The First World War broke out in August 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary set off a chain of alliances. Britain entered when Germany invaded neutral Belgium. Most of the fighting on the Western Front took place in the trenches of northern France and Belgium; battles such as Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
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The war ended at 11:00 am on 11 November 1918 — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month — when Germany signed an armistice in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne. About 750,000 British and Empire soldiers died and many more were wounded. Remembrance Sunday and the wearing of the red poppy still mark this loss.
You may be asked when the First World War ended (11 November 1918), or what the poppy commemorates.
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