The Great Silence (16 page)

The Savoy Hotel had announced that it also was in the grip of the euphemistically named ‘Big Sneeze’, reporting that at a recent lunch party of five millionaires only two had turned up. The chemist in the Strand opposite the hotel had sold more quinine in one day than their total sale of the last three years. The barman at the hotel, always up for a challenge, invented a cheery new cocktail based on whisky and rum combined called a Corpse Reviver. Children began to sing a song in the playground,

I had a little bird

Its name was Enza

I opened the window

And in-flew Enza

Across the world reports spread of the methods adopted in different countries for tackling this new plague. The killer bug made its silent way through North America, Asia, Africa, South America and the South Pacific. Arizona made handshaking illegal; in France you were arrested for spitting. The cruellest aspect of the disease was
its targeting of young adults who were neither old enough to have built up a resistance during earlier epidemics, nor young enough to benefit from the introduction of improved school meals for children. The most vulnerable were those very men who had survived the war. And young women, having endured rationing and a recent cold winter, seemed to be at even higher risk, prompting the
Hackney Gazette
to comment in January 1919: ‘This adds a new danger to life. One is never safe in this world.’

Cinemas provided a place to take the mind off death. People remained inside the building watching reel after reel, never leaving their seats and breathing the unventilated contaminated air. Kensington Borough Council insisted that cinemas should be emptied every four hours to allow windows to be opened and the bugs let out. The manager of the Coronet at Notting Hill refused to disturb his customers, claiming that he had an effective aerating machine that worked while the audience remained in their seats, twirling the air and neatly redistributing the infection around the auditorium.

The epidemic had several national identities. In Britain it was known as ‘Flanders Grippe’; the Spanish called it ‘Naples Soldier’; in Persia it was referred to in almost lyrical terms as ‘The Disease of the Wind’. But most people talked about the Spanish flu.

As early as 2 January 1919
The Times
was reporting somewhat optimistically that ‘the influenza scourge seems to have run its course’ and that the death rate had dropped by almost half since the preceding week, with only 581 casualties recorded. But in the late spring of 1919 as the epidemic gradually slackened, the appalling casualty rate became clear. Four per cent of the population of India had died; in the United States five times as many lost their lives to it as had perished in the Great War, and in Europe a further two million joined the dreadful statistics. It was estimated that in total forty to fifty million people had died. Although the infection lingered on until the summer, taking Joanna Selby-Bigge with it, the cases had at last become less frequent.

The flu epidemic had contributed to a dwindling lapse of confidence in any all-powerful Divinity that might claim to nurture and protect
mankind. Organised Christianity in particular had suffered a slump in popularity. The three cornerstones that anchored a churchgoer to his church had been eroded and in some cases had disappeared altogether. With no funerals to put the official marker down at the end of a life, fewer marriages owing to the scarcity of men to marry, and a related drop in the number of christenings, the frequency of church rituals had been significantly reduced. The local
Gazette
in Bakewell, Derbyshire, ran an angry editorial three days before the anniversary of the ceasefire. Churches were never full. Part of the reason, said the
Gazette
, was because they were ‘cold, draughty, unclean and poorly lit’. What is more, it continued, hungry parishioners felt Matins took place too late to cook lunch and Evensong interrupted tea.

But deprivation of warmth in body and stomach was not all. There was a further reason. People felt that the Church, and by association God, had let them down. During the course of the preceding five years, ‘when every family in the land has known suffering, pain and death, our churches even in remote villages became recruiting agencies, our pulpits were used as political booths’. People began to stay at home rather than go to church, let down by the holy men themselves who clearly ‘do not believe what they preach’. One woman told the
Gazette:
‘I went for a walk last night instead of going to church: I felt it would do me more good,’ she explained, frustrated at the way the clergy seemed so out of touch. ‘I often think if they’d let me get up in the pulpit I could tell ‘em something to help ‘em.’ A conspiracy not to speak the truth about the terrible reality of war had grown up even within the Church and people had stopped listening. Words from the pulpit floated down on silent, empty pews.

