PARIS, November 11 -- World leaders are attending a ceremony in Paris commemorating the centenary of the Armistice that ended World War One.
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are among those gathered for a service beneath the Arc de Triomphe. President Emmanuel Macron and dignitaries marched to the arch in the rain, under black umbrellas, while church bells tolled through the city. Many other events have been taking place around the world.With far-right nationalist politicians coming to power from Brazil to Italy to Austria, 40-year-old centrist Macron is set to invoke the war to make the case for international cooperation. "We want to make these commemorations a time to reflect on the present, not just the past, so that they have a meaning for us today," an aide to Macron said earlier this week. At a dinner on Saturday night with the visiting presidents and prime ministers, Macron said: "Some of us were on opposite sides at the time [of the war], and we are reunited tonight. That is the greatest homage we can pay." The First World War erupted in 1914 after a teenage Bosnian Serb assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, igniting a conflict that was contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars". In the four years of fighting, remembered for brutal trench warfare and the first use of gas, France, the British empire, Russia and the United States had the main armies opposing a German-led coalition that also included the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Some 9.7 million soldiers and 10 million civilians died in World War One, which lasted from 1914 to 1918.
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