THE Armistice, which wasn’t an armistice at all but an abject surrender, should have begun earlier – not on at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month – but five hours before, just after 5am, when both sides signed the ceasefire agreement which was then radioed to army commanders on both sides up and down the frontlines. But the guns did not fall silent and in the hours until they did men continued to die to capture patches of earth whose future had already been decided.

The final peace agreement took place in the dark, deep in a forest in northern France in the railway carriage of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the allies’ commander-in-chief, a diminutive, vituperative man with a massive moustache and matching ego who had already rejected German pleas for a ceasefire five weeks before and insisted, still, that the fighting would go on until the last second.

And in the six hours after the ink had dried on the armistice papers a further 2738 men died on both sides and 8206 were either wounded or were missing. They died, or were gravely wounded, for no political, military or logistical reason. That day’s casualty toll was greater than Allies suffered in Normandy on D-Day 1944.

Almost certainly the last man to die in the war was Private Henry Gunther, of the US Army’s 313th Infantry Division, known as “Baltimore’s own”. Ironically, he came from a German family in the city. At 10.59am, the 23-year-old, with fixed bayonet, charged a German machine gun crew. Although the Germans called at him in broken English to stop as the war was over he continued. They shot him.

The last British soldier to die was Private George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers, a former Yorkshire coal miner who had been recalled to the army just prior to the outbreak of war. He was killed at Mons (where he had also fought in the first battle) at 09.30, just 90 minutes before the ceasefire.

Militarily the war had come full circle. The first major engagement had been at the Belgian town of Mons in 1914 which saw a British retreat, and here again, after the allied forces had punched through German lines, it finally ended, in Belgium’s Walloon region, near to the French border, and just 65km from Brussels.

Five weeks earlier the German high command, knowing that they were rapidly losing the war, had appealed for peace negotiations. Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, who had been given overall command because the war had been largely fought on French soil, rejected the overtures. He wanted to make sure that the German armies were broken and could not pose a threat in the future.

But if the German generals knew the war was lost and sought peace at any price, the people back home had no idea that the cause was lost. All news was rigidly censored and only the alleged triumphs were published. And 1918 appeared to have been a very good year. Early in the year a defeated Russia had given up and under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk more than a million square miles of land in what is today in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states was signed over to Germany.

Then in spring 1918 a huge German offensive broke the trench warfare deadlock and advanced far into France – Kaiser Wilhelm and his generals were even dreaming of taking Paris – and on one day in May the Germans advanced 13 miles, the largest signal-day gain on the Western Front.

At home the only real sign of the war was widespread hunger and starvation. The Royal Navy had blockaded German ports since 1914. By 1918, slow starvation had claimed an estimated 24,000 German lives.

At the front, in the five weeks since the Germans had sued for peace, half a million casualties had been added to the pile which numbered more than nine million men killed in combat and a further 21 million wounded, with countless millions more civilians also victims. By then, Germany had already lost its two major allies, Ottoman Turkey and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both of which had already surrendered.

Germany was also collapsing from within. Workers inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution were forming soviets, even within the army. Kaiser Wilhelm travelled to military headquarters in the Belgian town of Spa, to find soldier soviets and enlisted men refusing to salute their officers. When news came to him that the red flag had even been raised over his own palace in Berlin he fled across the border to neutral Holland.

Kaiser Bill wasn’t the only one. The most garlanded and brilliant military commander, Erich Ludendorff, joint leader of the German forces, had slumped into psychosis, drinking heavily and berating his underlings. He resigned in September 1918 after telling the Kaiser that the war was lost and he must sue for peace. As word got out of his apparent cowardice and treachery he was reviled and pilloried, suffering a mental breakdown, or alternatively taking sanctuary in his brother’s house. In October, Ludendorff slipped out of Germany, wearing a disguise of blue spectacles and false beard, to take temporary refuge in Switzerland.

As the light began to come up November 11, at 6am, British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, received a message from France that the armistice had been signed. He met with his war cabinet at 9:45am and it was decided that the announcement should be made at once through the press bureau. It was agreed that it should be celebrated by the firing of maroons – a type of rocket which gave a loud bang and a bright flash – together with marching bands, the blowing of bugles and the “ringing of church bells throughout the kingdom”.

The 11th was a Monday and as the news of the breaking peace spread most people decided to celebrate and not turn up for work. Schools and factories closed across Britain and people celebrated in the streets.

As 11am arrived, Big Ben chimed for the first time in four years (although it may have been several hours later, accounts differ) and according to the historian AJP Taylor, “Total strangers copulated in doorways and on the pavement. They were asserting the triumph of life over death.” Although this may well be fanciful, the historian was just a 12-year-old lad on the day and in bed with flu.

In Surrey, a boy child was born at exactly 11am as the guns stopped. He was christened Pax by his parents to commemorate the peace.

Crowds mobbed Buckingham Palace calling for the King, George V, to make an appearance, which he did briefly, and Downing Street was swamped, chanting for Lloyd George. He came out briefly to the steps of Number 10, mumbled a few words, went back inside before being recalled by the crowd’s demands a few minutes later, popping up at a first floor window with future Tory prime minister Bonar Law and then Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill.

“You are well entitled to rejoice,” Lloyd George told the crowd. “The people of this country and our allies, the people of the dominions and of India, have won a great victory for humanity. The sons and daughters of the people have done it.”

They were celebrating, too, in Germany, still unaware that the war was lost. Troops were marching home in good order, they were welcomed in cities by crowds throwing flowers and were greeted at Berlin’s Brandenburg gate by the newly-installed chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, who told them that they were “unconquered from the field of battle”. And for most Germans this seemed to be accurate. Few appreciated that they been defeated.

It was only when the real victors emerged, with British, French and US troops marching into the Rhineland, that the truth became apparent to the German public. Socialist chancellor Ebert was blamed for the Armistice capitulation and the German delegates who had signed the agreement in Foch’s railway carriage were branded the “November Traitors”. The head of the delegation, Matthias Erzberger, was assassinated three years later by two members of a right-wing death squad.

The historical consequences were, of course, much greater. Hitler was able to manipulate the simmering resentment and histrionically play on the settlement terms of the Treaty of Versailles, of June 1919, to whip up fervour and hatred, particularly against the Jews. The treaty, however, was much less harsh than many imposed on defeated nations and two years later its terms were modified. The territory Germany lost contained only 10 per cent of its people, most of whom weren’t ethnic Germans.

Foch, too, condemned the treaty. On the day it was signed he prophesied: "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years". Twenty years later, almost to the day, the Second World War erupted.

In April 1940, the Royal Navy sloop HMS Pelican, escorting a convoy, was badly damaged by German bombs off the coast of Norway. Among those killed onboard was 21-year-old able seaman Pax G Yates.