Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour Armistice Day, 1918 World War I And Its Violent Climax

1 The Desperate Hours November 11, 1918. The runner, shivering, his breath visible in the morning air, waited for the captain to acknowledge the message. The night had been bitter, the temperature hovering near freezing. The cold had stiffened the mud, caking uniforms and frosting the rim of the trench. Leaden skies threatened snow. A medic moved along the duckboards handing out aspirin to sneezing, hacking men with heavy colds. They gripped tin mugs of coffee, grateful for the warmth, and eyed the runner, wondering what news he bore. The captain read the message twice. It must be a mistake. True, the night before, the U.S. 26th Division had received Field Order 105 to attack at 9:30 this morning. But at 9:10, just as they had been checking their ammunition and fixing bayonets, word came that the armistice had been signed. Hostilities were to cease at 11 a.m. The attack had been canceled. And here was another message telling the captain that the assault had been reinstated. His watch showed 10:30. A half hour remained in the war. To Private Connell Albertine, in Company A of the division's 104th Infantry, the earlier word that the assault had been canceled had produced deep, wordless relief. He would live. Rumors that an armistice was imminent had been rife for days. And at 5:45 that morning, the division's radiomen had picked up a message transmitted from the Eiffel Tower in Paris from the Allied commander, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, confirming the signing. That the attack would now go forward, after having been rescinded, struck him as insane, even murderous. Seventeen months had passed since the fresh-faced young New Englander had stood with the crowd reading the bulletin in the window of The Boston Globe. A giant keyboard tapped out on an unfolding paper roll, "A state of War between the Imperial German Government which has been thrust upon the United States is hereby declared." President Woodrow Wilson's long agony, his peaceful impulses pitted against the tide of events, had led him to take his nation into Europe's conflict, just five months after he had been reelected president on the slogan "He kept us out of the War." The personal import of the Globe's bulletin was immediately evident to Albertine. He belonged to the Massachusetts National Guard, and its mobilization would be inevitable. "An indescribable feeling swelled within me," he recalled of that day, "driving out all thoughts of my work and daily routine and filling me with an urgent desire to hasten to my gathering buddies and the comfort of my rifle." Since then, intervening realities had cooled his ardor. In the beginning, war had seemed a romp. The 104th had first entered the trenches in a quiet sector of the western front near Toul in northeast France. In the evenings, the doughboys could hear the sounds of a violin rising from the enemy trenches. When the Germans realized that they were facing Americans, they had behaved as if they had found long-lost family. They came out into no-man's-land offering sausages for American cigarettes, black bread for white. "Hey, Yank!" one called out. "Where're you from?" When the soldier replied, "Boston," the German responded, "I was a bartender at Jake Wirth's." The camaraderie ended abruptly when regimental headquarters at Toul brought court-martial proceedings against twelve soldiers for fraternizing with the enemy. Soon after, the opposing artillery batteries began exchanging fire. February 17, 1918, stood out starkly in Albertine's memory. He had been crouched in a funkhole clawed from the earth watching geysers of dirt heaved up by exploding shells. A blast over a nearby company tossed up what looked like a rag doll. Albertine waPersico, Joseph E. is the author of 'Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour Armistice Day, 1918 World War I And Its Violent Climax', published 2005 under ISBN 9780375760457 and ISBN 0375760458.