Instead a growing belief in the power of the self was taking hold. Spiritualist societies, already popular before the war, doubled in number. The relaying of comforting messages of reassurance from loved ones reaching out to their families from beyond the grave were seized on in particular by the middle and upper classes who could afford the expensive connections to the spirit world. ‘Mysticism’ became a household word in salons of grand houses. But as in the Ancient Greek kingdom of death, the Hades of Homer’s poetry, the spirits had no substance and a reaching out to their elusive nothingness simply increased the hopelessness of the mourner.

An obsession grew for physical proof of the paranormal. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, popular creator of Sherlock Holmes, had developed a growing fascination for the occult. The death of his first wife Louisa in 1906 was followed during the war by that of a brother, two brothers-in-law and two nephews. The final blow came when his son Kingsley contracted an infection from war wounds and died of the Spanish flu in 1918, triggering Conan Doyle’s fixation with the spirit world. He would lecture to packed theatres in his authoritative and rhythmical Scottish accent about how he now regarded communication with the dead as more important than his writing. For a brief time the famous contortionist Houdini came under Conan Doyle’s influence. But after the novelist-turned-spiritualist took Houdini to see Eva, a bosomy blonde clairvoyant apparently capable of bringing the dead to life, the magician returned to America unconvinced. Eva had managed to produce nothing more lifelike than a huge inflatable rubber doll.

An ingenious artist working on the beach at Brighton between the town’s eastern boundary, Black Rock, and the Palace Pier had hit upon a clever way of giving substance back to the missing soldier. Abandoning his pre-war speciality of drawing likenesses of stately homes, the sand artist would fashion from the grains an alarmingly lifelike relief form of a wounded soldier lying down. Every morning in the balmy springtime sun, he would make repairs to the damage caused in the night by wind and wave, and sitting beside his empty cap he would wait for his appreciative audience to pass by. Beside the soldier he scratched the words ‘Some carve their name in stone, I carve mine in sand/And I hope to carve my dinner with the aid of a generous hand’. His cap was full and his stomach grew rounder by the day.

Faith was tested and stretched as equally imaginative mediums went to great lengths and disgraceful strategies to persuade their audiences of the human reality of the spirit world. Barbara Cartland was less than convinced by a medium who announced that she was an incarnation of an Egyptian princess and arrived dressed in a chiffon scarf wrapped round her breasts demanding a large flask of brandy before beginning work.

If tangible evidence of the presence of the dead was difficult to
find, reminders of their existence became important. One young woman would sprinkle Ajax, a man’s hairwash, on to her pillow each night. Another dressed a tailor’s dummy in the full uniform of her dead Grenadier Guards husband and slept with it every night beside her bed. The clothes carried his smell and for a brief waking moment she could imagine her husband had returned. The widowed Lady Ailesbury would only allow herself to be kissed on the left cheek, the other remaining ‘sacred to the memory of my dear Lord Ailesbury’.

The sense of free-falling chaos prompted by uncontrollable and persistent grief could sometimes be steadied by a determined control of the mind, and the practice of the highly fashionable mind-training programme of Pelmanism came to be adopted as a solution by some. Pelmanism was a purely secular philosophical activity whose popularity had spread quickly at the end of the preceding century. The idea for Pelmanism had come from William Joseph Ennever, a 29-year-old British journalist, son of a piano manufacturer. Its advocates claimed that it could ‘soundly strengthen and develop a person’s mind and character while removing those barriers that led to inefficiencies and no growth as an individual’.

The Times
wrote of the potential benefits the programme could offer to thousands of people who felt themselves overcome by mental lethargy. A suggested schedule of reading and physical exercise before breakfast would set in motion a habit for the day that discouraged the temptations of inertia, over-indulgence and excessive consumption of alcohol. The former prime minister Herbert Asquith, still suffering from the death of his son Raymond, had recommended the practice of Pelmanism as a way of holding emotions in check. Other well-known individuals including Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, the novelist Sir Rider Haggard, playwright Jerome K. Jerome and the composer Ethel Smyth were devotees of the movement, along with thousands of bankers, journalists, doctors and - interestingly - a large number of clergymen. A change in outlook on life, the growth of optimism and self-belief came as a relief to those who followed the guidelines. A clarity of purpose came to Pelmanists, they claimed, as well as an increased
ability to see things more brightly, and ‘to hear meaningful sounds where there had only been a rumble’.

