The Great Silence (6 page)

Hostilities will cease at 11.00 a.m. November 11th. Troops will stand fast at the line reached at that hour which will be reported to army headquarters. Defensive precautions will be maintained. There will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy. Further instructions follow.

Three hours after she had sent the communication, Maude took ‘an involuntary glance’ at the clock in her office and saw that the moment the world had been waiting for had arrived. But nothing happened. There was silence. It was, observed Maude, ‘as though France had just heaved a vast sigh of relief.’

Maude had arrived in Boulogne eighteen months earlier on a lovely June day in 1917. She was excited at the prospect of joining her country’s young men in teaching ‘the Hun a lesson’. Soon after her arrival, she had made friends with some of the men. Her skill at the piano was warmly welcomed as she tried to please them with song after song, the requests coming with ‘merciless rapidity’. She had asked a Scottish private in the packed canteen how long he thought the war would last and was surprised by his disillusioned response. ‘I don’t care,’ he had replied, ‘all I want is home and wife and kiddies and I don’t care who England belongs to.’

Maude’s earlier mood of eager anticipation gave way to a sense of unease as she worried that ‘the seeming futility and endlessness
of the war was eating into the souls of men’. One of them, ‘a look of inexpressible weariness’ on his face, described to her a job worse than that of fighting: ‘I’ve been digging up dead bodies - digging them up for their identification discs so that we can send word home ... the fellow I was working with dug up his own brother and cried like a child.’ Maude found it impossible to look the man in the eyes as he spoke.

Later that day, as Maude walked down towards the port the eerie atmosphere persisted. Then as the church clock struck three, ‘Every siren and hooter was let loose, every church bell clanged out - a deafening roar.’ But things were still not right. Even though the streets were packed with people, ‘not a word was spoken, not a single cry of celebration was made’. To Maude it seemed as if’the stricken soul of France had not been able to find within itself the desire to rejoice’.

Suddenly her attention was caught by a sound, ‘the noise and din, the sobbing of a woman, a few yards away, finis - finis - incroyable’. Later on she remembered that almost unconsciously she had found herself’in the little military cemetery behind the congested street of the town where our men were buried three deep, for land was dear in France, and where the graves had been so beautifully kept by the loving hands of a khaki girl. I could not distinguish the names for the mist of tears.’ Barely able to drag herself away, Maude stumbled and then almost fell over something in the ground; a broken piece of wood that had sunk so deep that it was scarcely visible. She had come across the grave of a German soldier and, anxious not be spotted, she hurriedly laid a few flowers at the foot of the broken cross. She knew that ‘somewhere a woman was sorrowing’.

As soon as Maude’s signal reached the field units, messengers on foot, bicycle and horseback spread out in all directions, carrying up to the troops at the front line pink slips of paper torn from signal pads on which news of the ceasefire was written.

But the announcement that the war was over did not deter all those still caught up in the process of slaughter. Three hundred and twenty American soldiers lost their lives at Meuse on the morning of the 11th with a further three thousand wounded. General Pershing, Commanding General of the American Expeditionary
Forces, remained stubbornly reluctant to observe the ceasefire before teaching the Germans one final lesson.

Many British soldiers on the front line were too exhausted to celebrate. A muted cheer and a half-hearted attempt to send a hat spinning in the air was the most that some could manage. There was no crossing over into the enemy lines for the gentlemanly shaking of hands. The comradeship felt for fellow human beings during the Christmas truce four years earlier had evaporated.

In the northern French village of Malpaquet on the Belgian border, Brigade Major Wilfred House of the 57th Brigade wanted to demonstrate his gratitude for having survived the last four years. ‘We hurriedly organised a tea with rationed food for all the children in the village school’, and in their turn the villagers arrived with flowers and wine and pâté, and some rationed eggs and butter. Major House found the party to be ‘very moving and very simple’.

In Paris as the bells of Notre-Dame began to ring, flags sold out in every shop; so the scientist Marie Curie, with the help of the daily lady from the Radium Institute, stitched together some blue, red and white material and hung the home-made flag from the Institute’s window.

