The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

The armistice that ended the fighting of the First World War was signed in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne at about five in the morning on 11 November 1918. It came into force six hours later, at eleven o’clock, so that the news could reach the front. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

We can almost see it. An American sound-ranging unit was recording the artillery near the River Moselle to locate enemy guns, and its film strip captured the last minute before 11:00 and the first minute after. The strip holds no sound, only six lines, one for each microphone, that jump with every gun. In a short film the Imperial War Museum shows it: the lines shake, and at eleven o’clock they go flat. For its centenary in 2018 the museum also had the strip turned back into sound, a recreation of what that minute may have sounded like: a wall of thuds, and then almost nothing. You can listen to it on ABC News.

Kurt Vonnegut, born in 1922 on that very date, wrote in the preface to Breakfast of Champions that when he was a boy, all the people of all the nations that had fought the war were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day. He had talked to old men who were on the battlefields during that minute, and they told him, one way or another, that the sudden silence was the voice of God. Armistice Day, he wrote, was sacred.

It is the most serious eleven there is. Every year on 11 November, at 11 in the morning, a large part of the world stops for a minute because of it.