The Great Silence (42 page)

Railton hesitated to air his suggestion, worried that such a mawkish idea would be rejected. He said nothing about it, spending the summer of 1920 by the sea in Margate where his peacetime parish lay. But his wife persisted, encouraging her husband not to drop his simple and daring scheme. Finally, as autumn approached, Railton wrote a letter to the Dean of Westminster, the Right Reverend Herbert Ryle. At once the Dean understood the brilliance of the suggestion and wrote himself to the King and the Prime Minister asking for their agreement to proceed with the plan.

The King recoiled, not this time at the impracticality of the scheme, but rather, as Railton had feared, at its distasteful sentimentality. Indeed, the King questioned whether the very act of seeing a coffin pulled through the streets of London in a further scene of national mourning would not reawaken, with a ghastly reality, the pain that was beginning to dull. Was the whole idea not ‘poised precariously
on the tightrope of taste’? Would it not all become a morbid sideshow? Would the solemnity of the unveiling of the Cenotaph not be diluted? And there was more. Would a decomposing body give off a distasteful smell in the Abbey?

The King was not alone in his initial response. Siegfried Sassoon was among those who considered the idea sentimental. But the Prime Minister shared the Dean’s enthusiasm, and by early October had succeeded in persuading the King to give his consent.

In the village of Saint Pol-sur-Ternoise, twenty miles west of Arras, a small tin hut had been adapted to form a makeshift chapel. Four days before the second anniversary of the Armistice four bodies, deteriorated so badly that they were beyond identification, and from whom the vivid smell of death had long since dissipated, lay inside the chapel wrapped in sacking and covered in the Union flag. From these four bodies one would be chosen to represent all those who had died during the Great War. A few hours earlier they had been gently retrieved from beneath the mud of four different battlefields. The Aisne, Arras, the Somme and Ypres had all given up a soldier from hastily made graves commemorated simply as ‘Unknown British Soldier’: none carried any identifying mark beyond being clothed in the uniform of a British soldier; all of them precious in life only to a handful, but one of them in death about to provide the emotional focus for millions.

At midnight on Sunday 7 November 1920 Brigadier General L. J. Wyatt, the General Officer commanding the British troops in France and Flanders, entered the dimly lit chapel at Saint-Pol and put out his hand towards one of the flag-draped bodies and touched it. The choice was made. The body was sealed in a coffin made by the British Undertakers Association from the wood of an ancient English oak tree from Hampton Court. It had been sent over to Saint-Pol accompanied by two undertakers, Mr Nodes and Mr Sourbutts, and by an ancient battle trophy. The King, who over the last two months had moved from a position of distasteful scepticism to impassioned advocacy of the imminent ceremony, had selected one of his own ceremonial swords to accompany the coffin on its journey home.

Enough earth to fill six barrels had been dug up from Flanders and travelled with the soldier’s cortège as it made its way through northern France. At Boulogne the coffin was placed on the destroyer HMS
Verdun
to make the crossing to Dover. Halfway across the Channel, six more destroyers were waiting and as the
Verdun
came nearer, they lowered the Union flag in the manner usually reserved for the approach of the Monarch.

On the English side all shops in Dover had been closed for the day and as the reverberations from a nineteen-gun salute faded, a band on shore began to play ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. The huge crowds gathered at the quayside stared fixedly at the coffin as if wishing to imprint this scene on their minds for ever.

The coffin, secured by two thick black straps wrapped round it like string round a parcel, was placed in the same luggage van, number 132, that had brought home from Belgium the body of Nurse Edith Cavell in May of the preceding year. The inside of the luggage van had been fitted out by the railwaymen of the South Eastern and Chatham Railway Company a few days before. It was draped with purple cloth and hung with a frieze of sweet-smelling bay leaves, rosemary and chrysanthemums; outside, its white-painted roof ensured that everyone watching, from bridges and railway cuttings, even in the November darkness, could identify the carriage in the light of the moon and know that it contained this most special of cargoes.

