THE conflict was global. The commemorations of its end are not.

Britain, France and parts of their former empires will this weekend mark the hundredth anniversary of the armistice on the Western front.

Yet in much of the world, even in nations where the Great War claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, November 11 will pass almost unnoticed.

That is because some cultures - notably Germany - have recoiled from full-scale state-backed military remembrance ceremonies.

But it is also because there are nations which choose to remember their fallen in different ways, and on different days.

After all, the November 11, 1918, armistice was only for part of a conflict called, first by Germans and then by others, a “World War”.

It came towards the end of a series of ceasefires that ultimately resolved in a peace treaty the following summer.

Ironically, the fact that most nations do not make a big deal out of November 11 has meant many world leaders can attend a major commemoration of the date in Paris.

President Emmanuel Macron, in ceremonies he insisted be stripped of militarism, will host German chancellor Angela Merkel among dignitaries from 100 countries, 20 of them African.

Amid international tensions, France’s Armistice Day commemorations will also offer an opportunity for world leaders to meet. Donald Trump of the United States has scheduled bilateral talks with both Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Mr Macron, who is on a week-long tour of battlegrounds from the 1914-1918 conflict, has been warning of what he sees as a rise of the “leprosy” of nationalism.

He told a French newspaper: “I am struck by similarities between the times we live in and those of between the two world wars.”

Germany’s president Frank-Walker Steinmeier last Sunday joined Mr Macron at a special ceremony in the great Gothic cathedral in Strasbourg, the city, which, like the rest of Alsace and Lorraine changed hands between the two countries after the war.

At home in Germany – a country which saw Remembrance hijacked by the Nazis in the inter-war period - Armistice Day events are rare, low-key and muted.

In Munich there will a European Requiem – music from across the continent – will be performed on Saturday. On Sunday in Karlsruhe there will be an ecumenical church services with visitors from the English city of Coventry.

Later this month Germans mark their own sombre commemoration of the victims of all conflict and oppression, Volkstrauertag. Old soldiers and others wear a blue cornflower to remember those who lost their lives.

Americans fought alongside French and British Empire troops on the Western front, from 1917 onwards. But World War One does not have the resonance in the United States as conflicts before or after. There will be a ceremony in the National Cathedral in Washington but America’s capital has no permanent memorial.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand and some South Africans commemorate armistice day much as the UK. World War One is often seen as the point Britain’s old dominions, while not technically sovereign, began to behave as independent nations. India - where hopes of greater independence in return for Great War efforts were dashed - has had an ambivalent relationship with the conflict. Since 2016, however, it has adopted the marigold as a poppy-like Remembrance symbol .

Poppies remain a divisive symbol in Ireland, but that country is marking Armistice. Tomorrow there will be a special service in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, where thousands of leaves from a Tree of Remembrance have been signed by families who lost members in the conflict.

Italy - among the worst effected countries - marked its own peace with the Austro-Hungarian empire last week. Its president, Sergio Mattarella, told a packed square in the frontier city of Trieste that “only European unity guarantees peace”.

Balkan nations - where some of the conflict’s bloodiest fighting took place - commemorated the 100th anniversary of Bulgaria’s ceasefire at a ceremony in Thessaloniki, Greece, on September 28. Turkey’s armistice was a month later.

Russia remembers its fallen from the Great War on August 1, the day the conflict began, not ended. Its revolutionary government made peace with Germany in November 1917 - not 1918 - but then began a related civil war which cost more lives, including British ones.