Haunting audio reveals the moment that World War One ended and the guns fell silent

A haunting piece of audio documents the exact moment that the guns fell silent and one of the bloodiest wars of all time came to an abrupt end.

It’s incredible how quickly silence and birdsong returned to what had previously been a horrific theater of conflict.

World War One ended and the world changed

Back on November 11 1918, the powers that be finally managed to get around the table and negotiate an end to the bloodiest conflict that the world had ever known to that point.

The armistice was signed at 5:00am that morning and at exactly 11:00am the guns fell silent and both sides stopped shooting at each other.

The rifles stopped clattering, the bombs stopped dropping, and in one beautiful moment years of killing on both sides was halted.

It came too late for millions of young men, however.

The final estimates for those who died in the war - dubbed The Great War - amounted to between nine and 11 million military personnel and between six and 13 million civilians.

In total, it is thought that between 15 and 22 million people died.

How many millions have died in wars since then, including World War Two?

The end of World War One represented in audio. Credit: Imperial War Museum

This incredible audio documents the end of the war

There is no traditional audio recording that shows the exact end of World War One, but this is as close as you can get.

It was created using 'sound ranging’ techniques that were in operation throughout the war.

The idea was to figure out where the enemy gunfire was coming from, and to do that microphones were set up on strings across the lines.

So, these weren’t traditional microphones, but barrels of oil that were dug into the floor at a certain distance with photo film to record the intensity of what noise was occuring.

In the way that seismometers are used to measure earthquakes, this setup measured the distance between the data and the time of a shot fired to piece together where the enemy guns were and how far away.

It’s clever stuff, for the time.

One piece of that ’sound ranging’ film managed to make it out - and it captured the exact moment that the shooting stopped at the River Moselle on the American Front.

It was then reimagined into a piece of haunting audio that was part of an exhibit titled ‘Making a New World’ at London’s Imperial War Museum to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI.

The film had six lines, one for each microphone, and the team behind it - a company called Coda to Coda - did extensive research on the guns and bombs used by both sides at that stage, then used the film to see the size, distance and frequency of the blasts to reproduce it faithfully.

In a statement at the time, principal composer Will Worsley said: "This document from IWM's collections gives us a great insight into how intense and chaotic the barrage of gunfire must have been for those fighting on the western front,

"We hope that our audio interpretation of sound ranging techniques... enables visitors to project themselves into that moment in history and gain an understanding of what the end of the First World War may have sounded like.”

It certainly does.

This Veterans Day, it’s still as haunting as it must have been in 1918.

Featured image credit: Imperial War Museum