These terms, which not only constitute Germany's unconditional surrender, but reduce Germany to a condition that absolutely prevents her resumption of war, form the base of the final treaty of peace.
CLOSING DAYS OF HOHENZOLLERN REIGN
Into the four months preceding November 11, 1918, were crammed events that drove the Germans back, deprived them of their allies, brought the utter collapse of Imperial government, drove the emperor into exile, saw a socialist republic set up with Berlin as its capital, brought the whole of what had been the empire to a state of seething unrest and change touched with the poison of bolshevism. November 4, a memorable date, found Germany alone and unsupported against a world triumphant in arms. All the laboriously built up structure of her military state was brought to a futile struggle for life, the whole vast fabric of her underground diplomacy, her intricate, world-penetrating spy system, her marvelously elaborate and totally unscrupulous propaganda, crumbled away; nothing remained of the earlier vigor but a memory—that shall be a stench forever.
November 11, 1918, will go down in history as the memorable day in which the last surviving medieval tyranny in Europe disappeared in blood and smoke; for its final act was filled with characteristic hate and brutality.
In the very last hours before armistice took effect, German batteries poured a deluge of high explosives and poison gas on Mezieres, where there were no allied soldiers at all, but only civilians, men, women and children, twenty thousand of them, penned like rats in a trap, without possibility of escape. Says one correspondent, describing that horror: "Words cannot depict the plight of the unhappy victims of this crowning German atrocity. Incendiary shells fired the hospital, and by the glare of a hundred fires the wounded were carried to a shelter of cellars where the whole population was crouching.
"That was not enough to appease the bitter blood lust of the Germans in defeat. Cellars may give protection from fire or melinite; but they are worse than death traps against the heavy fumes of poisonous gas. So the murderous order was given, and faithfully the boche gunners carried it out. There were no gas masks for the civilians and no chemicals that might permit them to save lives. Many succumbed."
FINAL ACT OF THE HUN AT SEA
The final act at sea was almost concurrent with this tragedy. The 16,000-ton battleship Britannia was torpedoed off the entrance to the straits of Gibraltar, November 9, and sank in three and one-half hours.
FOLLOWING THE DAYS OF RECKONING
And so, spewing murder in its last writhing, the monster died. It had begun by furiously ravaging Belgium in August, 1914; it ended with the awful, wanton murder of noncombatants at Mezieres in November, 1918. Throughout four years, three months and ten days, it had ramped and raged over the land, under the sea and in the air, slaughtering, poisoning, ravaging, without cessation, killing wherever it could, robbing with colossal greed, defiling what it could neither kill nor carry away, leaving across the pages of history a trail of blood and filth and slime that all the tears of all the angels cannot ever wash away.