Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf

Armistice and Aftermath | November 9, 2025

• Archdiocese of Oklahoma City

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A minute of silence on November 11, 1918 did not end the world’s turmoil—it exposed it. In this episode, Monsignor Wolf opens with the Armistice and follow the shockwaves: empires dissolving, borders reshaped in Central Europe and the Middle East, and a fragile “peace” that many leaders privately admitted would last only twenty years. From Austria-Hungary’s collapse to the reassembling of the Ottoman lands, from Germany’s chaotic republic to Japan’s strategic rise, the map changed faster than the moral reckoning that should have guided it.

He also examines how the United States stepped from hesitant observer to decisive actor. Wilson’s ideals, the politics at home, and the raw numbers of American troops turned the tide, yet conflict persisted far beyond the armistice. Civil war in Russia, shifting lines in Ukraine and Poland, and fighting between Greece and Turkey all underscored a hard truth: ceasing fire is not the same as making peace. The Versailles settlement left most parties convinced they had sacrificed more than they gained, sowing grievances that would erupt again by 1939.

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

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This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives, and finding hope in his word. And now your host, Father Don Wolf.

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. At the 11th minute, on the 11th hour of the eleventh day of the 11th month of 1918, men laid off the sights of their rifles on the Western Front and looked instead at the wide horizon. The fighting of the First World War had come to an end there. It's not recorded who had arranged the mathematical concord so that the 11s would line up, but upon the minute on that Monday, the fighting on the Western Front paused. Technically, the war was not over. This was only an armistice, a cessation of fighting, but it was the prelude to a peace treaty that provided the official end to the war. World War I did not officially end until June 28, 1919, seven months after the fighting stopped. Even then, the treaty ending the war was signed only by Germany and the Allied powers. There had been other treaties involving other nations engaged in the war, all signed and approved previous to June 1919. Austria-Hungary had been a co-belligerent with Germany, but it dropped out of the war with its own armistice on November the 3rd, 1918, with the Emperor of Austria-Hungary declaring a separate Austrian state on November the 11th, and a separate state of Hungary being formed on the 12th. The melting away of the empire had actually begun earlier, with various provinces and states constituting the forlorn Habsburg holdings having made their own way to the tables of nations as early as 1917. It was a mess in Central Europe as the realm came crashing down, a mess that wasn't really sorted out and settled until the 1990s. Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and Turkey also had to work out their arrangements with the collapse of the various countries at war, leading to a reshuffling of boundaries and the reprinting of maps for almost a decade to come. And that wasn't the half of it. Russia had dropped out of the war on the Allied side a year before. It had ceded most of the land gained by the German army in its war in the East from 1914 to 1917. The Bolshevik government was desperate to get out of the war and were willing to settle by giving away the western boundaries of its empire. Poland and Ukraine and other provinces were formed into their own countries out of these original agreements. The maps were changed and the globe spun differently following November 11, 1918. Germany itself collapsed into chaos as its dynasty dissolved. A republic was hastily formed by the civilian politicians, and just as the Kaiser had warned, it was marked more by its dysfunction than its representation. For its entire existence, the political parties in the government fought each other at the ballot box and in the streets with their own private armies. At least three attempts at revolution were foisted, with one succeeding for a bit before the instigators were caught and then murdered, one of whom had been a resident in the United States. It was a time of unbelievable change, unimaginable confusion, and unnamable problems. The armistice only limited fighting on the Western Front and with the Allied armies, not among the Germans, who chose to sharpen their political debates with troops, machine guns, and bayonets in the streets, and not only in Europe. At their treaty tables between 1918 and 1919, there were many parts of the world, many parts of the rest of the world renamed and recolored on the map. The Ottoman Empire dissolved, and the whole part of the world known as the Middle East had its boundaries redrawn as well, or in many cases had boundaries established in places they had never been before. The countries so highly visible in our news over the last few decades were established as the war came to a close. Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates had their borders invented and their governments arranged. Some of them were old nations whose names had been present for thousands of years, but at that time whose frontiers were redrawn and repurposed. Others were entirely new and had national identities thrust upon them by the treaties. But all of them came into being as separate states in a way never before envisioned or empowered. Japan became a recognized and noted presence as a result of her participation in the war effort. She received the German possessions in the South Pacific, as well as a huge dollop of respect for the competence and capability of her Navy, thanks to her cooperation with the victors. She'd beat the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the 20th century, but had eventually entered the war against Germany and on the side of Russia. Shifting politics and changing sides were nothing new in the history of nations, of course, not in Europe and not in Asia. By 1919, her involvement had brought nothing but positive outcomes for her. As part of the peace conference, other Asian priorities surfaced. Most were papered over by assigning European countries to moderate or at least to temporize their control over the countries and provinces involved. One of the young men at the conference, who would later go by the name Ho Chi Minh, was not successful in bringing his concerns to the fore about a Vietnam free from French control, turned out to be a missed opportunity. The greatest change in the world was in the position of the United States at the time of the 1918 armistice. Germany and Austria-Hungary had gone to war with Russia, France, and England in late July of 1914 and had fought them to a near standstill over three years. As the comedian Norm MacDonald once said, Do you know who Germany went to war with in World War I? The whole world. It wasn't quite true, but it was true enough. By 1917, with the Allies teetering and the Axis nearly played out, but tilting toward victory, the U.S. entered the war. The decision to go to war was made in the mishmash of contemporary domestic politics that make it hard for us, all these years later, to get inside of. President Wilson had dabbled with and caused a good deal of political unrest in Mexico during his first term. He asserted his interest in making sure our neighbor to the south had the right kind of government, involving lots of backroom messing about in the domestic politics there, and even a temporary U.S. invasion by the Marines of Mexico in 1914. At the beginning of his second term, heightening his obsession with foreign behavior, he insisted on the right of Americans to travel with impunity on the high seas to nations at war with one another. And if Americans didn't have this right, he insisted we had the right to go to war with any country causing danger to those Americans. One of his opponents, Robert Lansing, opined that his logic could be taken to ensure the right of Americans to take a train from Paris to Berlin with the expectation we would fight anybody who dared to shoot at the train, even though it might cross the border full of French soldiers. But Wilson's view, and there were many more, many more than this one example, although not any of them more convincing, his views held sway, and the U.S. declared war on Germany in April of 1917. And with the declaration of war, the machinery of the military went into high gear. With the resources of the country and the manpower available to the Allies, American involvement eventually led to victory against Germany. To complete the Norm MacDonald joke, Germany went to war with the whole world, and they almost won. But because of the American presence, it was not to be so. By the time the armistice was arranged, there were two million American soldiers in Europe and another million on the way with the prospect of an additional million after them. Germany sued for peace and arranged for the cessation of hostilities in November of 1918 and eventually signed the peace treaty in 1919. But the fighting didn't stop. German soldiers were called upon to put down a communist rebellion in Latvia, which they did. The Russian Revolution that had brought the communists to power there quickly turned into a civil war. The fighting went on until just about 1922. The Soviet government also fought to take back the provinces it had ceded in its peace treaty with Germany, invading Ukraine, taking and losing the capital Kyiv seven times before it eventually overran it and made Ukraine again a province of the Russian Empire. They also invaded Poland in 1920 and fought their way to Warsaw, where they were surprisingly defeated at what became known as the miracle on the Vistula. Fighting in Armenia, Georgia, on the border with Iran, on the border with China in Mongolia, and throughout the Central Asian republics, it sputtered on and off for years after the peace treaty was signed, eventually forming the Union of Soviet Republics, the USSR. The armistice of 1918 was the cessation of fighting, but only in the West. Fighting also went on in the Levant as Greece and Turkey, rivals for centuries, stretched out to tidy up their borders. Each had been on opposite sides during the war, so each tried to get the greater advantage from the other, as the rest of the world was adjusting and readjusting to the new arrangements of countries and governments. Eventually, they fought to a standstill and arranged to settle themselves according to a new distribution of culture, language, and borders. As a part of this, all Greek settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean, which had existed for 3,000 years, were disbanded. This also meant the Greek Christian presence in the countries that were Muslim also ended at that time. The years between 1910 and 1925 were some of the most volatile and unstable in all of history. Norm MacDonald's joke would have been funnier if he had included the fact that no one in 1921 could sell a map that had been printed in 1918. There wouldn't have been enough colors on it to account for the new countries, Commonwealth's and citizenries. It was a time of unbelievable change. It was also a time when grievances were not settled. Given the gargantuan cost of the war, improve the treasuries and bankrupting four empires and three of the wealthiest countries in the world, as well as costing the lives of 10 million soldiers, 10 million civilians, and then 20 million more as victims of the Great Influenza, the great hope was that the world would become a more peaceful and a more cooperative place. The opposite