On the morning of November 11, 1918, the Armistice had been agreed, but the guns on the Western Front had not yet fallen silent. The terms were settled in a railway carriage in the forest near Compiègne, France, at about 5:10 a.m. They would not take effect until 11:00. An armistice is a suspension of fighting, not a peace; the Treaty of Versailles was still seven months away. In the hours between agreement and ceasefire, men kept fighting, and men kept dying.
One of them was Private George Lawrence Price of the 28th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force. According to Veterans Affairs Canada, he was killed near Mons, Belgium, at about 10:58 a.m., two minutes before the ceasefire. He was 25.
That fact raises questions that deserve straight answers before we stand in silence this year. Why did the fighting continue after the Armistice was agreed? Why was the ceasefire set for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month? Why do Americans mark both Veterans Day and Memorial Day, when Canadians gather once? And what should Remembrance Day mean in Canada now, more than a century later?
The argument underneath those questions is simple. Honouring soldiers does not require glorifying war, and respecting service does not require accepting every decision made by the people who sent them. The last hours of the First World War show why both things can be true.
Canada in the First World War
Canada entered the war in August 1914 because Britain did. There was no separate Canadian declaration. As a self-governing dominion, Canada still left its foreign policy to London, and the empire’s decision to fight was Canada’s decision whether Canadians had been consulted or not. The Canadian Encyclopedia’s account of imperialism in Canada is a useful reminder that loyalty to the empire was real and widely felt, but never unanimous, and that it did not settle what kind of country Canada would become.
The war changed that. About 650,000 Canadians served, and Veterans Affairs Canada puts the number who died at more than 66,000, with more than 172,000 wounded. The Canadian Corps fought at Ypres, on the Somme, at Vimy Ridge and at Passchendaele.
Canada’s national story is often compressed into a single battle, usually Vimy. That does the war a disservice. A country does not form in an afternoon, and a separate Canadian identity grew through years of shared hardship, bitter conflict over conscription, and a gradual assertion of independence. Prime Minister Robert Borden pressed for Canada to have its own voice at the peace table, and Canada signed the Treaty of Versailles separately in 1919. Full legal autonomy came later, with the Statute of Westminster in 1931. In 1939, Canada declared war on Germany in its own right, on September 10, a week after Britain.
The last campaign of the war was the Hundred Days, which began at Amiens on August 8, 1918. Veterans Affairs Canada’s overview of the Last Hundred Days records that the Canadians advanced about 130 kilometres, took roughly 32,000 prisoners, and paid for it with more than 6,800 killed and about 39,000 wounded. It was a military achievement and a human catastrophe at once.
The Armistice: Agreed Before Dawn, Effective at Eleven
By autumn 1918, Germany’s position was collapsing. Its allies were dropping out, its armies were in retreat, and its home front was close to breaking. German delegates crossed the lines and met Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied supreme commander, in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne.
Foch’s own account, preserved in a French Ministry of Defence historical resource, has the text agreed at 5:05 a.m. and signed at 5:10, with “the conventional hour of 5 o’clock” entered as the signing time. That is why many sources say 5:00 a.m. and others say 5:10. They describe the same morning. Foch’s telegram told commanders that hostilities would cease at 11:00 French time and that Allied troops would not cross the line they had reached.
The reason for the interval was practical. A UK government history blog says the time was set to give the news a chance to reach the men who needed to hear it. In 1918, that meant telephone lines, telegraph wires, motorcycle riders and runners crossing a battlefield that had been shelled into ruin. Six hours was not an unreasonable allowance.
It is tempting to say the hour was chosen for the symmetry of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Historical accounts emphasize the need to communicate the ceasefire, and there is little documentary evidence that the memorable sequence of elevens drove the decision. The historian Joseph Persico adds that the time also fell within the 72-hour deadline Foch had given the German delegation. Whatever influenced the original decision, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month subsequently became the defining moment of remembrance.
The Armistice also did not end the war in law. It ran for 36 days and was renewed four times. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919. Even then, the fighting was not finished everywhere. In East Africa, the German commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck did not surrender until November 25, and the Allied intervention in North Russia continued well into 1919.
The Final Six Hours
The Armistice did not freeze the front. Much of what happened before about 5:10 a.m. took place before any agreement existed. The harder question concerns the hours afterward, when the high commands knew a ceasefire was coming and offensives that had been under way for weeks continued in places.
The numbers need careful handling. The UK government’s account says that nearly 11,000 casualties were suffered across all armies on November 11, 1918, with more than 3,500 of them American. Casualties means killed, wounded and missing together. It does not mean 11,000 dead, and anyone who writes that is wrong. Nor can we say that every one of these casualties was avoidable. The honest question is narrower: what did commanders know, when, and what room did they have to act?
