We’re glad to see that President Trump will be going to Europe to mark the centenary of the Armistice that heralded the end of World War I. The event will invite humility. The Allied victory ignited here a joy that was tempered by the ghastly toll of the Great War, in which close to 20 million soldiers and civilians on both sides perished. They included 110,000 Americans. What if statesmen had possessed the prevision to see what lurked after 1918?

The Armistice was marked by The New York Sun with an editorial, issued on November 12, 1918. It was called “The End of War and the Beginning of the Problems of Peace.” It began with the sentence, “Our first thought should be of those who have died for us.” It went on to quote several stanzas of “Carmen Triumphale,” by the southern Civil War poet Henry Timrod.

Go forth and bid the land rejoice,
Yet not too gladly, O my song!
Breathe softly, as if mirth would wrong
The solemn rapture of thy voice.

Be nothing lightly done or said
This happy day! Our joy should flow
Accordant with the lofty woe
That wails above the noble dead.

“The next thing,” the Sun said, “is to thank God for West Point and Annapolis.” It proffered a paean to our military leadership and the valor our doughboys had shown — to, the Sun said, the “friendly surprise of the nations associated with us on the battle line” and to the “utter stupefaction” of our enemies, or, as the Sun called them, the “expert Teuton sneerers.”

President Wilson had wished to spare Germany overly harsh armistice terms, but was overruled both by his allies and his countrymen. The Sun endorsed the conditions of the armistice granted to Germany by Marshal Foch. “They are severe in the extreme,” the Sun reckoned, “but their severity is that of a righteous sentence imposed on guilt.” The Sun called it “the Day of Settlement.”

Historians may parcel to the Allies’ harsh terms a portion of the blame for the woes that followed. Our instinct is to resist such second-guessing, given the overriding blame that attaches to Hitler. The burden President Wilson bears is that, with the last of his 14 points, he loosed the idea of a general association of nations, an idea that has threatened American sovereignty ever since.

When Wilson went to Paris, he was, like Mr. Trump today, crosswise with our allies abroad and Congress at home. Sun readers were last week reminded of that by a student of the era, Paul Atkinson. The silver lining was that the League of Nations was defeated in the Senate. The League was of an ilk with its stepchild, the United Nations, by now a monument to the folly of world government.

Which is something to remember as Mr. Trump heads off to Europe. The Democrats may sneer that he’s unworthy of the centenary tasks. Yet the events of 1918 remind us that the most educated of the Democrats — Wilson, our only president to hold a PhD, had been head of Princeton and governor of New Jersey — was no better at it. So it’s a time for humility not only from Mr. Trump but also from his critics.