Foch’s curt words are that he has no conditions.
The Germans ask leave to read President Wilson’s latest note authorizing Marshal Foch to lay down the conditions. All Germany is waiting breathless for an armistice according to the Fourteen Points.
Foch insists that to have an armistice they must first ask for it.
The Germans request an armistice.
Then Weygand reads an outline of the conditions.
The conditions are:
“Immediate evacuation of all invaded countries within thirty days by German troops and of all of Germany west of the Rhine. The Rhineland to be occupied by Allied troops.
“Immediate repatriation without reciprocity of all prisoners of war.
“The delivery of an enormous list of various types of guns and of seventeen hundred airplanes.
“The delivery of five thousand locomotives and a hundred and fifty thousand cars and of five thousand motor trucks, all in good condition.
“The surrender of all submarines, of ten battleships and of a long list of other naval vessels.”
The armistice is for thirtysix days, but renewable. Meanwhile the blockade of Germany is to continue.
The German delegates are so aghast they can hardly speak. Erzberger says hoarsely he cannot even discuss such conditions without communicating with his government.
Even while he is speaking his government is melting away. A workers’ republic is proclaimed in Bavaria. Prince Max announces the Kaiser’s abdication in Berlin and promptly resigns. A new Cabinet is formed of Social Democrats and Independent Socialists. Friedrich Ebert, as prime minister, proclaims a German republic.
Kings, princes and grand dukes go scuttling off in all directions. Leaving Hindenburg alone at Imperial Headquarters to struggle with the problems of the armies, the Kaiser and the Crown Prince board their imperial train and take refuge in Holland.
The commissioners make a play of communicating with their government but there is no government in Germany. Revolution roars through the land. All night of November 10 they argue for better terms.
Foch, who has only left the train long enough to attend Mass that Sunday morning, sits icily obdurate at the end of the table. He lets the others argue as they will.
It is the second night that the marshal has spent out of bed in the course of the war.
“We slept but little,” he told one of his aides afterwards. “During the evening we had resumed our discussions. I lay down from eleven to one. Then we started arguing again till five fifteen that morning. At last they signed … and I saw Erzberger brandish his pen and grind his teeth when he signed the document. I was then glad that I had exerted my will, and employed the means of exerting it, for the business was settled.”
Orders are immediately telegraphed out. At eleven in the morning firing ceases along the whole line from Switzerland to the sea.
The very day and hour that the firing ceased on the western front, when the soldiers of the German and Allied armies were feeling themselves all over and crying out: By God I’m alive, three hundred Americans, supported by a company of Royal Scots and a few Canadians, were on the point of being overwhelmed by an assault of Russian Red Army troops in a group of log huts far upstream from Archangel on the Dvina River.
The village of Toulgas, under command of an American captain, was one of the fortified posts lost in the bogs and forests of north Russia left over from the sanguine British General Poole’s ambitious plan to sweep south to join the Czechoslovak Legion. Now the Czechoslovaks had fallen back on the Trans-Siberian, and Poole had been replaced in command of the north Russian expedition by General Ironside, who saw at once that his problem was to consolidate his forces and so avoid another Gallipoli.
Ironside set the Allied troops to building blockhouses. On November 10 his second in command General Findlayson inspected the position at Toulgas and pronounced the village quite safe from attack. Winter was late setting in and the boggy forests had not frozen hard enough in his opinion to allow the passage of troops. At the same time, since the Allied gunboats had retired to Archangel to escape being caught in the ice when the river froze, he took it for granted that the Red Army gunboats were tied up at their base at Kotlas, a good hundred miles to the south.
On the morning of November 11 the garrison of Toulgas was startled at breakfast by riflefire up the river to the south of them and cries of “Urrah, Urrah” from an attacking force. Through darkness and freezing dawn mist the Bolos had crept up on a squad of Americans occupying a cluster of charcoalburners’ huts at the upper end of the village.
Led by their lieutenant the Americans quickly fell back under fire across a little stream, past the church and the priest’s house to the blockhouses in the central group of huts. At the same time the crash of rifle-fire and the ratatat of machineguns were heard from the log huts to the north of the village. The field hospital was in one of them. As no attack was expected from that quarter the field hospital was completely open and the only defense of the two Canadian fieldguns set in emplacements to shoot south was a few American rifles and a Lewis machinegun.
As luck would have it the Bolos, commanded by a great brigand of a man in an enormous black fur hat, took time off to loot the first huts they came to. The leader stalked into the hospital and ordered his soldiers to kill the sick men lying there. With great presence of mind the British noncom in charge offered the leader a bottle of rum and brought out everything he had in the way of rations. At the same moment what turned out to be a young woman, dressed in bundles of rags like the rest, burst into the hut with a rifle cocked and threatened to shoot any man who laid hands on the sick. This was the Bolo leader’s girlfriend, a great strapping woman who had followed him through darkness and muck to the battlefront.
Food, drink and the lady’s charms did their work. The Bolo countermanded his order and, leaving her in charge of the hospital, continued the assault.
The delay gave the Canadians time to pull their fieldpieces out of the slots and to swing them around and to load them with closerange shrapnel. They were expert gunners who had served on the western front. They allowed the yelling Bolos, attacking in a mass, to reach just the right distance and then touched off a blast point blank. The Bolos wavered, took a second blast and fell back on the huts and the edges of the forest, leaving the field littered with dead and wounded.
Meanwhile the main body of Americans, protected by log walls, were holding off the attack from the south. There were casualties on both sides but the Bolos’ loss was much heavier. Clearing out snipers with a series of sorties the Americans and Britishers held off any further attack until early darkness fell.
During the night the American captain was cheered by blinker signals from a British post two miles across the river. When the message was decoded it turned out to be a demand that he account for six dozen Red Cross mufflers his outfit had been supplied with, and for which no receipt had been furnished. The night of Armistice Day when all the world was frenziedly celebrating an end to the war, the men of the little garrison at Toulgas slept on their guns.
Next morning five Red Army gunboats appeared around a bend in the river under the low arctic sun and started shelling. Rumor went around that Trotsky himself was aboard. This attack was no casual skirmish. The Russian guns outranged the Canadian fieldpieces so that they could lob shells at will into the long straggle of huts where the Americans and Britishers stood tense at their rifles and machineguns behind slits in the log walls.
The bombardment continued intermittently for three days. Though the attack to the north fizzled out with the death of the big Bolo leader in the black fur hat, repeated efforts to rush the little bridge that formed the northern entrance into Toulgas’ one muddy street had to be beaten back. A shell wrecked the American blockhouse and the priest’s house from which machinegun fire could be directed at the bridge. The church remained defensible.