France, Germany mark armistice together

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, laid a floral wreath yesterday at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the soaring arches of the Arc de Triomphe, erected in 1835 to honor Napoleon’s army.

The moment came two days after Sarkozy traveled to Berlin for ceremonies marking the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. Sarkozy said yesterday that remembrance of the past “is also to consolidate the present and prepare the future.’’

Germany, given its defeat in World War I and its shame over Nazism and World War II, has never celebrated Veterans Day or marked the suffering of its soldiers. Merkel’s visit was criticized by some in Germany. After the formal ceremonies, Sarkozy told her, “Your presence among us on this Nov. 11 is a gesture of exceptional friendship - every French person knows how significant it is.’’

Across Europe and other parts of the world, people gathered yesterday to commemorate the end of four years of fighting, from 1914 to 1918, in which millions of lives were lost in what are now depicted as strategically ineffective trench battles. Neither side gained significant territory as each lashed the other with artillery fire and often futile infantry charges.

The number of dead from both sides has never been known, partly because of poor recordkeeping. But most accounts put the number of military deaths at more than 8 million, including 1.4 million French and 2 million from Imperial Germany. Additionally, more than 6 million civilians were killed, and 2 million soldiers from all sides were reported missing in action.

France and Germany have reached out to heal the wounds before.

In September 1984, the leaders of France and Germany, President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl, chose the site of the 1916 battle of Verdun for a symbolic day of reconciliation. But yesterday was the first time a German leader attended the annual ceremony in Paris.

“I know that what has gone before cannot be erased,’’ Merkel said. “But there is a power, a power which helps us and which can help us bear what has passed: reconciliation.’’

In silence, the two leaders stood side by side before the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier after inspecting troops ringing the Arc de Triomphe. Sarkozy said later that the commemoration was not of one people’s victory over another but of an ordeal that was “equally terrible on both sides.’’

“German orphans wept for their slain fathers in the same way as French orphans,’’ Sarkozy said.

In political terms, the ceremony yesterday was seen by analysts as an attempt to bolster the postwar alliance between France and Germany that has been traditionally viewed as a driving force of the European Union. The union includes 27 nations across a continent whose alignments have shifted radically after the two world wars.

But more recently the bond between Paris and Berlin seems to have loosened as Germany pursues closer ties with Russia. In her first speech to the German Parliament after winning a second term in September, Merkel spoke of dialogue with Moscow but did not mention France or its relationship with her country.

In her speech yesterday, she praised the European partnership and reconciliation with France, but she alone mentioned the importance of the trans-Atlantic relationship. The war that was supposed to end all wars pitted empires against one another and destroyed several of them, with forces from Imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire ranged against the Allied powers, including Britain, France, Russia, and the United States, which joined the war in 1917. The United States lost 116,500 soldiers in the conflict.

The commemorations were the first in many places held in the absence of veterans from the conflict. The last French military survivor died in March 2008, while Harry Patch, the last British survivor of the fighting in the trenches on the Western Front still living in Britain, died in July.