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Time Travels with Truffle: Dateline November 11th,
1918 – Allied Trenches, France
The sky over France was beginning to brighten when
Truffle poked a small reddish-orange head above the sandbags.
The little Pomeranian was filthy.
Mud clung to Truffle's paws and tangled the
cream-colored fur beneath Truffle's chest. Nearby, soldiers crowded into a
trench carved through a landscape that seemed to have forgotten what trees and
grass were supposed to look like. Broken trunks rose from the earth. Shell
holes filled with muddy water. Tangled wire disappeared into the morning mist.
This was the Western Front.
And on November 11, 1918, something was about to
happen that millions of people had prayed for through four terrible years.
The war was going to stop.
Truffle had lived among the soldiers long enough to
recognize the sounds of war. Artillery thundered somewhere beyond the horizon.
Rifles cracked intermittently across the front. Shells passed overhead with
their terrible rushing sound.
But that morning the soldiers were talking about a new
sound.
Silence.
Word had reached the trenches that representatives of
Germany and the Allied powers had agreed to an armistice. The agreement had
been concluded that morning in a railway carriage in the forest near Compiègne,
France. The ceasefire would take effect at 11:00 a.m.
Eleven o'clock.
The soldiers kept looking at their watches.
Truffle watched the soldiers.
Everyone knew the hour was coming.
Yet the war had not stopped yet.
Across the Western Front, the final Allied offensive
had been driving German forces backward for months. The campaign remembered as
the Hundred Days Offensive had begun in August and continued until the
armistice itself.
Now there were only hours left.
Then minutes.
Truffle wandered along the duckboards between boots,
packs and rifles. Usually somebody would reach down and scratch behind
Truffle's ears.
Not this morning.
The soldiers were watching their watches.
10:50.
Ten minutes.
The distant artillery continued.
Truffle climbed onto an ammunition crate and looked
over the parapet.
Somewhere beyond the battered earth were German
trenches filled with people doing exactly the same thing.
Waiting.
Perhaps that was the strangest part.
Everyone knew the war was ending.
But until the appointed moment, it remained a war.
10:55.
A soldier crouched beside Truffle and checked a
wristwatch.
"Five minutes."
Truffle tilted a head.
Five minutes until what?
The soldier lifted Truffle and placed the little dog
safely behind the sandbags.
Truffle objected immediately and scrambled back up.
"Stay down."
Truffle stared stubbornly.
Four years of artillery had failed to solve this
particular disciplinary problem.
Then came another explosion.
Truffle ducked.
The soldiers did too.
And then everyone checked the time again.
10:58.
Two minutes.
The First World War had erupted in the summer of 1914
and spread across Europe and far beyond it. Empires had mobilized millions.
Battles had consumed armies on an almost unimaginable scale. Old political
orders had begun collapsing under the strain.
Now all that killing had been reduced to the movement
of the hands on a watch.
10:59.
Someone whispered:
"One minute."
Truffle climbed onto the sandbags.
Nobody stopped the Pomeranian this time.
The little dog stared across the devastated landscape
of the Western Front.
A gun fired in the distance.
Then another.
The seconds passed.
The soldiers waited.
Finally...
Eleven o'clock.
The ceasefire took effect at the eleventh hour of
the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
The firing stopped.
Truffle's ears lifted.
The little dog waited for the next explosion.
None came.
The soldiers waited too.
For perhaps the first time some of them could remember,
there was no artillery rolling across the horizon.
No machine guns.
No incoming shells.
Only wind moving across the ruined ground.
One soldier slowly stood.
Then another.
Somebody climbed onto the firing step and looked across
no man's land.
Nothing happened.
Truffle scrambled onto the top of the sandbags.
"Truffle!"
Too late.
The reddish-orange Pomeranian stood completely exposed
above the trench.
Every instinct formed during years of warfare told the
soldiers what should happen next.
But nothing did.
Truffle stood there.
Alive.
Safe.
And suddenly somebody laughed.
Another soldier shouted.
Then the trench exploded, not with shells, but with
human voices.
Helmets went into the air.
People embraced.
Flags appeared.
And Truffle began barking furiously at absolutely
everyone.
British, French and American flags rise above a sea of
soldiers. Steel helmets sail through the air. People climb onto the parapets
that had sheltered them from enemy fire.
And there, directly in front of them, sits Truffle.
A muddy little reddish-orange Pomeranian.
For once, nobody orders Truffle down.
Someone scoops up the little dog.
Another soldier reaches over.
"Give Truffle here!"
Truffle passes from arm to arm through the trench.
Everybody wants to hold the Pomeranian who has endured
the mud, noise and fear alongside them.
But eventually the cheering quiets.
Because silence after four years of war was not simply
joyous.
It was strange.
The men looked across the landscape.
There were empty places among them.
Friends who should have been celebrating were not
there.
The war's human cost was staggering, with millions of
soldiers and civilians dead and millions more wounded.
Truffle could not understand numbers like that.
But Truffle understood absence.
There were hands that once slipped pieces of food
beneath the table.
Hands that once scratched Truffle behind the ears.
Voices that once called Truffle's name.
Some of those voices were gone.
A soldier sat quietly against the trench wall.
Truffle walked over and climbed onto the soldier's lap.
For several minutes, neither moved.
Above them, the flags still fluttered.
The war had stopped.
But peace would take longer.
The armistice of November 11 ended the fighting on the
Western Front, but it was an armistice rather than the final peace settlement.
The formal peace with Germany would come with the Treaty of Versailles in June
1919.
On this morning, none of that mattered very much to
Truffle.
There was only the silence.
Eventually, Truffle climbed back onto the parapet.
The little dog looked out across the shattered
countryside.
The sun was higher now, touching the broken landscape
with pale November light.
Behind Truffle stood soldiers from countries that had
fought together through the terrible final years of the war. Before Truffle
stretched the empty battlefield.
Then someone produced a piece of bread.
Truffle immediately abandoned the contemplation of
history.
The soldiers laughed.
And perhaps that laughter was the most remarkable sound
of all.
For four years, the trenches of France had echoed with
the machinery of industrial warfare.
But on November 11, 1918, the guns finally fell
silent.
Soldiers could climb above the sandbags without
immediately fearing the consequences.
People could imagine going home.
And sitting proudly upon the muddy parapet,
reddish-orange fur covered with the dirt of France, was a very small Pomeranian
who had survived to witness it.
Truffle had heard the last guns of the Great War.
But what Truffle remembered most was what came
afterward.
Silence.
And then...
cheering.
And once again, History is gently guided by a tiny paw.
