Remembrance Day is coming. More accurately it is Armistice Day. The armistice between Germany and the Western Powers was signed at Compiègne in France on the morning of 11 November 1918, after four years of war. Sadly, there are heart-chilling parallels to today.

Then, as now, atrocities at the beginning of a war were ceaselessly exploited by propagandists to justify a savagely disproportionate response. In August 1914, the German invasion of neutral Belgium — which killed up to 7000 civilians in the first weeks of fighting — was endlessly cited to vindicate a war of avenging angels, on many fronts over four years, that eventually killed more than 16 million people, while seeding still more bloody wars.

Then, as now, a horrific war of industrialised mass-killing was prolonged by callous leaders, on both sides, essentially to save their political skins. From 1914 to 1918, a dozen opportunities for a negotiated peace — proposals from the Dutch, the Swedes, the Americans, the Pope and the Germans — were sabotaged by those leaders who shrieked that only a crushing military victory, only a “knock-out blow”, could lead to “a lasting peace”.

Then, as now, food was used as a brutal weapon of war. In 1914, the British Government proclaimed food contraband and a starvation blockade of Germany was imposed by the British Navy, which eventually killed up to three-quarters of a million Germans, mainly the poor, children and the elderly.

Then, as now, opportunities for an earlier ceasefire were sabotaged. In the first week of October 1918, a new German Government requested an armistice from US President Woodrow Wilson, while publicly accepting his peace program; but howls of protests from the war-at-any-price politicians and pressmen in London, Paris and Washington, decrying a “German peace trap” and a “premature peace”, delayed the armistice for six weeks.

Then, as now, the victors imposed the terms of a conqueror. Under the armistice of 11 November 1918, the defeated Germans were forced to withdraw from occupied territory, and to accept the occupation of the Rhineland, disarmament, a one-sided return of prisoners of war, and worst of all — under vehement protest — the extension of the starvation blockade during the period of armistice, intensifying the food crisis in influenza-ridden Germany.

Then, as now, an armistice was used as another weapon of war. The November 1918 armistice was for one month, then renewed in December 1918, and again January and February 1919, with more onerous terms added each time, such as the surrender of agricultural equipment, which again worsened the food crisis inside Germany.

Then, as now, the warmakers and their hirelings in the press insisted there was no starvation. In the winter of 1918-19, the Western ultra-patriotic press denounced German “squeals” about hunger, blamed Berlin for the crisis and campaigned against any emergency food going into Germany, which only began to trickle in after public pressure in April-May 1919.

Then, as now, those entering the defeated land were shocked by the evidence of starvation. In 1918-19, British officers investigating inside Germany reported profound suffering and occupying British forces witnessed starving children surrounding their army cookers, while prostitution for food soared, along with venereal disease, in the occupying armies.

Then, as now, the emaciated and defeated nation rapidly descended into chaos. Inside Germany, during the winter of 1918-19, moderates had little firm ground to stand on, and extremists of left and right resorted to street-fighting, death-squad justice, and brief outbreaks of civil war, while the victors shunned the new democratic Weimar Republic.

Then, as now, an American president visited the capitals of the victors, to be feted, while behind the scenes their leaders prepared a victors’ peace. During his visit to Europe in the winter of 1918-1919, president Wilson was praised in parliaments and palaces, while the politicians in London and Paris privately mocked him, and conspired to crush defeated Germany, to enlarge their empires, and to strangle any “Wilsonian” movement for self-determination in the colonial world.

Then, as now, upon the signing of the ceasefire, the victors indulged in nauseating celebrations of peace and sought to milk the moment for domestic political advantage. In Britain, for example, just days after the armistice, prime minister Lloyd George announced a general election, repudiated his earlier promises of progressive peacemaking, stoked hatred of the enemy, incited fantasies that the enemy could pay the entire costs of the war and basked in glory as the man who had won the war and would punish the defeated.

Then, as now, an armistice — or a “ceasefire deal” — is not a peace. In November 1918, the victors agreed to a “pre-armistice agreement” (of 5 November) under which they agreed to negotiate peace on the basis of President Wilson’s liberal internationalist ideals (the Fourteen Points, Four Principles, and Five Particulars); but once Germany was effectively disarmed, the allies refused to negotiate with any German delegation, blocked progressive elements of Wilson’s program and did not even invite the Germans to Paris until early May 1919 and then only to receive the Treaty of Versailles as a fait accompli.

Then, as now, war brutalised and traumatised the soldiers engaged in it, on every side. In 1919, when German soldiers returned from the fronts, and when German prisoners of war and internees returned, months after the peace was signed, some of these disillusioned men would drift into fanatical right-wing political parties that would spawn a new European war two decades later.

Then, as now, war dissolved principle and smashed civil liberty. In 1914-18, both sides failed to distinguish civilians from combatants, in their use of submarines, starvation blockades and aerial bombing and both sides shut the mouths of dissidents, boosted demagoguery and eroded democracy.

Then, as now, supporters of the war through to military victory proclaimed the most high-minded goals, to build peace and avenge the dead. But the post-war world discovered that no rituals of honour for the dead at war memorials could bring them back, or soothe the scar on our civilisation, or distract from the dimensions of the disaster.

Then, as now, the victory was — and will be — illusory. In the post-war world a terrible retribution was prepared, in the hearts and minds of those who had endured the catastrophe of 1914-18, including those half-starved children of 1919 who entered the ranks of Hitler’s Army. As the poet Auden would write in his “September 1, 1939”, the lesson was plain:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return_._

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.