Armistice

The Armistice in U.S.A. marks the announced end of fighting without bringing an assured or complete peace. Its celebrations release crowds into the streets, yet the scenes surrounding it remain shadowed by grief, racial violence, political repression, and uncertainty about what peace will mean. Rather than treating the announcement as a decisive resolution, the novel makes the Armistice a revealing interval: jubilation is real, but it cannot undo the injuries and conflicts that the war has intensified.

Announcement and Public Celebration

In St. Nazaire, Joe Williams encounters the Armistice as a noisy, physical upheaval. Sailors, soldiers, and French veterans crowd into the streets and cafés, clapping one another on the back, exchanging drinks, kissing strangers, and cheering the Allied flags. A meal that begins in a café stalls at soup as the gathering spills into dancing and drinking; the cook passes out, and champagne is poured into tumblers. The ordinary boundaries of shipboard and military life seem briefly suspended by collective release.

Joe’s own purpose in going ashore is more personal: he is looking for a young woman with whom he has been intimate during earlier visits. In a cabaret, he sees her dancing with a Senegalese officer and attacks him. The officer does not fall; in the ensuing confusion, the woman is knocked down, Joe strikes French soldiers, and a man brings a bottle down on his head. The scene turns celebration into assault in a few beats. Joe’s jealousy and the racial assumptions shaping his response expose how readily the language of Allied fellowship coexists with violence against the very people gathered under its flags.

The news of the Armistice is not immediately stable or universally confirmed. A Newsreel collage reports that Brest was celebrating after an announcement, while the news remained unconfirmed. Elsewhere, the arrival of the news is represented as overwhelming a city’s telephone lines. These fragments set the speed of mass communication against the uncertainty of what has actually been agreed: crowds begin to celebrate while information is still traveling and verification remains incomplete.

Celebration and Private Grief

For Eveline Hutchins, the news arrives in the Red Cross office as sudden, intimate commotion. An officer rushes in, kisses Eveline and Eleanor Stoddard, and announces the Armistice; Eveline finds herself kissing J. Ward Moorehouse. The office becomes, in her perception, a place of uninhibited celebration, and the group heads toward the Café de la Paix. The scene registers the release of emotion through gestures and movement rather than through a formal account of the agreement.

That exhilaration meets a different measure of the war when Eveline returns to her apartment. The elderly concierge congratulates the visitors on victory, then points out that it cannot restore her dead son. Eveline gives her five francs, unable to find another response. The brief exchange cuts through the rhetoric of triumph: a public end to hostilities cannot reverse private loss, and the small act of money offers neither restitution nor consolation.

Eveline’s conversation with Paul Johnson also makes the meaning of peace uncertain. He describes his dispatch travels and his experience of the army and European cities, then wonders what people will do if this really is the beginning of peace. He believes that Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points may make this the last war, but his hope remains tentative, expressed alongside an acknowledgment that he knows less than Eveline and Don Stevens about the political arguments around him. The Armistice opens a future in his imagination, not a settled guarantee.

Conflict Beyond the Battlefield

The novel’s surrounding accounts of labor struggle show why the end of military fighting cannot be equated with an end to coercion. During a New Jersey textile strike, Webb Cruthers and Ben Compton encounter mills ringed by police and armed special deputies. The hall available to the strikers is closed to them, and mounted police disperse the crowd. When Webb later returns with Daughter to the picket line, she sees a policeman kick a fallen young woman in the face; Daughter intervenes and is struck and taken away in a police wagon. The episode presents violence not as an exceptional battlefield event but as force deployed against workers seeking to assemble and organize.

The same conflict between collective speech and state power returns in the account of the Industrial Workers of the World in Everett. Ben Compton and Bram Hicks go with other workers to attempt a meeting, but armed deputies arrest them as they step off the boat. The men are beaten, loaded onto trucks, and taken away under guard. The sequence links the promise of civic rights to the physical vulnerability of those who try to exercise them. These labor scenes belong to the novel’s wider wartime landscape; set beside the Armistice celebrations, they clarify how a declaration ending combat does not itself dismantle institutions capable of suppressing dissent.

Ben’s experience at the Empire Casino makes the persistence of political pressure especially explicit. At a meeting supporting Russia’s workers’ government, federal agents take notes, police shut the doors, and soldiers and sailors enter the gallery. Ben speaks against a war he sees as serving bankers and munitions makers, and he is arrested with other speakers. His lawyer obtains his release on fifteen thousand dollars’ bail only after an assurance that he will not agitate before trial. The state’s attention to his speech, his military-registration status, and the conditions of his bail make the boundaries of peacetime liberty appear anything but secure.

The Unfinished Work of Remembrance

The novel carries the Armistice’s unresolved meaning into the treatment of the dead. A congressional resolution authorizes the return to the United States of the body of an American member of the American Expeditionary Forces whose identity has not been established, for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The solemn public act gives one unidentified soldier a place in national remembrance, but the terms of the resolution preserve the central absence: the body’s identity remains unknown.

This ending does not cancel the celebrations or the hope attached to the cessation of fighting. Instead, it places them beside a lasting material consequence of war: a body returned for burial without a name that can reconnect it to a particular life. The Armistice thus functions less as a final answer than as a change in the questions the novel asks. The guns may fall silent, but grief, political conflict, and the work of accounting for the dead continue.