RUTHFULLY YOURS

The original Armistice Day, as Guy Cuthbertson shows in “Peace at Last,” was very different from the current Remembrance Day. It was characterized by striking contrasts. On the Western Front, the morning started as usual, with continued small-arms and artillery fire as the Allies made their final “push.” The last British soldier to be killed in action was George Edwin Ellison, a middle-aged man with the Royal Irish Lancers who fell at Mons, in Belgium, near where he had been involved in some of the first fighting at the start of the war in August 1914. His death, like those of the other men who were killed on the war’s last couple of days, has often been described as futile, because the combatant countries had by then agreed on a precise timetable for the cessation of fighting. In fact, hostilities continued up to the last hour to ensure that the Germans did not wriggle out of their armistice obligations, which were effectively terms of surrender.

Then, at 11 a.m. on Nov. 11—the now fabled 11th hour—the armistice came into effect. In one famous incident on the Western Front, a German machine gunner fired off his last belt just before the clock struck, then stood up, bowed and withdrew in the direction of home. An “uncanny” silence, as Mr. Cuthbertson puts it, descended on the war’s many battlefields—the inspiration for the two minutes of silence that are part of the modern commemoration of the day.

At home, by contrast, the end of the war brought an eruption of noise that lasted until the following morning and beyond. In Portsmouth, thousands of officers and men, as well as members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service—the “Wrens”—broke into a full 10 minutes of wild yelling. There was as yet no BBC, so the news spread in fits and starts. Across the United Kingdom crowds, often including wounded servicemen, streamed into town squares and city centers. At one end of the spectrum, there were the official proclamations and the countless church services. The royal family appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Afterward, George V, who had abjured alcohol for the duration of the war, took “a cup of kindness” while the Windsors, as they had been called since 1917 (instead of their original Germanic name), sang “Auld Lang Syne.” At the other end of the spectrum, there were high spirits, drunkenness and (it seems) a lot of celebratory sex.

Amid the rejoicing, there was also terrible sadness. One couple in Doncaster, Yorkshire, received news of their son’s death at the front more than three weeks before. Others remembered those who had not returned or who had been horribly maimed. Once the euphoria had worn off, relief and exhaustion were the dominant sentiments, not least because, as the author reminds us, Britain—and indeed the world—was in the grip of an influenza pandemic that would claim many lives and sap the energy of the survivors.

But it was also a time of hope. Many thought that the Great War was, as British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had said, the war to “end all wars.” Children were named for the peace. One of these was Pax G. Yates of Chertsey (about 30 miles west of London), who was born at exactly 11 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918.

It was only in later years that Armistice Day acquired its ritualized sobriety. In his absorbing and well-researched study, Mr. Cuthbertson, a professor of literature at Liverpool Hope University, shows how a day of spontaneity was tamed over time, as celebration morphed into commemoration. The exuberance of Armistice Day gave way to the solemnity of Remembrance Day. What was being marked was no longer the end of the war but the full experience of the conflict, and in time of all the recent wars in which the British Empire and the United Kingdom were involved (a long and growing list).

“Peace at Last,” despite its sometimes grim subject, is a pleasure to read and is full of fascinating tidbits. Did you know that Capt. Harry Truman, the future president, was serving on the Western Front on Nov. 11 and fired his last shot 15 minutes before the armistice, which he celebrated by eating a blueberry pie? Probably the last man to die in the war, at one minute to 11 a.m., was also an American, Henry Gunther from Baltimore; the author does not add that he was the grandchild of German immigrants. A crowd in Maidstone, Kent, started singing “Rule Britannia” but found that nobody knew more than the first few lines and so continued with the more widely known “Keep the Home Fires Burning.”

As one might expect from a literary scholar, Mr. Cuthbertson marshals an impressive range of literary sources, from Vera Brittain’s “Testament of Youth” to James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” (which, he says, presents the “mangled speech” of drunken armistice revelers); from Thomas Keneally’s novel about the armistice negotiations, “Gossip From the Forest,” to Horton Foote’s play “1918.” There is even a disquisition on armistice and the rituals and traditions of bell ringing.

Marshal Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander, said that what was achieved in 1918 was “not peace, but an armistice for twenty years.” This turned out to be a surprisingly precise prediction. There was unfinished business in Europe. Hitler led Germany, which had convinced itself that it had not really been beaten “in the field,” back into war in September 1939. Seaman Pax Yates was killed in action off Narvik, Norway, on May 3, 1940, age 21.

Mr. Simms is the author of “Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, From 1