WWI remembrance events begin

Leaders will mark anniversary of end of fighting

PARIS — Paris always was the grandest prize of World War I, either to conquer or defend.

So it is only fitting that when victors and vanquished mark the centennial of the armistice this weekend, the biggest ceremony should be on the famed Champs-elysees at the Arc de Triomphe.

On Friday, some leaders began remembrance events at a wide crescent of cemeteries and trench-rutted battlefields north of the capital.

British Prime Minister Theresa May laid wreaths for the first and last British soldier killed in the fighting — the two were buried across one another near Mons in southern Belgium.

French President Emmanuel Macron continued his pilgrimage of WWI sites and caught up with May as the two leaders of the Allied forces that defeated Germany walked past graves at the Thiepval Memorial in France.

“Each cemetery and memorial across the world is a unique and poignant reminder of the cost of the First World War,” said May.

Sixty-nine heads of state and government will underscore that message at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month on Sunday, exactly a century after the armistice.

President Donald Trump will join Macron and others Sunday to remember the millions who died during the first global conflict.

France, Britain and its empire, Russia and the United States had the main armies opposing a German-led coalition that also included the Austro-hungarian and Ottoman empires. Nearly 10 million soldiers died, often in brutal trench warfare where poison gas added a cruelty in warfare that the world had never seen.

Hundreds of thousands from all corners of the world died in Europe, many of them on the Western Front reaching from Belgium’s Flanders Fields almost up to the Swiss border.

Carrying the heritage of defeated Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit the site in the woods north of Paris where military leaders agreed in a train carriage to the armistice at 5 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, six hours before it took effect.

On Sunday Merkel will open an international peace forum in

Paris with Macron and U.N. Secretary-general Antonio Guterres.