For millions of soldiers, the First World War meant unimaginable horror: artillery shells that could pulverize a human body into a thousand fragments; immense underground mine explosions that could do the same to hundreds of bodies; attacks by poison gas, tanks, flamethrowers. Shortly after 8 P.M. on November 7, 1918, however, French troops near the town of La Capelle saw something different. From the north, three large automobiles, with the black eagle of Imperial Germany on their sides, approached the front lines with their headlights on. Two German soldiers were perched on the running boards of the lead car, one waving a white flag, the other, with an unusually long silver bugle, blowing the call for ceasefire—a single high tone repeated in rapid succession four times, then four times again, with the last note lingering.

By prior agreement, the three German cars slowly made their way across the scarred and cratered no man’s land between the opposing armies. When they reached the French lines, they halted, the German bugler was replaced by a French one (his bugle is in a Paris museum today), and the German peace envoys continued their journey. At La Capelle, flashes lit up the night as the envoys were photographed by waiting press and newsreel cameramen, then transferred to French cars. Their route took them past houses, factories, barns, and churches reduced to charred rubble, fruit trees cut down and wells poisoned by retreating German troops. “It appeared to me that the drive was intentionally prolonged in order to carry us across devastated provinces and to prepare us for the hardest conditions which the feelings of hatred and revenge might demand,” one of the German passengers later wrote. The envoys next boarded a railway carriage that had once belonged to Napoleon III, who was forced to surrender most of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War.

Finally, the train pulled into a clearing in the forest of Compiègne, near another train occupied by an Allied delegation headed by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied commander-in-chief, a diminutive Frenchman with an immense, shaggy mustache. The two groups met in Foch’s train, in what was formerly the dining car of a luxury sleeper service. The German delegation was headed by a civilian cabinet minister, but the high command was desperate to avoid blame for a humiliating end to the war, and the military representatives were relatively junior: a major general and a Navy captain.

The German Army had asked for peace talks because it knew that it was fast losing the war. Germany had already seen the surrender of its two major allies, Ottoman Turkey and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was rapidly fragmenting as one ethnic group after another declared its independence. The most powerful German commander, General Erich Ludendorff, had had a nervous breakdown, raging at his staff, drinking heavily, and suffering panic attacks; a hastily summoned psychologist advised flowers in his office and the singing of folk songs when he woke in the morning. He had resigned in late October, and fled the country wearing a false beard and blue spectacles. In rear areas, tens of thousands of German troops were deserting. On the Western Front, the Allies had been gaining ground since midsummer. And mutinous crews in the German Navy, ordered to sea for a suicidal last-ditch foray against the British, seized control of their ships, ran up the red flag, arrested their officers, and made common cause with rebellious workers and soldiers ashore.

The Allied powers yielded to the French—on whose soil so much of the bloodiest fighting had taken place—the role of dictating peace terms to the Germans. The demands that Marshal Foch laid down were even harsher than the pessimistic German delegates had feared. German troops were to swiftly evacuate territory they occupied in France and Belgium. Alsace and Lorraine were to be returned to France, and the left bank of the Rhine—Germany’s industrial heartland—would be occupied by Allied troops at German expense. Foch further demanded that the Germans turn over to the Allies not merely large numbers of artillery pieces, machine guns, aircraft, submarines, and surface warships but also five thousand trucks, five thousand railway locomotives, and a hundred and fifty thousand freight cars. Reparations would be determined and imposed later. The German representatives pleaded for an immediate ceasefire while the two sides discussed these terms. Foch refused. Instead, he ordered all Allied commanders to step up attacks: “It is urgent to hasten and intensify our efforts.”

In the five weeks since the Germans first requested peace negotiations, half a million casualties had been added to the war’s toll. As the delegates talked, Germany continued to collapse from within: inspired by the Russian Revolution, workers and soldiers were forming soviets, or councils. Bavaria proclaimed itself a socialist republic; a soviet took over in Cologne. With Berlin in ferment, Kaiser Wilhelm II had gone to Western Front military headquarters in the Belgian resort town of Spa (which is where the word “spa” comes from). But even there he found a soldiers’ soviet, and troops who refused to salute their officers. As news came that the red flag had been raised over his own palace, in Berlin, he fled across the border to neutral Holland.

It was no longer clear what sort of government the German delegates in the railway carriage were representing, but the Allies’ chief concern was that the German Army accept Foch’s terms for peace. Ferocious combat continued as a courier was sent back through the front lines to carry the text of Allied demands to Spa, again with a white flag and bugle calls. (Years later, the French bugler who accompanied him described the thrill to a veterans’ magazine: “For the first time in my life, I am riding in a luxury car.”) At last, the high command in Spa radioed its approval, and, early on the morning of November 11, 1918, the delegates signed the agreement known as the Armistice. There were no handshakes. The Armistice took effect at 11 A.M. At that moment, the Times correspondent Edwin L. James wrote from the front, “four years’ killing and massacre stopped, as if God had swept His omnipotent finger across the scene of world carnage and cried, ‘Enough!’ ”

A flurry of new books marks the hundredth anniversary of that moment. Paul Kendall’s “Voices from the Past: Armistice 1918” is a useful and capacious collection of material about the war’s last weeks. It consists, in large part, of excerpts, generally a paragraph or more, from memoirs and other documents, including a few quoted above. The voices we hear are German, British, French, and American, and they encompass the famous, the unknown, and those who became famous later. Here, for instance, is the young Captain Harry Truman writing to his fiancée, Bess Wallace, after he saw a downed and wounded German aviator robbed of his boots by an American officer: “I heard a Frenchman remark that Germany was fighting for territory, England for the sea, France for patriotism, and Americans for souvenirs.”

Guy Cuthbertson’s “Peace at Last: A Portrait of Armistice Day, 11 November 1918,” is exactly what its title says, and focusses almost entirely on Britain. After a while, though, it becomes wearisome to learn who was standing where when they heard the great news and what was playing in London theatres and cinemas that evening, or to hear how the day was later represented in fiction, film, poetry, paintings—or in accounts that may be suspect. “Total strangers copulated in doorways and on the pavements,” the historian A. J. P. Taylor declared. “They were asserting the triumph of life over death.” But, Cuthbertson points out, Taylor was in no position to know: at the time, he was a boy at home in bed with the flu. Did such things happen? “It is difficult to say,” Cuthbertson allows. Did Big Ben really ring out at last at 11 A.M., after more than four years of silence, or did its keepers only manage to get the chimes working several hours later? Recollections differ. The book is a collage of such tidbits. There are, however, hints that the ecstatic celebrations were eventually followed by something far more sombre. A British baby who was born at exactly 11 A.M. on the great day was christened Pax. At the age of twenty-one, he would be killed in the next war.