Snapshots of a war waning

nolead begins The Greatest Day in History
nolead ends nolead begins How, on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, the First World War Finally Came to an End
nolead ends nolead begins By Nicholas Best nolead ends
Public Affairs. 304 pp. $27.95

On Jan. 20, President Barack Obama will face a stark truth of world history: Getting out of a war is far tougher than getting into or opposing one.

Case in point: the international debacle that ended 90 years ago today - a day originally commemorated as "Armistice Day," then changed to "Veterans Day" - at precisely 11 a.m. French time.

The London Daily Express proclaimed it "the greatest day in history" because it ended the worst military confrontation and slaughter in world history. The numbers astonish, particularly when the four-year totals are compared with the thousands of deaths suffered in the five-year war in Iraq.

World War I caused more than 40 million casualties around the globe, and 8 million deaths, including an astounding 10,944 casualties and 2,738 dead on Nov. 11, 1918, alone. That came to almost as many, British journalist Nicholas Best tells us in this book-length photo of the moment, as on D-Day 26 years later.

A veteran of the Grenadier Guards, Best chooses a kaleidoscopic approach in The Greatest Day. He mines scores of World War I memoirs, histories and archival reports to line up more than a hundred vignettes, in rough chronological order, of what World War I's actors - from Kaiser Wilhelm and President Woodrow Wilson to soldiers, writers and others - were doing as the war ended.

Best lets the information speak for itself - his book is pure reportage rather than scholarly analysis or big-think critique. At the august level of policy, we see statesmen and generals from Britain's David Lloyd George to France's Georges Clemenceau calibrating the exact balance of vengeance and mercy to be imposed on defeated Germany, aware that how victors end a war determines whether they'll have to fight another one.

Predictably, Best corroborates the standard view that the Western Allies got the endgame badly wrong.

For some, the key mistake of the Allies was agreeing to cease hostilities before completely destroying the German Army. U.S. Gen. John Pershing, citing Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's insistence on the Confederacy's unconditional surrender at the end of the Civil War, believed that Germany had to be "brought to her knees."

For others, the fiasco stemmed from imposing severe and humiliating terms on Germany, making World War I a first round rather than a settled battle. Allied anger at Imperial Germany's many war crimes, such as the torpedoing of civilian ships, accounted for the Allies' thirst for revenge. But as history showed, the victors' decisions produced an angry German public, resulting in Adolf Hitler and World War II just over two decades later.

Many of Best's capsules rivet interest, providing insider glimpses of grand errors of policy and pompous European royalty trying to preserve their status amid ruins. Agatha Christie, Harry Truman, Marie Curie and Charles de Gaulle are among the famous participants he scrutinizes. But Best's most powerful portraits during World War I's final hours are of soldiers on the ground.

We usually recall the dates on which wars ended by focusing on the joy of people carousing in the streets, strangers kissing strangers. There's another side. Years ago, Sen. John Kerry famously asked, during testimony to a Senate committee about the Vietnam War: "How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?" It's little better, Best shows, to be the last person to die for a just cause.

In World War I, that person, for the United States, was Pvt. Henry Gunther of Baltimore's 313th Infantry Regiment. News of the armistice had reached the rear of the 313th at 10:44 a.m., but not soldiers like Gunther, at the front of their advance near the misty village of Ville-devant-Chaumont.

The Prussian 31st Regiment, defending a roadblock in front of it, knew the armistice was coming. Gunther suddenly leapt up and charged the roadblock, firing. "The Germans," writes Best,

"frantically waved him back." He kept charging and the Prussian machine-gunners cut him down. At 10:59 a.m., Gunther, a German American bank clerk and draftee, became "officially the last American to die in the war."

Best recounts other horrific codas as well.

An American soldier "stamping a dead German's face into a pulp," cursing the corpse in out-of-control anger over lost comrades. A wounded German lieutenant telling an advancing British battalion that his men had retreated from the town they were about to enter, tricking the British into an ambush that left more than a hundred of the latter dead or wounded. (The battalion's corporal returned to the wounded lieutenant and killed him immediately with a bayonet.)

German officers in Brussels turning machine guns on their own troops. Australian soldiers in Boulogne raping French prostitutes to celebrate.

The message of The Greatest Day comes across direct as a rifle shot: War is hell, right to the last moment.