proved to be true. Everyone thought they had paid more than they had received. Every belligerent was convinced he'd been cheated out of his due. The sum of the world in 1920, even as the treaty was signed and celebrated, was that it was only an extension of the armistice, not a true peace accord. Even the signatories acknowledged publicly it would provide only about 20 years of peace. They were right. War and all of its horrors were visited upon the peoples of Europe and Asia just a few decades later, beginning in 1939. November eleventh is a day of sadness, especially in memory of all those who heard the silence at the eleventh hour on that day in 1918 and hoped it might have meant the anticipation of real peace. That was not to be. No one has the power to see into the future. There were many in the Allied armies convinced of the utility of a final defeat of the German homeland. Only by the Allies marching into Berlin, they assured themselves, could the real cause of the war be addressed and the heart of violence in Europe be defeated. Instead, at the cessation of hostilities, every army quickly disbanded, and the German army returned home with its with its honor intact. These skeptics believed that this allowed the Germans to claim they they had really won the war and only had only been defeated by some sort of trickery or ruse. Thus, in only a few decades the Nazis came to power, and the rest is history, they say. None of these scenarios dealt with the massive chaos and the almost unlimited violence going on throughout the bloodlands of Central Europe at the time. Peoples and nations were rising up to assert and to establish themselves while working to diminish and disestablish those who stood in their way. And besides, the Germans had lost two million young men in the fighting. They noticed. If the U.S. today lost ten million soldiers in four years, we would notice. Nobody thought they hadn't lost the best part of themselves. England and France won, and they were devastated politically and morally for twenty years. It's a hard case to make that enough suffering hadn't taken place. What had been Europe at its most productive and peaceful was laid waste in the four years of the war. Countries proud of their churches and universities, wildly successful in their science and industry, leaders in liberation and freedoms, sprouting faithful missionaries and sterling patriots, they went to war with a savagery nobody had imagined possible. Europe tore itself apart. It took four years for the war to end, but in truth, the continent had wounded itself mortally after the first two years. As Winston Churchill wrote, when all was over, torture and cannibalism were the only two expedients the civilized, scientific Christian states have been able to deny themselves, and these were of doubtful utility. It was hard for anyone to speak of European civilization without a high note of irony. For the decade and a half leading up to the declaration of war, there had never been a more prosperous time for the people there. By our standards, the times were not great. France had the GDP of modern day Algeria, and Russia was more like contemporary Kabul than modern day Moscow when it came to freedom, opportunity, and thought. But things were trending positive in every measure. While the peoples of the continent were not wealthy, free, or at ease, their wealth, freedom, and ease had never been so widespread or so predominant. If only, if only each country had been content with its present, extending into its future, each would have been vastly better off. But no one could know such a thing. There's never been a time of perfect peace or complete equipoise. States like persons are always in motion. Politics are like heartbeats. They rise and fall and grow weaker or stronger based on the environment they're in and the stimulants or sedatives they take. Nothing remains the same. Since no one can foresee the future details of his actions or his ideas, everybody decides and acts in the blind. And so it is with nations and those who decide and act in their name. In 1916, the Vatican was anxious to find a way for the fighting to stop. The armies of Europe had rushed to the field, each fixed on fighting a just war, and each had been attached to the conviction of limited fighting for limited goals in a short war. None of the nations had prepared for a long war or for one demanding total mobilization. After two years of slaughter and numerous attempts by the Pope to broker some measure of moderation, if even if not a full-on peace, the Holy See asked the belligerents to state their war aims. The Vatican position was classic. Each of us, each of you, tell us what you want out of the war, and if we can see what all of you want, maybe we can bring the sides together and begin to talk about how to achieve it so the fighting can stop. And none of the nations responded except to say they wanted total victory. They'd become locked in a death match in which nobody could let go. They could settle for nothing less than vanquishing their enemies. It was all or nothing, even at the risk of settling for nothing. For two more years the Vatican struggled by way of its cardinals and bishops and their connections to the government of the nations to find an end to the fighting. And in the end, they could do nothing except begin to organize the relief necessary to feed the starving millions the war had impoverished. The Pope himself was tempted to think the entire world was coming to an end. In truth, that really wasn't anything new. The papacy has seen its people and its power challenged in catastrophe after catastrophe through the ages. Every person is blinded by the bias of the immediacy of his experience, and so was Pope Benedict XIV. In previous ages, the papacy had seen the Black Death, when one third of Europe died in one generation. There had been invasions and threats from barbarian