As the train pulled into Victoria Station at 8.32 p.m. the steam clouds from the engine billowed up into the station’s high ceiling. The police had to work hard to restrain the huge numbers of people who had come for a glimpse of the white-roofed carriage. There was no ceremonial that night, simply a mass of ashen faces, many in tears, straining to see the carriage in which, guarded by officers of the Grenadier Guards, the dead soldier lay.

Early on the morning of Thursday 11 November the streets around Westminster Abbey were not silent. Voices were hushed but people were talking with some excitement of the events they were to witness. Many wore black armbands. All wore hats. Some were in uniform. The majority were dressed in mourning. The misty November sunshine bathed the grey buildings with a pale light that softened their sharp edges. Large sycamore leaves, some still whole despite their
dry fragility, others showing traces of their earlier golden colour beneath the late autumn dappling, rustled in the gutters. There was a tenderness to the barely discernible breeze. If the unknown soldier had himself imagined his own homecoming he could not have wished for a lovelier day. And, ‘if he was a Londoner’,
The Times
said, ‘he could not have wished to see his city more beautiful’.

Just as they had waited all night nearly eighteen months before for the march of peace, now they came early to wait for a return too precious to miss. Tired eyes occasionally dropped downwards towards hands protecting drooping bunches of carnations shrunken in the cold, trying to will them to cling to life for just an hour or two longer so they could place the flowers at the monument in front of them. The sun too was struggling to appear from behind a white mist. And as it broke through, the King arrived wearing the uniform of a Field Marshal. The slow beat of the drum came ever nearer. George V shielded his eyes from the shafting light, as he looked in the direction of the road along which the gun carriage would travel. Thousands more eyes, tired with the waiting but a little brighter now that the moment had arrived, followed his. The King and his subjects had at last gathered together for a funeral.

After leaving Platform 8 of Victoria Station, where the unknown soldier had spent his final night on earth, guarded in the darkness by the silent officers of the Guards, the black gun carriage emerged from the western arch of the station into what
The Times
called ‘the kindly sunshine of a mellow day’. Six black horses pulled the carriage with its precious burden as they made their slow rhythmic progress over two and a half miles.

Accompanied by four admirals, four field marshals and two generals, as well as officers and other ranks from the Royal Navy, the Marines and the Air Force, the procession travelled slowly from Grosvenor Gardens, through Grosvenor Place to Hyde Park Corner, and down the long slope of Constitution Hill to the Mall. From there it passed through Admiralty Arch until it eventually came rolling down the empty stretch of Whitehall. The crowds in places were between ten and twenty deep. Behind the carriage the heads of the armed forces and four hundred former servicemen marched four abreast. As the procession passed by, the pattern of colour changed.
Dark naval blue gave way to the yellow and khaki of the army and finally to the slate-coloured uniform of the air force. The flecked black and grey of civilian clothes brought up the rear of a slow-moving river of men bound together by what
The Times
described as ‘the mysterious and indefinable bonds of comradeship’.

Among the watching masses, hats, removed as the silent crowds ‘uncovered’ at the approach, were not returned to heads even twenty minutes after the procession had disappeared. It was as if the extended emotion and the indelible memory of the coffin had brought a near-total paralysis.

By now there was no music, apart from the funeral drums, and although sand had been spread over the tarmac to muffle all noise, the hard echo of the horses’ hooves struck the cold November pavements. When daylight emerged that day some heard the sound of a lone thrush. A few weeks earlier the bird had stopped singing for the winter months, but had suddenly returned in the late-appearing dawn for a final song. Choosing ‘to fling his soul upon the growing gloom’, as Thomas Hardy had written twenty years earlier as one century gave way to another, a darkling thrush brought ‘some blessed hope’ to crowds bereft of such an unaccustomed feeling.

