Throughout September and October 1918, Allied forces made a series of offensives that threatened and destabilised the last of the German Army’s defensive positions on the Western Front. The BEF broke through German lines between the Schelde and the Sambre rivers in early November, leading to the capture of hundreds of German prisoners and scores of field and heavy siege guns. Suffering a series of defeats from which it could never recover, the German Army collapsed. An armistice was signed at Compiègne on 11 November 1918, bringing an end to four years of fighting on the Western Front. German sailors of the High Seas Fleet had by then mutinied at Kiel, Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated and moved to Holland, and Germany was in the midst of revolution. The war had ended, and for 2.5 million Allied prisoners in German captivity, the day of being released after years of deprivation and hardship had finally arrived.