The Great Silence - Armistice 1918

1 THE GREAT S ILENCE ARMI ST I CE 1 9 1 8 Introduction When the guns fell silent on the Western Front at 11am on 11th November 1918 the fighting that had lasted 1,559 days finally came to an end. British and Imperial troops had been fighting alongside their Allies at sea, on land and in the air in France and Belgium, in Italy, Greece, Palestine, Mesopotamia and in Africa. Their enemies had included Austro-Hungarians, Bulgarians, Germans and Turks. The number of casualties on all sides had set grim new records, with current calculations suggesting that 9 million service personnel from all the belligerent nations perished. To this total should be added uncounted numbers of civilians for whom it had been a long ordeal of bereavement, anxiety and, in so many cases, of extreme dislocation of settled ways of life.