Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode One of our buildup arc is 1918–1919: The Peace That Continued the War.

The first thing to understand about the armistice is that it doesn’t feel like victory in the bodies of the people who survived. It feels like the gun finally stopping after you’ve lived so long with noise that silence itself is suspicious. The world in late 1918 is not a relieved world. It’s a stunned world. A world of men trying to walk on legs that aren’t there. A world of women who have learned to dread the sound of footsteps at the door. A world where influenza moves through weakened populations like a second army. A world of ration books, debt, and cemeteries that become permanent architecture.

So when leaders speak of “peace,” they are already lying a little—not out of malice,  ...