90 years of chasing peace

NINETY YEARS have passed since that gray, drizzly morning when, shortly after 5:30, Matthias Erzberger, representing a defeated Germany, signed an armistice under the glare of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the allied commander in chief. The scene was the field marshal's private railway car on a siding in the forest of Compiegne, just north of Paris.

By Nov. 11, 1918, the German army was in retreat, revolution had broken out on the home front, the high seas fleet had mutinied, and Germany's ally, Austria, had already left the war. While the German delegation was still attempting to negotiate, news came to Compiegne that the kaiser had abdicated and was on his way to exile in Holland. Two days later, word went out from the railway car to the armies in the field that hostilities would cease on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The war was over.

"Is this the end?" Winston Churchill would ask nine years later in the concluding paragraph of his great, multi-volume account of the war. Or would the Great War be "merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands?"

Soon enough, Churchill's grim question was answered. In June 1940, Adolf Hitler, in a theatrical act of revenge, made France surrender in that same railway car in the same forest, sitting in the same chair in which Marshal Foch had sat. The car was later taken to Germany and destroyed. Only a replica remains today.

Mercifully the black accounts of Teuton and Gaul have now been settled. The rapprochement of Germany and France was, and remains, the cornerstone of the new Europe. But this did not happen until the great scourge of Soviet power, an unintended consequence of World War I, had swallowed up half the continent.

The peace of Paris that followed World War I tried to make sense of the great collapse of empires, to create some order out of the wreckage of Austria-Hungary and the vast regions of the Ottomans in Asia Minor. The attempt to forge a union of southern Slavs in the Balkans came apart 75 years later, when the external threat from first Germany and then Russia was no more. After great pain and bloodshed, seven national entities exist within the borders of what was once Yugoslavia.

After World War II, it was the turn of the British, French, and Portuguese empires to end; the anguish and great loss of life defined much of the last half of the 20th century. And then, at last, as the century was ending, what remained of the Russian empire under the Soviets died a remarkably peaceful death.

But it was in the Ottoman domains that the attempts to establish a new order most spectacularly failed, and the Middle East has scarcely seen a peaceful month since.

The British and French divided up the region in secret agreements. The French faced endless rebellions in Syria, and their attempt to create a country based on religion in Lebanon is still in doubt. The British faced similar rebellions in Iraq and in Palestine that roil the region to this day. Israel, another country based on religion, is no longer in doubt, but cannot find peace until the Palestinians find theirs. And Pakistan, the third country to be founded on religion, finds itself in crisis against religious extremists.

What President Woodrow Wilson called the "war to end all wars" did no such thing, of course. But what would have really surprised Wilson is the extent to which America has tried to take over the imperial responsibilities of Britain and France. Thirty years of trying to prop up the old order in Indochina failed spectacularly.

Today America is engaged in trying to impose its will on Iraq, which gave Britain no end of trouble, and in Afghanistan, where the British were never able to maintain order for long. Our children continue to bleed and gasp again in devastated lands - 90 years after silence fell on the Western Front.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.