A proclamation was immediately issued, addressed to the army and the navy, authorizing regiments at the front to elect delegates to open negotiations with the enemy, though the power to sign an agreement for an armistice could only be exercised by the Council in Petrograd. The soldiers were urged not to allow their generals to stand between them and the attainment of their ends. Care should be taken, however, that they should be in no danger from unlawful violence. They were urged to maintain the strictest military discipline. On the following day Trotzky sent a notification of the effort being made to open negotiations with the Germans to the ambassadors of the Allied nations, the text of which was as follows: "I herewith have the honor to inform you, Monsieur Ambassador, that the All-Russian Congress of Soldiers' and Workmen's Delegates has organized a new Government in the form of a Council of National Commissioners. The head of this Government is Vladimir Illitch Lenine. The direction of the foreign policy has been intrusted to me in the capacity of National Commissioner of Foreign Affairs. "Drawing your attention to the text of an offer of an armistice and a democratic peace on the basis of no annexations or indemnities and the self-determination of nations, approved by the All-Russian Congress of Soldiers' and Workmen's Delegates, I have the honor to beg you to regard the above document as a formal offer of an immediate armistice on all fronts and the immediate opening of peace negotiations--an offer with which the authoritative Government of the Russian Republic has addressed itself simultaneously to all the belligerent peoples and their governments. "Accept my assurances, Monsieur Ambassador, of the profound respect of the Soldiers' and Workmen's Government for the people of France, which cannot help aiming at peace, as well as all the rest of the nations, exhausted and made bloodless by this unexampled slaughter." CHAPTER XX THE PEACE PARLEYS BEGIN At four o'clock in the afternoon of November 28, 1917, a Russian delegation crossed over into the German lines under a flag of truce and asked the German commander of that sector to communicate their request for immediate negotiations for an armistice to German headquarters. The official Russian report of this first parley was as follows: "We crossed the line, preceded by a trumpeter carrying a white flag. Three hundred yards short of the German entanglements we were met by German officers. Our eyes were blindfolded and we were conducted to a battalion staff of the German army, where we handed over our credentials to two officers of the German General Staff, who had been sent to meet us.