At 5 A.M., the representatives of Germany signed the Armistice that had been under negotiation for four days. At 11:00, it took effect, and the war ended, almost exactly a week after Wilfred Owen was killed.
At noon on November 11 the Armistice bells had been pealing for an hour in Shrewsbury when the telegram arrived at his parents’ house.
That, at least, is how I first read the story. Now I realize, rather belatedly, that I’m not sure where Paul Fussell got this account of the exact timing, this hour’s space of grace before the blow fell. The telegram did arrive at some point today, a century back, telling Susan Owen the her favorite son was dead, or so she would always remember it. But when, exactly? And did Harold Owen really see his brother’s shade in his shipboard cabin at the moment of the armistice? I don’t know–but we’re out of the war now, and into the telling of it.
There are so many facts, so much evidence, so many written records and so much artistic expression that speaks to the experience of the war. There’s so much history. But no definitive History, and no tale can be told straight and plain afterwards, not without the frame of the war, beginning to end; without the filter of the tellers’ lives between the experience and the writing; without the coloring added by readers’ own experiences; without the attrition and distortions of memory.
None of which makes our reading (and writing) any less worth the doing. What would be worth doing, really, if not re-telling the stories that show us how we have lived, and might live?
But this can be hard to see on a day like today, when we–and they, a century back–are thinking so much of those who have died. Can they remember them as they were, or only as they are now, part of this dreadful story? Can we know their lives as experiences once open to possibility, rather than as arcs visible in their entirety?
This is one challenge that has defined this project since the summer of ’14: knowing the ending. Knowing, as many of you did, that one of the best poets would die so late, and that his mother would suffer the cruelest possible ironic blow at the very end. But exciting as it was to propose and carry out the experiment of wilful historical possibility–of living on the day, a century back, and trying not to know the “future”–on this last day it feels, perhaps not surprisingly, that there is very little left to do. To carry on is dispiriting, not least because there are entire shelves of books written about this one particular day. Some of these focus, as Fussell did, on the irony, on the cruelness of the war and the physical and emotional destruction and exhaustion it left in its wake. Others detail the celebrations in London and Paris, or write in anger about the cynical last few hours of violence (hundreds of men were killed today, in pointless up-to-the-minute fighting, but only one of our writers was actually under fire) or the grim future that the Armistice gave birth to: a Germany that didn’t understand its own defeat, punitive allied terms, the birth of the “stab in the back” myth and the seeds of a war that will dwarf the sufferings of this one. So I want, mostly, to think about Susan Owen, and to rest from my scrivener’s labors…
Yet it would be a strange little irony to go short-and-bitter after so many conscientiously exhaustive episodes, and it would be unfair to our writers to leave so many stories without their final tableaux. So, bear with me one more time, for one long last post. There will be a number of shorter excerpts describing Armistice Day experiences, a few passages from the most important contemporary novels of the war, longer pieces from Vera Brittain and Osbert Sitwell, a last note on the future of A Century Back, and a poem at the very end.
So, to the soldiers. Of all of our informants, Vivian de Sola Pinto had perhaps the liveliest Armistice Day.
On the morning of the 11th we were still being shelled and machine-gunner occasionally by German rear-guards and one of our captains was killed by a direct hit on a latrine.
It’s too brutal for a cheap joke. Their triumphal entry into a Belgian village has a suitably surreal air to it:
Soon after, as we approached the outskirts of the village, we were met by a crowd of peasants, headed by a little hunchback with an accordion who led us in triumph into Perquise, playing the Marseillaise.
Frank Richards of the 2nd Royal Welch nearly witnessed a similar last chance killing–horrifying and infuriating considering that the armistice had been signed, and yet, for an old soldier, just another twist of fate, one more shell on one more day of the long war.
On the morning of November 11th, just before we left the house we were staying in, a small enemy shell crashed through the roof, but nobody was hit. We advanced about a mile out of the village and were halted behind some banks. On the right of us on the road was a cooker which had been badly knocked about, and laying alongside of it were the two dead cooks of another battalion in the Division. One of the last shells that the enemy had fired on this part of the Front had burst by them as they were moving along the road that morning…
With the exception of some men of the transport there were not more than two or three of us left that had seen it through since the commencement, and ours was supposed to be a lucky battalion. I expect we had pulled off a twenty-thousand-to-one chance.
There being nothing to drink in this particular village, Richards promptly sat down to gamble, and lost many months of pay in a few hours. He’s probably right on the odds, and philosophically accepts the fact that only now his luck has changed at last: easy come, easy go.
