What started out as an assassination attack on the Austrian heir to the throne by a Bosnian dissident and evolved into a political game of chicken (with deadly consequences) neared an end, as Germany announced their surrender.

On this day, November 11, in 1918, at 5 a.m., in a railroad car parked near the front lines in France, Germany signed an armistice. Orders went out to stop fighting by 11am that morning.

An American colonel on the front lines recorded in his diary that morning about the sudden strangeness of peace after months of brutal fighting. “After the long months of intense strain, of keying themselves up to the daily mortal danger, of thinking always in terms of war and the enemy, the abrupt release from it all was physical and psychological agony. … What was to come next? They did not know – and hardly cared. Their minds were numbed by the shock of peace. The past consumed their whole consciousness. The present did not exist-and the future was inconceivable.”