At “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” Paris time, 1918, all was quiet on the Western Front. At least in theory. It wasn’t as neat and tidy as it sounds; however, there was an official cease fire, an armistice that was scheduled to last 30 days. It was, for all intensive purposes, the end of World War I. Exactly a year later, Buckingham Palace hosted the first official Armistice Day event in England — and, thanks to the suggestion of South African author and politician Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, people around Europe began observing two minutes of silence in honor of those who had died during the war and those who were left behind.