In Germany a young corporal of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry lay on his hospital bed wondering if he would ever fully regain his sight. A few weeks earlier he had been blinded in a gas attack after four years of fighting at the Western Front. The gas had begun to gnaw at his eyes and although the cloudiness was beginning to clear, his vision was still hazy. The news of the Armistice, given to him in the convalescent hospital by the local padre, reduced him to a state of despair as he thought of ‘so many a dear friend and comrade’ who had died in the fighting. On hearing the news the young soldier had ‘tottered and groped’ his way back to the ward and at the thought of defeat ‘threw myself on my bunk and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow’. The medical staff were worried. They wondered if Corporal Adolf Hitler was going out of his mind.

In Holland a train was on its way to Arnhem. Inside a curtain-shuttered carriage sat the white-faced Kaiser Wilhelm. A chink in the curtains made it impossible for him to ignore the thousands of
people who stood on the banks shouting abuse as the train passed by, indicating with a swipe of the hand how they would like to cut the former leader’s throat.

In the English Channel the crew of HMS
Amazon
, which was patrolling the stretch of sea at Beachy Head, were amazed to see a French fishing boat covered in flags. As fishermen shouted out that the war was over, the incredulous captain of the
Amazon
retorted that the boat should return to harbour at once and stop giving false hope to other passing ships.

In London, a young diplomat Harold Nicolson was working in the basement of his office in Whitehall, sufficiently confident in the imminent announcement of an armistice that he was already drawing up plans for the proposed peace conference. In fact he knew the ceasefire agreement had been signed in a railway carriage nearly six hours earlier in Compiégne. Leaving his desk for a moment in search of another map, Nicolson passed a window that overlooked the Prime Minister’s official residence. The time was five minutes to eleven on 11 November.

At that moment the door of number 10 was flung open and a hatless Lloyd George emerged. His thick white hair, barely restrained behind his ears, reflected the eagerness of his mood. ‘At eleven o’clock this morning the war will be over,’ Nicolson heard Lloyd George cry out as if he was a street newspaper seller hoping to attract the attention of anyone who might be listening. He repeated the words several times. As Nicolson watched, the street began to fill up and within a few minutes there was no room to move. There was silence in the crowd, an interruption for cheering and then silence again. But by this time Lloyd George appeared flustered, his flushed face in contrast to the bright white of his hair which, owing to the absence of his customary homburg, was now flying all over the place in the wind. After a burst from the crowd of ‘God Save the King’, Lloyd George pushed his way back again through the mass of people towards the sanctuary of his famous front door.

That afternoon, on the first day the guns fell silent, the announcement of the Kaiser’s abdication and his flight to Holland was posted outside
The Times’
office in Printing House Square. A group of passers-by gathered around the billboard and began to cheer. But
the newspaper staff noted that the tone of the cheers was not ‘hilarious’. ‘The shadows of the last few years remained,’ the reporter noted, even though ‘the silver lining of passing clouds’ seemed to be reflected in the eyes of the passers-by.

A week earlier, although there had been no official word that the Germans were planning a surrender, hundreds of German guns without public explanation or fanfare were placed along the length of the Mall from Buckingham Palace. Brought directly from the French battlefields, they resembled the wounded enemy soldiers themselves, pockmarked and stained. Final, brutal evidence of the war had arrived in the heart of the capital.

In New York there had been a muddle. On Thursday 6 November rumours that the end of the war was imminent had become so pronounced that they were taken for fact. Glancing out of the window of her couture cutting room on to the pavement below, Lucy Duff Gordon, the famous British dress designer, New York resident and survivor of the
Titanic
disaster six years earlier, was amazed to see old men letting off fireworks and staid-looking fathers kissing lovely young women who were quite clearly perfect strangers. At 2.30 p.m. the Stock Exchange closed and one hundred and fifty-five tons of ticker tape fluttered down into the street. Lucy found herself swept up in the excitement and, although her couture business had not been thriving in the manner she would have liked, she impulsively offered all her dress-cutters time off and unlimited champagne for the rest of the day. The day passed, Lucy noted, ‘in an orgy of celebration’. As dusk was falling another official announcement was made. It had been a false alarm. There was no armistice as yet. America who had joined the war nineteen months earlier remained at war.

Five days later, on 11 November New York felt both sheepish and exhausted and Lucy noticed that the champagne they still felt compelled to drink had lost its fizz.