Richards is a canny old Regular and penniless former coal miner from South Wales. Alfred Hale, musical gentleman of means and hapless babe-in-the-woods of soldiering, is probably the least similar private soldier in the entire B.E.F. So he responded rather less decisively:
I see I have written in my Diary the single word ‘(Peace?)’ thus, in brackets. Anyhow, from that day the guns ceased to rumble in the near distance… I don’t think I, personally, knew for certain what had happened till Saturday night the 16th, since my Times arrived somewhat spasmodically…
But all the guns are not quiet yet–or won’t be until the stroke of 11:00. John Buchan will report a strange little scene opposite the South African Brigade, a last glimpse of the war as a performance. At least there were no casualties (apparently) as a result of this particular last-minute hate-show.
A German machine-gunner, after firing off a belt without pause, was seen to stand up beside his weapon, bow, and then walk slowly to the rear…
C.E. Montague was not far away from Vivian de Sola Pinto, and he managed to find a suitable way of bringing the war full-circle–geographically, at least.
…with all speed we go through Valenciennes towards Mons… we motor into Mons at 11 to the moment… The only
German we see as we go into Mons is a dead one lying under the Boulevard trees… In the square troops of the
3rd Can. Div. are drawn up in mass before the Town Hall. The G.O.C. comes in, stands up in his car, and orders caps off and three cheers for King Albert, and we give him four… One of the General’s G.S.O. tells me the enemy left Mons in the night.
So, for the British, the war ends where it began; and, in being driven along the Rouen-Brussels road from Mons to Albert, and fighting back along it to Mons, the Allies have broken Prussianism and saved the world. Back through Valenciennes to Lille. On coming in I write my application to relinquish my commission and to have leave pending retirement.
We will hear from Montague again, in fiction, below, but we’ll go now to his colleague, Charles Moncrieff, who is now supervising photographers and film crews on the scene with B.E.F. headquarters, which is now in Cambrai:
Sir Douglas Haig and the Army Commanders met in conference, duly photographed and filmed by two of my men, a historic scene, a small knot of troops outside, motor drivers, etc. When the Chief came out they suddenly gave a ringing cheer, which you will see in the film by the row of opening mouths. After lunch, the same day, the Prince of Wales slipped up very quietly in an open car to congratulate the Chief on winning the war. To-day’s excitement is the repatriés, who are beginning to come through. There is much to do and so few of us to do it that I quite despair—and must stop now.
This film appears to be in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, but not, alas, available online (nor is Moncrieff’s role noted). Just one more note for that diminished chord of long-serving soldiers in France and Belgium.
Guy Chapman‘s battalion was in the fighting of November 4th–they have, in fact, been in and out of combat for the last “hundred days,” one of the little groups that has been left to finish the job while others planned their celebrations.
On 11th November we marched back fifteen miles to Bethencourt. A blanket of fog covered the countryside. At eleven o’clock we slung on our packs and tramped on along the muddy pavé. The band played, but there was very little singing. ‘Before a man comes to be wise, he is half dead with Catarrhes and aches, with sore eyes, and a worn-out body.’ We were very old, very tired, and now very wise…
In an effort to cure our apathy, the little American doctor from Vermont who had joined us a fortnight earlier broke his invincible teetotalism, drank half a bottle of whisky, and danced a cachuca. We looked at his antics with dull eyes and at last put him to bed.
It’s time, perhaps, to move back across the channel and begin looking at the celebrations in England.
The young infantryman Harry Patch was stationed at Golden Hill Fort, looking out over the Solent. Out on the firing range with other men training or re-training for France, Patch saw a rocket go up at 11:00.
I remember the feelings of joy to think that I would not have to go back and relief that the war was over…
That night they had a wild party, and Patch was soon demobilized. He will live to see ninety more Armistice Days, but prefer to observe instead the day his own war ended in disaster and survival.
Edward Heron-Allen recovered from a bout of the flu just in time to return to work at the War Office this morning. His diary describes the famous celebrations in central London, giving pride of place to “a long procession of girls and boy clerks” cheering, waving, and improvising “confetti” from War Office “forms”–both still in scare quotes, a century back. But Heron-Allen himself, though no spring chicken, is fast off the mark with his own celebrations:
The moment the Order of the Day came round at 10am I secured tables at the Imperial for lunch and dinner, and it was as well I did, for they were turning people away by hundreds…
One got something now and then, but we were principally occupied standing up and singing… I never saw so many drunken people together before.
Osbert Sitwell, looking back on the war from toward the end of what will be a lively career as a Modernist poet, writer, editor, and public pseudo-intellectual, writes the last day several times over in the early pages of one volume of his memoirs. We’ll take the second passage first:
No-one, then, who had not been a soldier, alive on the morning of the 11th of November 1918, can imagine the joy, the unexpected, startling joy of it… victory… flung itself on us. The news had been — or at any rate had seemed — beyond what could be believed: the only way of persuading oneself of its truth was by doing something one had never done before, such as dancing in Trafalgar Square. It was with this feeling, I think, that the units composing the crowd danced. . . . When the news had first come with a ringing of bells and sounding of maroons, men and women, who had never seen one another before, spoke, to ask if it were true.