There were other ways to raise oneself from the stupor induced by the ending of the war. Long before the war was over an urgent need had developed to establish the precise manner and exact place of death of those lost on the battlefields of France. Many wished to see these alien, other-worldly sights before they were covered over. Personal columns ran advertisements offering photographs of individual war graves in France and Flanders costing thirty shillings for three prints. Enterprising companies accepted commissions for placing flowers and wreaths on graves. The French Government announced that widows, children and parents of French soldiers who had given their life for their country would be offered a day’s free excursion to visit the graves of those they loved. Pilgrimage trains left Paris each morning for Albert, Arras and Rheims.

In England newspapers carried advertisements for guided tours to the battlefields much as pre-war tourists had been enticed by special deals to seaside towns. Prices for package trips to the ‘Devastated Areas’ included hotels and cars and even an officer guide, if so desired, promoting an eerie holiday atmosphere. Visitors were recommended to bring their own food and to ensure they were dressed for the cold, while ammunition boxes that lay discarded everywhere conveniently suggested themselves as picnic tables, upended and laid with sandwiches, in the middle of this silent wasteland.

The Michelin Tyre Company began publishing illustrated guidebooks to the battlefields even before the end of the war. Climbing to the town ramparts at the entrance gate to Lille, so the volume dealing with the Battlefields of the Somme enthused, afforded ‘a magnificent panorama’ of the city, a city that essentially was no longer there. After a trip to see the hamlet of Marquelise where ‘the old chateau opposite the Church is in ruins’, and taking the footpath opposite the church from which ‘a fine panoramic view may be had of the battlefield on both sides of the Amiens-Compiègne road ... the scene of desperate fighting during the German offensive of June 9-11 1918’, the tourist was advised to return to the car, turn it round and take the first road to the left towards the rubble and
broken-pew filled church of Margny-sur-Mer which is illustrated with a photograph in the state described. The photographs were profoundly shocking. For the first time people saw abandoned overturned tanks looking like huge animals that had lost their way. A French journalist, M. H. Thierry, compared the landscape to a sea ‘whose waves are formed by the rise and fall of shell-holes’.

There were almost daily casualties among the visitors from unexploded bombs as if the ghostly enemy was taking revenge from beneath the soil. The Michelin volume that covered the Second Battle of the Marne described the area of land that had been host to the fighting:

The ruined villages are as the shells and bombs left them. Everywhere are branchless trees and stumps, shell craters roughly filled in, trenches, barbed wire entanglements and shelters for men and ammunition. Thousands of shells, shell casings, rifles and machine guns lie scattered about. Corpses are occasionally seen.

While unexploded shells made it a dangerous place to be, unburied bodies made it a distressing place to visit even for the ghoulish. C. Day Lewis compared it to the imagined surface of the moon, a place lacking in any beauty, any hope, any comfort, any godliness. One of these first tourists, William Johnson, ‘could barely conceive how thoroughly the agents of death levelled the ground, leaving nothing emerging more than a foot or two above the surface except for a few former tree trunks bowled over sideways and shattered and splintered until they mimicked ghoulish stalagmites’.

Women searching for a trace of comfort in the devastated landscape were seen plunging their bare hands into the earth and rummaging in the soil looking for any little token of evidence, however macabre. Raymond Asquith had described the sight of’limbs and bowels resting in hedges’. But flesh had rotted over the months and another visitor, William Ewart’s sister, who had lost her husband, failed to find him in the mud at Bapaume. However, the experience of looking at the precise landscape, the very trees and mounds of mud that her husband had seen in his last moments, brought her an unexpected and welcome relief. William Ewart reported that his sister left that place transfigured and that she ‘went laughing into the world
again ... nor has the dancing light ever left her gay blue eyes. Her ear responds; she loves; she lives.’