Perhaps it was because I led a short Act of Remembrance at church on Sunday but I wanted to also deliberately take a pause for myself today. How though to not get distracted and end up otherwise engaged at 11am. I had a brainwave and turned the radio on. To be more accurate, I turned the Radio 4 stream on via the BBC Sounds app on my iPad but, for the first time in a long while, I was listening to radio as it was being broadcast rather than catching up days or weeks later.

At 11am the announced reminded us that, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns of the Great War fell silent. It is a wonderfully poetic phrase, using repetition to mark a point to remember but, for the next two minutes, I tried to not get distracted by the question of whether the guns actually did fall silent at that point.

It clearly is a question that had been asked before. Google was keen to autocomplete my search on “when was the last shot fired in ww1” and also offered options for WWII, Vietnam and other conflicts. The AI overview boldly stated that the last artillery shell was fired at 10:59:59 and that, somewhere in that minute, the last soldier (American Private Henry Gunther) was killed while charging a German machine gun nest. To be honest, I expected that most of the fighting would have been coming to an end a few days earlier but the answer seemed suspiciously precise. If a shell was fired in the last second (without any digital timers) it would probably have landed a few seconds after the “magical” 11am mark.

Fortunately the first actual link was to a more nuanced page from the UK Government’s history site. That notes that the end of the fighting was somewhat more fuzzy. It was hard to get the message to troops who had been cut off from their communication lines and some of the commanders pushed as long as they could. For example, American General John Pershing ordered new assaults on the morning of 11 November and later had to face a congressional hearing to explain why so many men were sent to their deaths when the end was imminent. Furthermore – a fact I didn’t know – the armistice was only a temporary cease fire and had to be renewed four times before Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) officially ended the war.

History is about life and life is not cut-and-dried. However that is not a good reason to pass by the date and time that has become pinned on this modern tradition. The guns did not fall silent at that exact moment but o that they had and o that they would cease again, not to restart.