In London, the newspaper compositors had been given six hours’ notice for assembling the size of type suitable for announcing the news that people had been longing for. The Armistice headlines were an inch high and small boys on bicycles careered through the
rain-drenched streets carrying bundles of damp newspapers yelling the single word ‘Victory’.

In front of Buckingham Palace the white marble statue of Queen Victoria turned black with the number of people who had climbed into the old sovereign’s lap and clung to the winged statues that surrounded her seated figure. The royal family appeared briefly on the balcony acknowledging the cheering crowds, a reassuring symbol for some that Britain was returning to normal.

In London’s East End, the eleven o’clock sirens were at first confused for those that announced an air raid. The death of several children in Poplar two years before, when a Zeppelin bomb had exploded in the grounds of a school, had not been forgotten. Children in Canning Town were terrified when a shop handed out armfuls of free fireworks. The noise made by the rockets and Catherine wheels were frighteningly reminiscent of the deadly German bombs.

Duff Cooper, glamorous diplomat and Grenadier, had returned from the battle lines a few days earlier. Back in London he felt overcome with despondency and unable to go down into the streets and join the Armistice Day party. As he watched the scene below him, with the coloured fairy lights threaded through the tricolour draperies, the cheering and the waving of flags, he was ‘overcome with melancholy’. He shuddered at the dancing and the noise of celebration and could think only of his friends ‘who were dead’. After dining at the Ritz on food that was ‘cold and nasty’ he slipped away as soon as possible, feeling the infinite sadness of loss wash over his girlfriend, Diana Manners, reducing her to tears. There was another reason, however, for Duff’s low spirits. He had a temperature of 102 and he suspected that he might be suffering from ‘a sharp attack’ of influenza.

Florence Younghusband, wife of General George Younghusband who had commanded British and Indian troops during the Turkish invasion of Egypt, was travelling on the top of a London bus at the moment of the ceasefire. In front of her was a soldier, his face shattered by a shell. As Florence watched, the soldier ‘looked straight ahead and remained stonily silent’. Suddenly the lady bus conductor collapsed into the seat beside her and, leaning her head on Florence’s shoulder, she wept. Her husband, she confided to Florence, had died two months
before and she felt incapable of celebrating. Florence, whose husband had been invalided home in 1916, felt herself to be a lucky one.

Susan and Tom Owen listened as the church bells of Shrewsbury began ringing, and said a prayer of thanks that their three sons had been spared, before going to answer the knock on the front door. A young man stood outside patiently, a telegram in his hand. The news concerning Wilfred, their eldest boy, could not have been more terrible.

Vera Brittain heard the sounds that signalled of the end of the war through the window of the London hospital annexe where her hands were buried deep in a basin of pinkish water. Standing in her nurse’s uniform she continued to wash out and disinfect the bloody dressing bowls. Her pointed chin was set firm in concentration at her task. She did not interrupt her work, because ‘like a sleeper who is determined to go on dreaming after being told to wake up’ she had no interest in the jubilation going on outside the window. Only three years earlier she had written to her fiancé contemplating this exact moment. ‘Would she be one of those who take a happy part in the triumph?’ she had wondered, or instead would she ‘listen to the merriment with a heart that breaks and ears that try to keep out the mirthful sounds?’

A few weeks after receiving the news in December 1915 that her 20-year-old fiancé Roland Leighton had been killed, Vera Brittain had gone to the house of Roland’s parents. That morning the postman had delivered a large brown paper packet. When Vera walked into their sitting room she had seen Roland’s clothes laid out all over the floor encrusted with mud. Here were clothes that showed what even a bluntly worded telegram could not show. The mud on this bedraggled set of garments ‘had not the usual clean smell of earth but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies’. Here was mud of a different kind to ordinary English mud or even ordinary French mud. This was mud that clung, tenacious even when the struggle was over. This was death mud. In that moment, breathing in the dreadful smell of the jacket, the waistcoat, the breeches soaked in the dying blood of the man she had loved, Vera understood the reality of war, of decay, of mortality. Buried deep in an inner pocket she had found the only possession of Roland’s to escape the stench of
death: a photograph of Vera herself. The warmth of his body had never lost the power to repel the damp and decay.