five minutes of silence. Two minutes was decided upon, but he received an invitation to the ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

Participants in Armistice Day events have almost always worn or displayed flowers—red poppies in English-speaking countries and territories and cornflowers in France and Belgium. The poppy became associated with the holiday because of the popularity of the poem “In Flanders Fields,” written in 1915 by Canadian soldier Lt. Col. John McCrae. In the United States a professor at the University of Georgia named Moina Belle Michael was so moved by the piece that she campaigned to make the poppy a national symbol of remembrance. By September 1920 the American Legion had come to agree with her, and the organization used the poppy as an official emblem at its convention in Cleveland. The idea spread overseas thereafter thanks to the efforts of a Frenchwoman named Anna Guérin, who had a still-greater vision of the poppy as an international symbol. She succeeded by convincing the newly founded British Legion to put the flower at the centre of its first charity drive. The resulting “Poppy Appeal,” wherein volunteers for the organization exchanged artificial poppies for donations, was so well received that it did indeed create a connection.

Finally, “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” (sometimes “Tomb of the Unknown Warrior”) monuments have been built to symbolize the numerous dead in World War I whose remains could not be identified for burial. Each monument holds the body of an unidentified (or “known only to God,” as the inscriptions sometimes read) soldier from the war. François Simon, president of the Rennes Remembrance Society, and an English chaplain, David Railton, independently conceived of the idea within a few months of each other. It was through Simon that the notion first made its way to the British government, as Railton largely kept the idea to himself, but it was Railton’s connections—he wrote to the dean of Westminster Abbey, who in turn contacted Prime Minister David Lloyd George—that pushed the proposal through Parliament. England and France simultaneously buried their unknown soldiers on Armistice Day in 1920, and other countries quickly adopted the idea. Today there are over 50 countries with such tombs, although some of them honour the dead from other wars.

It was hoped by many that World War I, being an unprecedented conflict in its scope, would be “the war to end all wars,” and that Armistice Day would therefore serve as an eternal warning never to repeat the past. The arrival of World War II, however, tragically complicated that view and, consequently, the meaning of Armistice Day. The United States switched the name of the holiday to Veterans Day on June 1, 1954, and repurposed it to honour veterans of the U.S. military in general. In Great Britain the Second World War resulted in the replacement of Armistice Day as a public holiday with Remembrance Sunday. France and Belgium have kept the day unchanged.

In 2018 special services were held in honour of the centenary of the armistice across the world. The largest occurred in Paris, where more than 60 heads of state and government gathered before France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the base of the Arc de Triomphe.