On the lid of the coffin was the brass plate confirming that this was the body of’A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 for King and Country’. Covering the coffin was the faded flag, ragged and stained, that David Railton, when serving as a padre, had used as an altar cloth – a piece of the life so many had come to remember and to forget. This was a flag that had travelled from the Western Front to the heart of London, a flag that had been used for services on makeshift altars before the battles at Ypres, High Wood, Passchendaele, Cambrai and the Somme. This was a flag that had been used to cover shattered bodies, to shield them from the indignity of death. This was a flag covered in death mud, and in blood. The colours of the flag were almost the only colours to relieve the black-drenched scene.

As the carriage came nearer, its joints creaking slightly with the weight of the load, sobs ineffectively suppressed were prompted again and again by the sight of the poignant familiarity of the soldier’s webbing belt and modest, dented steel helmet on top of the coffin.
Perhaps at that moment more than any other, the dead soldier was invested with the millions of identities that the bereaved willed upon him. Here at last was lying that father, brother, husband, lover, son or friend that had been taken from them. The scene was magnificent in its plain depiction of death.

In an instant the entire crowd was bareheaded. The sword strapped to the top of the coffin was the very one that had belonged to the King. The clock on Big Ben announced that it was ten minutes to eleven. General Haig handed George a wreath of bay leaves and red roses and, stretching up a little to reach the coffin, the King gently placed it on top. On the card attached the King had chosen to include the eternally hopeful words of St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘In proud memory of those Warriors who died unknown in the Great War. Unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and beheld they live.’ Nearby the Abbey choir, standing in the brisk November air, sang ‘O God our Help in Ages Past’ and then joined the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Lord’s Prayer.

For a moment those assembled in Whitehall stood motionless and silent. Then at the thundering sound of the first of Big Ben’s eleven chimes, the King pressed a button that released the flags shrouding the Cenotaph. Nearly ten years earlier, even before his Coronation, George V had stood in the Mall beside his first cousin, the German Kaiser, and pressed a button that had revealed the huge marble statue of the grandmother they shared. She had been the figurehead of an Empire and a Europe at peace. He now made the same gesture and unveiled a monument commemorating a period of war – a period in which the monarchs of Europe had seen Victoria’s peaceful rule ruptured.

‘The Glorious Dead’, read the inscription on both sides of the monument. A day earlier General Haig had written in
The Times:
‘All generations of British men and women shall look at it forever with pride, for it stands for the Nation’s glory.’ Yet could there be glory in the four years that the tomb commemorated? The
Illustrated London News
did not think so. This had been, it said, ‘the strife that has filled the world with agony, destroyed millions of men, broken millions of lives, ruined great cities and hamlets’. And there was more: the war had left ‘a belt of earth ravaged, crowded the world with maimed men, blind, mad, sick men flinging empires into anarchy’.

The new monument, elegant in its severity, stood unadorned except for two Union flags. The upended shape was reflected hinge-like in the horizontal coffin lying beside it.

Big Ben completed its eleven strokes and England for the second time edged its way towards that unfamiliar state of absolute silence. During those two minutes the previously inexpressible was, for some, at last articulated. For others the silence and the containing of emotion was almost intolerable.

The observance of silence was not confined to England. All the other countries except Germany that had fought in the war respected the Great Silence. In Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, India, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and South Africa silence fell as the anniversary of the Armistice was remembered. Only America was too busy to stop.

As the acute, pain-triumphant notes of the Last Post sounded and the silence was broken, thousands of heads were raised, throats were cleared and crumpled handkerchiefs dampened the fists that held them. The crowd watched as first the King laid his second wreath of the morning at the foot of the Cenotaph, followed by the Prime Minister. And then the tableau, a still life only moments earlier, began to move. After such stillness the King appeared to be in a hurry. The horses pulling the gun carriage slowly made their way towards Parliament Square, the hollow clock of their hooves echoing through a still silent Whitehall.

When the procession reached Westminster Abbey the coffin was lifted from the gun carriage and carried in through the doors towards the west end of the nave, where one hundred recipients of the Victoria Cross formed a guard of honour. The grave was positioned so that for ever after no one, not even a king or queen approaching the altar at their own coronation, would be able to avoid side-stepping the grave of the man who had given his life for his country.