In 2018, it was French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel doing the commemorating. They inspected troops who were drawn up and at attention but there to pay respect to their fallen comrades of a century before. The troops, in fact, were both French and German. Unveiled at the ceremony was a plaque that honored the reconciliation and good relations now enjoyed by the two countries, who have so often battled each other in the past few centuries.

Estimates of war dead during the four-year conflict known then as the Great War and now as World War I are that 10 million soldiers died and that one-third of those were French or German.

It was a different story in 1918. On November 11, at 11 a.m., the war ended. French commander Ferdinand Foch owned the rail car in which a delegation from Germany signed the Armistice, in the Compiegne Forest, north of Paris. The war officially ended with the Treaty of Versailles, which went into effect the following year.

It was not the last world war. Twenty years later, World War II began. In that war, Germany conquered France and German leader Adolf Hitler forced French authorities to sign papers of surrender in the very same rail car. When the war ended in Europe with Germany's surrender, the rail car was not used again.

The rail car still exists, after a fashion. It was reconstructed in order that Macron and Merkel could occupy it, looking through a book of remembrance, which they each then signed.

The two leaders also took part in commemoration ceremonies in Paris.