The war was over at 5am. The last soldier died at 10.59: the six strangest hours of 11 November 1918

At 10.59am on 11 November 1918, near Verdun in north-eastern France, an American private named Henry Gunther got up and charged a German machine-gun post. The war had one minute left to run. The Germans fired, and he became the last American soldier killed in the First World War.

The war had, in every sense that mattered, been over for almost six hours.

What actually happened on the morning of 11 November?

Shortly after 5am, in a dining car parked on a railway siding in the Forest of Compiègne, about 80 kilometres north of Paris, German delegates signed the Armistice in front of the Allied supreme commander, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The carriage was Wagons-Lits car No. 2419D, Foch’s mobile headquarters, chosen in part because the remote forest siding kept the talks away from journalists.

The ceasefire would take effect at 11am Paris time. That gave the world its famous phrase, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It also left six hours in which the war was officially still on.

Why did anyone keep fighting?

Partly because the order said they could. The delay existed so the news could travel by telegraph, telephone and runner to every unit along hundreds of kilometres of front. Some officers used the time to rest their men. Others pressed on with attacks planned days earlier, to take a village or a river crossing before the deadline, or because no one had told them to stop.

The cost has never been counted precisely. The American historian Joseph Persico estimated that 2,738 men were killed on the final day of the war, and close to 11,000 killed or wounded across all sides. Those figures are estimates, not a count, but there is no doubt the dead ran into the thousands.

Who were the last men to die?

Their times are recorded almost to the minute.

| Time (local) | Soldier | Army | Where | |—|—|—|—| | 9.30am | Private George Ellison | British | Near Mons, Belgium | | 10.45am | Private Augustin Trébuchon | French | Vrigne-Meuse, Ardennes | | 10.58am | Private George Lawrence Price | Canadian | Ville-sur-Haine, Belgium | | 10.59am | Private Henry Gunther | American | Near Verdun, France |

Each has a story stranger than the last.

Augustin Trébuchon, a shepherd from the Lozère in southern France, was carrying a message to his comrades when he was shot. By most accounts it told them to gather at 11.30 for a meal. Some accounts put his death at 10.50. Yet his memorial and village records give the date of his death as 10 November. The French soldiers killed on the last day were recorded as dying the day before, and nobody has established who decided that, or why.

George Lawrence Price, 25, from Nova Scotia, was shot by a sniper at Ville-sur-Haine and died a minute later. A plaque put up in 1968 marks the spot where he was killed at 10.58. He is traditionally regarded as the last soldier of the British Empire to die in the war.

Henry Gunther, 23, from Baltimore, had been a sergeant until an army censor read a letter he wrote home complaining about conditions at the front. He was busted down to private. On the last morning, he charged. The next day, the American commander John Pershing’s order of the day listed him as the last American killed. His sergeant’s rank was later restored.

What is the strangest coincidence of the war?

It may be in a quiet cemetery at St Symphorien, a few kilometres south-east of Mons.

Mons is where the British Army fired its first shots of the war in August 1914. On 21 August that year, a 17-year-old cyclist scout named John Parr, who had lied about his age to enlist, was killed nearby. He is regarded as the first British soldier killed in action in the war.

Four years and three months later, Private George Ellison was killed by a sniper on patrol in woods near Mons at 9.30am on 11 November, the last British soldier to die before the ceasefire. He was 40 and had fought since 1914.

Both men are buried at St Symphorien. Their headstones face each other across a few metres of grass. George Price, the Canadian killed at 10.58, lies a few metres away. The first and the last of Britain’s war, and the last of the Empire’s, in one small cemetery.

Where were the Australians?

Mostly out of the fighting. After months of battles, including the Hundred Days offensive that began on 8 August, the Australian Corps was exhausted and badly under strength. The infantry’s last battle on the Western Front was at Montbrehain on 5 October 1918, where the 6th Brigade took the village and the 21st Battalion became the last Australian battalion to leave the line the next day.

Some Australian artillery units stayed in action, attached to British and American formations, so not every Australian was out of the war. But most Diggers heard about the Armistice away from the front line.

What happened to the railway carriage?

This is where the story turns very strange.

After the war, carriage 2419D became a national relic. It was shown in Paris, then returned in 1927 to the forest clearing where it had stood in 1918, inside a memorial building on the exact spot.

On 22 June 1940, after the German army had overrun France, Adolf Hitler ordered the carriage pulled out of its museum and put back on the same spot. He sat in the chair Foch had used. France’s surrender was signed inside, in the same carriage, at the same place, as Germany’s defeat 22 years earlier.

Days later, the clearing’s monuments were demolished on Hitler’s orders and the carriage was taken to Berlin to be put on show as a trophy. As Allied armies closed in late in the war, it was moved to Thuringia in central Germany and destroyed. How it was destroyed is disputed: one account says it was burned by German troops as American forces approached in 1945, another that it was wrecked in an air attack.

So what stands in the forest now?

A stand-in. In 1950 France took a dining car from the same series, built at the same time, renumbered it 2419D and put it in the rebuilt museum. The clearing, known as the Glade of the Armistice, was restored around it.

Why does this matter now?

Because the silence we keep at 11am remembers the ending, not the decision. The men who died between 5am and 11am were killed in a war their own governments had already agreed to stop. As Russia and Ukraine sit down again in Abu Dhabi this week, those six hours are a reminder that the timing of a ceasefire is not a technicality. Every hour between agreeing to stop and stopping is counted in names.