hordes, from Viking tribesmen, from Genghis and Attila and the Khans and Huns from the steppes, and from Muslim armies and navies from the eighth century all the way to the 17th century. Numerous popes themselves had borne arms to challenge the enemy of the Papal States and to defend the right of papal prerogatives. They were no strangers to armies and their capabilities. Pope Pius VII had even been captured by Napoleon's troops and taken to France, and on and on and on. There had never been a time in which all was peaceful, all was prosperous, and all was at ease. Not in the church that is everywhere and among everyone. But Pope Benedict XIV was right in that he thought of the days of the First World War as the apocalypse. That word simply means revelation, and the quick stumble into the conflagration of war revealed the riot behind the mask. Europe was not a place of peace, nor was it a place where only the church had taken hold. It took just a few weeks of diplomatic ineptitude to turn the whole continent into a seething bushel basket of snakes, and it has never recovered. Anyone who's tempted to cite a practice or quote an author or look in the direction of what used to happen in the Halcyon days in the past when things were quiet and peaceful, if it's pointed toward the days before the guns of August, that person is checkmated even before he moves his second piece. When we look back over our shoulders at what seemed tame and solid, noticing the new churches, the placid agreements, the great crowds, the dynamism and the convictions that seem so certain, we're looking back through the ruins of tottering chimneys and electrified barbed wire. From the moment the war broke out, the church was examining itself to find what it had to know about the world being born and the civilization coming forth. The questions are not yet answered, and the world has not yet unveiled itself fully. On this Armistice Day, Veterans Day, we do well to pause and acknowledge all of those who have become involved in the defense of our country. To defend ourselves is one of the great priorities of every age, and those who do so are honorable. We depend upon them and their willingness to act in our name for the loved one, for the ones we love the most. As GK Chesterton wrote, the true soldier fights, not because he hates the one in front of him, but because he loves the ones behind him. And those who stand the night watch and bear arms to the far shore for our protection are worthy of our thanks. But we also bow to the complications of our day and time. Only God knows the true pathway to the gift of peace and to the illimitable future we're anxious to encounter. We've been led by and will be led by fallible men, each a product of the prejudices and limitations of his age and aptitude. Our leaders only know what they know. They lead us, who elected them, into the decisions for our future and our prospects. Whom we elect and why remains for us a responsibility we cannot shun. As we go about our day, it's important for us to remain fixed on what is true about ourselves and our world. We will never know absolute peace, but we must be aware of what abandoning peace might cost. We'll never know absolute justice. This will happen only as the kingdom has come among us, but abandoning every project because it falls short of this measure risks bringing even greater injustice. We must not be complacent about our accomplishments, no matter how great, because they always come at our expense. Often we're not aware of the full measure of what's paid until we can consider what our alternatives are or could be. We also can't give in to the lies of simplification. As the former mayor of New York City, Ed Koch used to say, there is an immediate, simple, and straightforward solution to every problem, and it's wrong. The real world is complicated. Politics is a jumble. People are devious, truth is slippery, and options are limited. We have to invest ourselves in knowing our world, not just mottos and slogans and jingos or memes. We owe it to our future to know ourselves, our society, and our world, and to address them before they surprise us with their violence and disorder. God is the God of nations. We trust in the divine providence to realize the goodness of God's kingdom come among us. More than anything else, we trust Christ and His promise to be with us always in His sacraments and in His church. No one knows the contratempts of the future, or hardly even the details of the past. All we know, as we look over the awful history of our time, is that we are either given to God or we're given to despair. On Veterans Day, let's look to the source of hope that sustains us in God alone. Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called The Photos from Yemen. The photographer drew back to reveal, past the smiles of the young soldiers, for the cameras all knew he would seal our interest while focusing over their shoulders. And we could see the bodies crumpled and sprawled in death, women mostly shot easily, soldiers freed from the brawled conflict and the breadth of opinion whose ghostly ways haunted them breezily. They were proud of what they had done, shot their opponents in the open to secure their land, boasted long and loud, happy to be the sons of victory, proponents of life, demure and bland. This is from the now, not a crusader's tale or a warrior saga, but on our own TVs, a reminder of how we veil the horrors of what our homes see. Because in the pictures we see the bodies broken, there is no outrage rising from us. We pause and perhaps bend a knee at these Saudi tokens, but forget we gauge them not of our devising as not a plus. That's the photos from Yemen. Hope you can join us in the weeks to come as we continue to investigate what it means to be Living Catholic.

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Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.