“It was a curious situation, with the victors so quiet and the losers so feverishly celebrating their defeat.”

BEFORE HE BECAME the voice of New York City in the Roaring Twenties, the iconic American writer Damon Runyon was an overseas correspondent covering the First World War in Europe.

During his time on the Western Front in late 1918, the future author of Guys and Dolls banged out dispatches from the trenches, including the report below filed on the day of the Armistice.

The account, which describes the bizarre moment American Doughboys and German troops ceased fighting and met in No Man’s Land, is captured in the new book Amid Ruins.

Edited by military historian Alan D. Gaff, the volume is a collection of Runyon’s reports from the battlefields and his experiences accompanying the Allied occupation of Germany in early 1919. It’s excerpted here with permission of the publishers.

On the dot of 11 o’clock this (Monday) morning, Band Sergeant Herman C. Miller led all that is left of the band of the 122nd Field Artillery into a grove of trees on the battlefield of Laneuville and Stenay. There were about eighteen men. All come from Chicago. Miller himself in time of peace lives at No. 2615 Payne Street, Evanston, Illinois. With a switch for a baton, he gave the signal. The band struck up the “Hail to the President” march.

The echo of the last shot had scarcely died away on the American front as the artillery bandsmen struck up the music. One hundred yards from the grove, Battery C, 56th Heavy Artillery, had just thrown a shell, the size of a baby, into the German lines from a French 155-millimeter piece. They let it go at 0:50.

There probably will be interminable arguments as to the distinction of firing the last shot at the Germans. All along the line they claim to have waited until [the final minute] before cutting loose. One battery rushed into position with the intention of firing the final salvo, and it seemed as though the big guns were disconsolate because they could not reach the position in time. Miller had a hard time mustering enough bandsmen to make music. Some musicians have been killed or wounded. Others are serving as litter bearers. The band is attached to the 89th Division, which had rushed into Stenay a few hours before. The road over which they passed was still littered with dead horses, horribly torn by the artillery fire, and by wrecked guns and trucks. There also were dead men on the road. Close together, almost as if they had been engaged in a hand-to-hand combat even as hostilities ceased, were a dead American officer and a German soldier.

After blaring forth the march, Miller’s band swung into “Watch Your Step” and “The Girlie You Love.” Farther back down the line at a supply station of New York’s 77th, another band was going full blast. They played Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” with a saxophone putting in a lot of jazz.

Tonight on the front line, American soldiers are dejectedly watching the Germans in a wild celebration. The German soldiers are firing off ammunition by the ton, lighting the sky with rockets and flares. The Americans are not permitted to celebrate in that fashion.

Farther back of the lines a few flares were set off and an occasional shot was heard, but the frontline regiments silently held the positions they had when hostilities ceased. They have patrols out as usual.

During the day at several places along the line, especially in the St. Mihiel sector, Germans came over to the American outposts with outstretched hands. They were all smiling jubilantly. They traded Iron Crosses, knives, helmets, and other belongings for American cigarettes. Americans talked with them frequently, but no Americans left their lines to go to the Germans. They were not allowed.

It was a curious situation, with the victors so quiet and the losers so feverishly celebrating their defeat. One German said he expected to be home by Sunday. They were all unutterably and sincerely glad that the business of killing was ended. So are the Americans, for that matter, but the men in the front lines were not giving as much vociferous expression to their gladness today as the Germans. They seemed to take it as a matter of course.

There were a few very old men and few young children in the town. A big soldier who said his name was A. C. Larsen snatched up one as soon as the order “fall out” was given and kissed it. He said he had kids of his own. The first American flag displayed at Stenay was a little one, carried by a YMCA man, who was with the first line troops. He showed it to an old woman, who gazed at it wonderingly. Some of them obviously don’t believe everything that was told them as true. They had been practically prisoners for four years.

The chateau, which was owned by Mme. Henri de Verdier, widow of a Frenchman who was famous in that part of the country, was undamaged, but all rooms were littered with belongings of German officers. While the Americans were looking the town over, a number of French officers scrambled across the Meuse and entered the town. Many houses at Stenay displayed French flags. A woman storekeeper, who had a stock of them, insisted on giving them away to the soldiers. She wouldn’t take any pay.

Company F, 16th Infantry, which had the first engagement of any unit in the American army in this war, marched out of the battle line this morning, with the rest of the regiment, past the place where Miller’s band was playing. There are not a great many veterans of that first engagement, which was just a raid. A fresh division was marching in as the 16th came out. The old soldiers kidded the new men. They knew fighting had been suspended and were in a jovial mood.

Battery C, Sixth Field Artillery, which fired the first shot in the war, as far as the Americans are concerned, was not in the line when the finish came.

Sergeant Arch was the man who pulled the lanyard on that occasion. So far as known, he is still alive.

The men of the 89th Division were walking through Stenay in skirmish line when 11 o’clock came this morning. Stenay was about the largest town along the American front for which the Yankees were fighting when the hour of the cessation of hostilities arrived. It was the headquarters of the German Crown Prince during the campaign around Verdun.

The 89th is the division which the chief of operations of the American army credits with having broken the German line when it took the Boise de Barricourt, assuring the success of the American operations that day. It is a crack division of drafted men made up of whole regiments from Kansas and Missouri and units from Nebraska, Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico, and other mid-Western Rocky Mountain states.

The boys knew last night, with the rest of the American forces, that hostilities would end at 11, but they went right on after Stenay. The Germans had opened the floodgates of the canal there and widened the Meuse to 1,000 yards. The 89th crossed the footbridges. On that particular front the Germans put up a terrific fight to the last. Their artillery fire was vicious and quite accurate. They threw over heavy stuff. The last shell came along about 8 o’clock this morning.

It looked as if they had made an effort to hold Stenay until 11 o’clock. But when the American patrols got in, they found only four Germans. They were made prisoners and allowed to roam around for a time at will.

Every fresh detachment of Americans that entered the town recaptured them. Finally, one became querulous about the matter and said he was sick of being taken prisoner. At 11 o’clock sharp the platoon commanders re-assembled their men in the streets of the town, in column formation. They scattered out and began finding quarters for themselves. That’s about the only formality there was at the stopping of the war on that front.

Stenay was a city of old folks. A bunch of bent crones, with a doubting air about them, came out and greeted the Americans volubly. They said the Germans had taken most of the inhabitants away or scared them out by telling them that the Americans would bombard the town. This one thing the Americans studiously avoid.

They did not want to do any further damage to French cities. Stenay was scarcely touched by shells and undamaged aside from a giant causeway connecting with Launeville, which was cut in a score of places. The interior of the houses were a mess, the Germans having apparently looted everything. The first soldiers in prowled through the wonderful chateau that was the headquarters of the German Crown Prince.

Old Madame Hazard, the caretaker, was glad to see them. A number of other women were hiding in the chateau. They said the German soldiers had come to take them away, too, but a German officer, who had lived in the chateau, had told them no one was there. Tonight, French soldiers marched arm in arm through the streets, singing and shouting. Some towns were lighted up for the first time in four years.

From Amid the Ruins: Damon Runyon: World War I Reports from the American Trenches and Occupied Europe, October 1918–March 1919