The American case is the best documented, largely through Persico’s account in MHQ, republished by HistoryNet. He reports that Foch had ordered pressure on the Germans to be maintained from November 9, and that General John J. Pershing, who had favoured pushing on rather than accepting an armistice, sent his commanders word that the Armistice had been signed and would take effect at 11:00. The message left discretion with commanders in the field. Some used it to keep attacking. Persico writes that General William Wright’s division took the town of Stenay that morning, while General Haan declined to attack at all. Both acted within the latitude they had been given, and the difference between them is the whole question.
Congress looked into it afterward. According to Persico, lawmakers scrutinized the Armistice-morning attacks, but the investigation did not establish individual culpability. These details rest on Persico’s account, and an inquiry is not itself a finding of wrongdoing.
Here the argument has to be careful. Scheduling the ceasefire for 11:00 was one decision. Choosing to attack during the hours before it took effect was a different decision, taken separately, by different people. Treating them as one lets both the planners and the commanders off the hook. Keeping them apart is how we ask the question properly.
Private George Lawrence Price and the Last Canadians
Veterans Affairs Canada records that Canadian Corps headquarters learned at about 6:30 a.m. that the ceasefire would take effect at 11:00. (The historian Tim Cook gives about 6:00, so the exact time varies slightly by source.) The Canadians were then near Mons, Belgium. The town was taken that morning, and the advance continued to about eight kilometres northeast of it. On that last day, according to Veterans Affairs Canada, 40 Canadians were killed.
George Lawrence Price was born in Falmouth, Nova Scotia, on December 15, 1892, and enlisted in Regina in October 1917. He served with the 28th Battalion, the Saskatchewan Regiment. The Canadian Virtual War Memorial entry for Price records his death on November 11, 1918. He was shot at Ville-sur-Haine, near Mons, and died at about 10:58 a.m. Archival accounts differ slightly on the exact time and the weapon, so the time given here is the one commonly recorded and the cause is left open.
Price is buried at St. Symphorien Military Cemetery, outside Mons, near John Parr, recognized as the first British soldier killed in the war.
It is often said that Price was the last soldier killed in the war. That claim is too broad. He is generally recognized as among the last Canadians killed in combat, but he was not the last person killed anywhere. George Edwin Ellison, a British lancer, is commonly described as the last British soldier killed, though accounts of the hour of his death differ. Henry Gunther, an American with the 79th Division, is recorded in the official account as dying at 10:59 a.m. Records of the final minutes are uneven, and no one should stake a claim on who was last. What we can say is that Price belongs to the last hours.
From Armistice Day to Remembrance Day
The first anniversary of the Armistice, in 1919, was marked in Canada with two minutes of silence. On November 6, 1919, King George V had asked for the observance of two minutes of silence at exactly 11 a.m. on November 11, as the Canadian Encyclopedia’s history of Remembrance Day records. The Department of National Defence history of the Remembrance ceremony follows how the observance developed.
In May 1921, Parliament passed an Armistice Day Act. It set the observance on the Monday of the week in which November 11 fell, and it joined Armistice Day with Thanksgiving. For a decade, Canadians marked remembrance and harvest gratitude as the same holiday. Thanksgiving has its own history of shifting traditions, which we have traced in a look at Canadian Thanksgiving’s history and traditions, but pairing it with a day of mourning was an awkward match from the start.
The arrangement confused the public and angered First World War veterans. In 1931, on a motion in the House of Commons, Parliament decided that the observance should fall on November 11 and on no other date, and members, led by C.W. Dickie, proposed the new name. Thanksgiving was separated from the day, and Canada held its first Remembrance Day on November 11, 1931. Veterans’ organizations were central to the change; the Royal Canadian Legion, formed in 1925, took up the cause.
The renaming mattered. An armistice is an event. Remembrance is an act, and it points toward people. Celebrating that a war ended and remembering those who did not come home are related, but they are not the same.
The Poppy
The poppy’s story starts with a poem. John McCrae, a Canadian physician serving with the artillery, wrote “In Flanders Fields” in May 1915, and it was published in the British magazine Punch on December 8, 1915. It is easy to find, and it deserves to be read whole rather than quoted in pieces.
Moina Michael, an American educator, wore a poppy in tribute to the war dead and encouraged others to do so. Anna Guérin, a Frenchwoman, took the idea further, promoting handmade poppies as a way to raise money for people affected by the war, and she helped bring the practice to Canada. The Great War Veterans Association adopted the poppy as its remembrance symbol on July 6, 1921, at a meeting in Port Arthur, Ontario, according to the Royal Canadian Legion. The first Canadian poppy day followed that November. The Legion now runs the national Poppy Campaign and holds the trademark. Its page on the poppy and the Campaign explains how donations support veterans and their families.
