The Armistice of November 11, 1918, brought the fighting to an end at the Western Front after Captain Harry S. Truman and Battery D had continued firing their assigned barrages that morning. The order to cease fire turned a routine artillery schedule into a countdown: Truman’s last shot was fired fifteen minutes before the armistice took effect. The sudden quiet, and the celebration that followed, made the end of the war tangible to the men who had been under fire.

The Last Morning of the War

The end came after weeks of rumors that peace was near. A German pilot shot down behind Battery D had predicted the war would be over in ten days. On November 7, a United Press correspondent in Paris reported that hostilities had ceased; the report was false. On November 9, infantry went forward after an hour-long barrage, with Battery C and Truman’s friend Captain Ted Marks ordered to support the advance. The drive and artillery support continued the following day, a reminder that predictions and hopeful reports had not stopped the fighting.

Battery D was firing again on the morning of November 11. At about 8:30, headquarters notified Truman that the Germans would sign an armistice at 11:00—two and a half hours later, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Truman’s battery continued to fire the barrages assigned to it, the last directed toward the village of Hermeville. In his account, Truman gave the final shot’s exact time: 10:45. The scheduled cease-fire did not erase the remaining minutes; the guns kept to their orders until the end was imminent.

The Message and the Silence

Sergeant Meisburger was summoned to Truman’s dugout and found the captain stretched on the ground, eating blueberry pie and grinning. Truman handed him a slip of paper and told him to take it back and read it to the battery’s members. Meisburger later recalled being puzzled by the practical detail of the scene: where had the captain obtained the pie? The news of the armistice arrived not as a formal gathering at the guns, but as a message passed from the dugout to the men who had been firing.

When the firing ceased along the front, Truman described the quiet as so complete that he felt suddenly deprived of his ability to hear. Officers and enlisted men looked at one another before a cheer rose along the line. Infantrymen a thousand meters ahead joined in; the French battery behind the American position danced, shouted, and waved wine bottles. The release from the guns’ noise was the day’s first striking change, and celebration quickly filled the space it left.

Celebration at the Front

The festivities continued through the day and far into the night. Men fired Very pistols, rockets, and whatever else was at hand. Truman went to bed at about ten in the evening, but members of the French battery marched around his cot, shook his hand, and repeatedly toasted the American captain and President Woodrow Wilson. They were still at it after midnight; Truman wrote that he could not sleep until two in the morning. The scene joined exhaustion to elation: the men had stopped fighting, but the energy of the front did not immediately subside.

The celebration also took less orderly forms. Lieutenant Broaddus of Battery F had been directing artillery fire from a balloon when the cease-fire came. He recalled that people below became so absorbed in celebrating that they forgot to bring him down, leaving him aloft for two hours. Truman later wrote to Ethel Noland that he and the men had been deeply relieved to have the war end. The continual, indiscriminate fall of shells had strained his nerves; word to cease fire brought, in his recollection, an exceptional sense of relief.

After the Armistice

For the 129th Field Artillery, the war had been concentrated in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which cost the regiment 129 battlefield casualties. Battery D suffered three men wounded, one of whom later died. Those men had been serving on a special detail with an ammunition train, however, rather than under Truman’s command. Private Vere Leigh attributed the battery’s survival partly to luck and partly to good leadership, contrasting it with batteries that had not been as fortunate. The armistice ended the firing, but did not undo what the campaign had cost.

The day’s immediate triumph also opened onto an uncertain political task: statesmen now had to make a lasting peace. Less than a month later, President Wilson sailed to France aboard the George Washington, the same ship that had carried Truman and thousands of other American troops across the Atlantic. The armistice was therefore both a precise military halt and the beginning of a different, unfinished effort. At the front, its meaning had first been registered in the last shot, the abrupt quiet, and the cheering that carried on into the night.