The train carriage is straight from the golden age of rail travel. Commissioned in 1913, wagon 2419D of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits had a dining car with mahogany walls. By November 11 1918, it was the French marshal Ferdinand Foch’s mobile office, parked in the forests outside Compiègne, in northern France. Eight French, German and British men spent that night in strange intimacy around its small wooden table, smoking and studying France’s punitive peace terms. Foch had refused to negotiate: the Germans could sign the proposed Armistice or leave. At 5.12am the German Catholic politician Matthias Erzberger signed, then said, “A nation of 70 million suffers but does not die.” Foch still wouldn’t shake hands.
France repeated its humiliation of Germany in the peace talks at Versailles in 1919. After that, Foch remarked (at least according to Winston Churchill), “This isn’t a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” So it proved. In 1940, Hitler made France surrender in the same wagon (with the French now sitting in the Erzberger delegation’s seats), then had Compiègne’s monuments dynamited. Only Foch’s statue was left standing to oversee the wasteland.
The Armistice of 1918 is a model for how not to treat other countries. The historian Margaret MacMillan points out that Germany’s humiliation didn’t mechanically cause the second world war: there were 20 years in-between. Still, visiting Compiègne, you inevitably think of contemporary parallels. Here are some lessons for world leaders gathering in Paris next week to commemorate 1918: