The Churchill Series - Nov. 11, 2005

(One of a series of daily posts about Winston S. Churchill.)

In November 1918 Churchill, then Minister of Munitions in Prime Minister Lloyd George's government, was privy to negotiations for the armistice that would end the fighting in World War I.

On the eleventh of that November, Churchill knew what the British public was learning: The armistice would take effect at the day's eleventh hour.

Churchill's biographer, Martin Gilbert, reports that a few minutes before the hour Churchill stood looking from his office window onto Trafalgar Square, and would later write that as the first stroke of eleven o'clock rang out:

I looked again at the broad street beneath me. It was deserted. From the portals of one of the large hotels absorbed by Government departments darted the slight figure of a girl clerk, distractingly gesticulating while another stroke of Big Ben resounded. Then from all sides men and women came scurrying into the street. Streams of people pouring out of buildings.

Within Churchill's own department "everyone rose from the desk and cast aside pen and paper."

People celebrated throughout the day and into the night.

That evening, Lloyd George invited Churchill and two other colleagues to dine with him. The Prime Minister said he wanted the Kaiser shot; Churchill opposed the idea. "The struggles of war were over," Gilbert writes. "The conflicts of peace had begun."
______________________________________________________________________________
Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life. (p. 401)