The news of the Armistice with Germany spread rapidly. On November 11, 1918 there was no two minutes’ silence.

True, the guns on the Western Front ceased firing, but in cities across the world, from Paris and London to New York and Sydney, “a pandemonium of noise” (in the words of Beatrice Webb) brought people out on to the streets.

In Edinburgh a party of soldiers and sailors, egged on by an amused crowd, halted a lorry laden with beer barrels in Leith Walk and broached one barrel on the pavement.

A New Zealander, John Lee, who had won a Distinguished Conduct Medal at Messines in 1917 and lost an arm in the German offensive the following spring, was convalescing in Brockenhurst in Hampshire.

Hearing of the armistice, he caught a train from Weybridge to Waterloo and partied for three days: “I can scarcely remember whether I slept in a bed, on a couch or on a carpet or with whom.”

Celebration, although the dominant response to the German surrender, was not the only emotion of the day.

The dying had not stopped and peace, when it came, would force a different adjustment to loss and grief.

As the expectation of a settlement mounted in October, Cynthia Asquith, the daughter-in-law of the former prime minister, realised “the need to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones”.

Famously Wilfred Owen’s family heard of his death in action a week before on November 11 itself.

That day many were in hospital, suffering with wounds from which they too would eventually succumb.

In the following weeks influenza returned with renewed force, taking off soldiers under training who had yet to see action.

How to mourn and how to memorialise had not yet assumed a pattern. Just as there was no silence on November 11, 1918, so there were no Cenotaph, no poppies and no Unknown Soldier.

Moreover, their creation and establishment would generate controversy and division, between church and state, and between family and country.

The church would be unhappy at the secular nature of many memorials; families would resist the decision of the Imperial (today Commonwealth) War Graves Commission’s decision not to repatriate the bodies of those who had died overseas.

As unsettling were the political and social challenges. Beatrice Webb, a socialist and Fabian wrote in her diary on November 11: “Thrones are everywhere crashing and the men of property are everywhere secretly trembling.”

As she sat at her desk in London, listening to the noise, she asked herself, “How soon will the tide of revolution catch up the tide of victory? Will it be six months or a year?”

Caroline Ethel Cooper, an Australian who had been trapped in Germany since 1914, reflected similar concerns.

“There is no time to lose in making peace," she wrote from Leipzig to her sister in Adelaide on 10 November 1918.

“The red flag is not stopped by geographical boundaries, and the wiping out of a ridiculous feudal system in Russia or Germany will not satisfy it, and the establishment of an old-fashioned bourgeois republic on Swiss or French or American lines is not its object.

"Its real enemy is capitalism and its real object, the founding of a socialistic republic ... If peace is not concluded quickly, it looks as if we might have a European chaos which would be even worse than an organized war.”

Responses at the front were as confused.

Many took the news quietly, barely able to comprehend that a war that had become part of everyday existence was over.

Personal relationships, between husband and wife, parent and child, fractured by long separation and life-changing but divergent experiences, would have to be rebuilt.

Men who had had no other career, and who were not sure they would ever have one, for whom military service represented the rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood, could be bereft without war’s intensity.

“Once you have lain in her arms you can admit no other mistress," Guy Chapman wrote of the military life 14 years later: “No wine gives fiercer intoxication, no drug more vivid exaltation.”

Chapman, an officer in the Royal Fusiliers, was awarded the Military Cross for his actions at Ghissingies, close to the Franco-Belgian border, on the day that Owen had died, November 11, 1918.

Many Americans, latecomers to the war, felt acutely the frustration that it had ended so soon.

Some sought battle up to, and even beyond, the deadline of 11am.

For them, as for the Royal Navy in Scapa Flow, the end of the war came as an anticlimax.

The Grand Fleet, thwarted at Jutland in 1916, still sought their equivalent of Waterloo, a battle so decisive that it would both define an era and sanctify what had been achieved.

In some respects these responses were premature. The armistice still gave the navy an active role: the blockade of Germany, now tightened as never before, was to continue.

The Germans protested that continued economic warfare constituted active hostilities, ones moreover directed specifically at women and children. The United States, and particularly its president, was not happy.

In the new year Herbert Hoover responded by organising famine relief, and the Save the Children Fund was established in Britain in April 1919.

Of course, for those on other fronts the formal fighting had finished weeks or – in the case of Russia – months before, but even after November 11 not all hostilities with Germany immediately ceased.

The news of the armistice took two days to reach East Africa, and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s force in today’s Zambia did not accept terms until November 25. Most importantly, the armistice was a military arrangement, technically a pause in the fighting only, and was renewable every 36 days until a peace settlement was finally concluded.

Formally the war continued until the individual peace treaties of Versailles, Neuilly, St Germain, Trianon and Sevres were all signed, a process only completed in 1920.

The separation of the military processes for ending the war from the political bargaining proved profoundly damaging.

After his success at Megiddo in September 1918, Edmund Allenby had signalled the Foreign Office in London to ask for guidance on what terms he should offer if the Turks sought an armistice.

Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, replied that he did not yet know what they would be.

For Foch in France, this failure in autumn 1918 to link the incipient victory directly to the delivery of political outcomes was unconscionable. But when he protested, France’s premier, Georges Clemenceau, told him that as a soldier he should stay out of politics.

In practice a rigid division between military action and policy was impossible as 1918 turned into 1919. From the Baltic to the Balkans, and from Ireland, through North Africa, and on to the Middle East, Afghanistan and India, conflicts continued. Some were continuations of the wars initiated under the umbrella of the war that had originally broken out in 1914: Italy’s desire to complete its unification, or Greece’s ambition to secure its position in Asia Minor.

Others were the direct consequences of the collapse of four empires, those of Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottomans.

By allowing in his Fourteen Points of January 1918 for the principle of national self-determination, Woodrow Wilson had let loose the ambitions of different ethnic groups with overlapping territorial interests.

The Russian revolution, followed by revolutions in Germany and Austria, generated civil wars along ideological lines, as Reds and Whites fought in Russia, Finland, Poland and Hungary.

Demobilised German soldiers reformed as Freikorps and brought violence to eastern Europe. Germans who had lived for generations in the Baltic states, Poland or Alsace were forcibly moved, and Turks killed Greeks living in Asia Minor, while Greeks assaulted Turks in Thrace.

The British empire was not exempt: from civil war in Ireland to civil disorder in Punjab. One calculation is that more than four million further deaths followed between 1919 and 1923.

The remit of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the First World War ended in 1921, not 1918.

As a result, the peacemakers in Paris in 1919 tried to define on maps the frontiers of states which were being altered on the ground by force of arms. Their task was not helped by Russia’s absence from the negotiations, the consequence of it having signed its own peace treaty at Brest Litovsk.

Few soldiers of the British empire would be home by Christmas 1918. The last peace settlement was that to replace that signed with Ottoman Empire at Sevres, agreed with the Republic of Turkey at Lausanne in 1923.

The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Henry Wilson, wrote to Lord Esher on November 14, 1919, that “one year and three days after the Armistice we have between 20 and 30 wars raging in different parts of the world”. Those who celebrated on November 11, 1918 were about to learn that it had been much easier to start this war than it would be to end it.

Sir Hew Strachan is Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews and a member of the WW100 Scotland Panel