The armistice that ended the First World War in November 1918 gets read from both sides of the front line by historian David Reynolds, who narrates from command centers and former battlefields using archival footage and photographs. Reynolds sets the familiar British story of Remembrance Day against the German experience, which rarely gets screen time: soldiers and civilians worn down by four years of war, and a population that came to see the armistice terms not as relief but as betrayal. He traces the political maneuvering and personal rivalries among Allied and German leaders that dragged out both the fighting and the negotiations, then follows the aftermath forward, showing how German resentment over the settlement fed the grievances the Nazi party would later exploit. The film keeps its focus on how one document, signed to stop the killing, planted the argument that would restart it two decades later. Reynolds treats the ceremony of peace and the anger it left behind as two halves of the same event.