The poppy began as a voluntary gesture of respect, and it works best that way. Nobody should be pressured or shamed into wearing one, and nobody should mistake the symbol for the thing it stands for.
Remembrance Day, Veterans Day and Memorial Day
Memorial Day grew out of grave-decorating traditions after the American Civil War. Several communities claim early observances, so crediting any single founder is a mistake. General John A. Logan’s General Orders No. 11, issued on May 5, 1868, called for a nationwide Decoration Day on May 30, as described in the National Cemetery Administration’s history of Memorial Day. The order and the first observance are different dates. After the First World War, the day widened to honour Americans who died in all wars, and since 1971 it has fallen on the last Monday in May. Its date has nothing to do with the 1918 Armistice.
Veterans Day, by contrast, began as Armistice Day on November 11. After the Second World War and Korea, Congress changed the name in 1954, and President Eisenhower issued the first Veterans Day proclamation that October, to honour American veterans of all wars. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs history traces the change, including a period when a Monday-holiday law moved the observance to October, starting in 1971, before legislation in 1975 restored November 11 effective in 1978.
| Remembrance Day (Canada) | Veterans Day (U.S.) | Memorial Day (U.S.) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date | November 11 | November 11 | Last Monday in May |
| Honours | Those who died in service, and veterans and serving members | Veterans of all wars, living and deceased | Those who died in military service |
| Origin | First marked 1919; named Remembrance Day 1931 | Armistice Day; renamed 1954 | Civil War grave decoration; Decoration Day, 1868 |
| Tone | Solemn, centred on silence | Recognition and thanks | Solemn, centred on graves and loss |
Canada’s day combines elements of both. It asks us to remember the dead, and it also recognizes those who served and came home. The two aims overlap, but they pull in slightly different directions, and holding both is part of what makes Remembrance Day in Canada distinctive.
How Canadians Remember Today
The central ritual is simple. According to the Department of National Defence’s ceremonial guidance, the Last Post is sounded and its final note begins two minutes of silence. No instrument is played during the silence, and the Rouse is sounded when it ends. Around that core, communities hold ceremonies at cenotaphs from coast to coast, and wreaths are laid at Ottawa’s National War Memorial, which was dedicated in 1939. Nearby lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where the remains of an unidentified Canadian soldier from the First World War were interred on May 28, 2000.
Remembrance in Canada no longer belongs to one war. It includes the Second World War, Korea, decades of peacekeeping, Afghanistan and other deployments. Indigenous Veterans Day, observed on November 8, honours First Nations, Métis and Inuit people who served. According to the City of Winnipeg, it was first observed across Canada in 1993, with Manitoba officially recognizing it in 1994, following the founding of the Manitoba Aboriginal Veterans Association in 1992. The National Aboriginal Veterans Monument in Ottawa was unveiled on June 21, 2001.
Remembrance Day is one of the general holidays listed in section 166 of the Canada Labour Code, which governs federally regulated workplaces. Everyone else is governed by provincial and territorial employment standards, and those rules differ. Some jurisdictions treat November 11 as a general paid holiday, and others do not. Check the rules that apply to your workplace.
What Remembrance Should Mean
Canada’s sovereignty was not won in a single campaign, and it did not arrive because of what happened on the battlefield alone. Military service, diplomacy, constitutional development and political decisions all contributed: the sacrifice of the Canadian Corps, Borden’s insistence on a separate voice at Versailles, and the long legal road to the Statute of Westminster. That independence is worth defending. But independence is not wisdom. A country that makes its own decisions can still make poor ones, and it can still ask its soldiers to pay for them. Sovereignty creates the responsibility to decide. It does not guarantee that we will decide well.
That is why remembering the dead and questioning the use of force belong together. To honour a soldier is to take seriously what was asked of him. It would be a poor kind of honour that never asked whether those demands were justified, or whether the last two minutes of a war needed to cost anything at all. Questioning leadership is not a way of dishonouring the troops. Often it is the only honest way to respect them.
We do not know what every commander knew that morning, and we should not pretend to. We cannot say that every casualty was avoidable, and we should not claim it. What we can say is that a ceasefire was agreed at dawn, that it was set for 11:00, that the news reached the front in time for many and not for all, and that the war went on in places until the clock ran out.
On Remembrance Day this year, when the Last Post sounds and the silence begins, I will be thinking of a 25-year-old from Falmouth, Nova Scotia, who died at about 10:58 a.m. near a Belgian town, two minutes before the ceasefire. The silence we keep lasts exactly as long as he was short of it.