Some 70 heads of state and government took part in a ceremony marking the end of World War I in the French capital of Paris in an extraordinary gathering amid tight security, including US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
French President Emmanuel Macaron received the audience at the Elysee Palace. Then dozens of leaders went to the Arc de Triomphe overlooking the famous Champs-Elysées, where the Unknown Soldier's Tomb was erected and an unremitting torch to commemorate the magnitude of the conflict that killed 18 million military and civilian people.
"History sometimes threatens to return to its tragic course and to undermine the legacy of peace, which we thought was crowned with the blood of our ancestors," Macaron told dozens of world leaders gathered at the Arc de Triomphe.
"Let us recite the oath of states again, to put peace above all else, and we all as political leaders in this day to emphasize to our people our real and great responsibility to leave our children the world dreamed of by previous generations."
Some 10,000 security personnel were deployed to secure the ceremony, and French police arrested two protestors from the Vimen movement, two of whom were in the chest. They approached the Trump parade while on their way to the Arc de Triomphe.
For the first time since World War II, leaders of Germany and France met in the forest in northern France, which witnessed the signing of the Armistice Agreement that ended the First World War.
In a moving ceremony a day before the centennial of the signing of the Armistice Agreement, Macron and Merkel sat inside the reconstructed wooden-lined train, which signed the Armistice Agreement on November 11, 1918, and then read a book of remembrance after signing it.
As a victory for France in World War I, a German delegation signed the armistice agreement on a train belonging to the commander of the French forces, Ferdinand Foch, who was standing on a railroad track in the Compiegne forest, and hours later the war ended.
McCron and Merkel lost troops from a joint French-German division before unveiling a painting that reflected the renewed peace and friendship between the two countries, which were the enemies of two world wars.
One hundred years after the end of World War I, Macron and Merkel clasped their hands to each other in an impressive ceremony marking the signing of the Armistice Agreement for Peace.
"Europe has been living in peace for 73 years, because Germany and France want peace," McCron told a number of young people. Merkel warned that "old evils and modern ideologies threaten peace." Merkel said she was touched by the celebration. She was intrigued by her presence as "a gesture of great significance."
World War I in numbers
- More than 70 countries participated in the war.
- Only 20 countries have managed to remain neutral.
- 70 million troops mobilized by warring nations in battles.
- 10 million soldiers killed in the war.
- 5 to 10 million civilians killed by historians' estimates.
- 27 thousand French soldiers were killed in one day (August 22, 1914).
- 70% of the victims were killed in artillery bombardments.
- 10 million refugees in all of Europe.
- 3 million widows and 6 million orphans.
- 1.3 billion shells were fired during the war.
- 10 billion letters and postal eviction between fighters and their families.
Macaron: Ancient evils and modern ideologies threaten peace