WWI Victors Mark 75th Anniversary of Armistice

In ceremonies Thursday before a dwindling band of survivors, the victorious nations who lost a generation of young men in World War I marked the 75th anniversary of the armistice that ended four years of carnage that claimed 12 million lives.

Church bells pealed in Paris and Big Ben chimed in London at 11 a.m., the symbolic hour when the machine guns and artillery finally fell silent on the Western Front on Nov. 11, 1918.

The war pitted France and Britain and their empires, Russia, Italy, the United States and Japan against Germany and its allies, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, comprising most of modern Eastern Europe, and the Ottoman Empire--modern Turkey and the Middle East.

Of the tens of millions of soldiers who fought in World War I, perhaps 10,000 are still alive.

In France, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur laid a wreath at Armistice Clearing in a forest north of Paris, where the cease-fire was signed in a railroad car by the Allied victors and defeated Germany.

“Peace is never fully won,” Balladur said. “It can only be the fruit of unceasing work.”

Across the English Channel, Queen Mother Elizabeth walked through a field of tiny crosses at Westminster Abbey honoring the 750,000 British dead.

She was 18 years old when joyous crowds flooded London’s streets at news of the war’s end. Thursday, she leaned on an umbrella and chatted with a few survivors, some more than 100 years old.

In Belgium--whose invasion by Germany on Aug. 4, 1914, unleashed the conflict--King Albert II visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Brussels.