There’s something about that rather slight breach of social decorum that brings across the jarring strangeness of the day, no?
But Sitwell has also written the famous London celebrations as a Modernist “found art” spectacle. In this he captures the other half of a paradoxical bundle of feelings: that sense of being at a sudden, momentous ending. Here he anticipates the Larkin poem which will eventually be where we now so often begin:
And today — the 11th of November 1918 — that long present had suddenly become changed to past, clearly to be seen as such. Hence both the joy and the earnestness of dancers in street and square tonight: hence, too, the difficulty of finding a way in which to describe to the reader the movements that so precisely interpreted conflicting emotions: the long drawn-out misery and monastic stultification of the trenches, and then the joy of a victory that in the end had rushed on us with the speed and impact of a comet — for it was difficult, I realised that fully, as, with my companions, Diaghilev and Massine, I stopped to watch for a moment the shifting general pattern of the mass of people. With something of the importance of a public monument attaching to his scale and build, the great impresario, bear-like in his fur-coat, gazed with an air of melancholy exhaustion at the crowds. I do not know what thoughts were passing through his head. The dancer, on the other hand, so practical an artist, and in spite of the weighty tradition of his art, so vital in the manner in which he seizes his material from the life round him, was watching intently the steps and gestures of the couples, no doubt to see if any gifts to Terpsichore could be wrung from them…
As for myself, when I looked at the couples — and a few who were dancing by themselves! — I felt lonely, as always in a throng. My thoughts turned inwards, and to other occasions. It was curious that now that the battle was over and the Captains and the Kings had become dead leaves overnight, rattling down from their trees, whirling head over heels in the air, my mind, which had so perpetually during the course of it avoided thoughts of war… did not busy itself with the future, enticing as that seemed to all of us, but reverted ever to two scenes.
First to the landscape of an early September morning, where the pale golden grasses held just the colour of a harvest moon, as they shone under the strong, misty sun of autumn in northern France; a wide flatness of gentle, tawny land, where dead bodies in khaki and field-grey lay stiff and glittering in the heavy dew, among the blue clouds of the chicory flowers, which reflected the sky and, as it were, pinned it down…
Such a morning, I would have hazarded, as that on which men, crowned with the vast hemicycles of their gold helmets, clashed swords at Mycenae, or outside the towers of Troy, only to be carried from the field to lie entombed in air and silence for millenniums under their stiff masks of thin virgin gold: (how far had we descended, crawling now, earth-coloured as grubs, among the broken stumps of trees, and the barbed wire, until we were still, among the maggoty confusion, and our faces took on the tints of the autumn earth and the rusty discoloration of dry blood!).
Then the alternate scene switched before me: No-Man’s-Land, that narrow strip of territory peculiar to the First World War; the very dominion of King Death; where his palace was concealed, labyrinthine in its dark corridors, mysterious in its distances, so that sometimes those who sought him spent hours, whole days, a week even, in the antichambers that led to his presence, and lay lost in the alleys and mazes of barbed wire. Throughout the length of time that the sun takes, you could hear their groans and sighs, and could not reach them. . . . All that was over, for everyone. No wonder that the world rejoiced at a cessation that seemed more splendid than many a thing won!
Herbert Read surely would have preferred to be observing the throngs with his pal Osbert and the famous Russians whose work he has begun to love. But, alas, he is still stuck at a military camp in Kent, so he stayed in. It’s to be all Modernism from now on: Read and Sitwell have decided to edit Arts and Letters together, and just yesterday Read wrote to the War Office to cancel his request for a permanent commission. But today he is the army, and indoors. At least he gives us one last opportunity to peer over a soldier’s shoulder and see what he is reading:
Everybody went mad… I felt hopelessly sober. I read Henry James’s Sacred Fount to the accompaniment of the rejoicings—with a savage zest.
Sitwell’s other surviving new friend, Siegfried Sassoon, was similarly preoccupied. But, writing tonight in his diary, he is much more succinct than Sitwell and, as is his way, more blatantly adversarial.
November 11
I was walking in the water-meadows by the river below Cuddesdon this morning—a quiet grey day. A jolly peal of bells was ringing from the village-church, and the villagers were hanging little flags out of the windows of their thatched houses. The war is ended. It is impossible to realise…
I got to London about 6.30 and found masses of people: in streets and congested Tubes, all waving flags and making fools of themselves—an outburst of mob patriotism. It was a wretched wet night, and very mild. It is a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years.
Duff Cooper made a very similar progress from the countrysie–he has been at a weekend shooting party in Norfolk–to a London that seems, suddenly, a very bad place to be for those who feel their losses heavily.
November 11, 1918
We left by train at about 11. Two Flying Corps officers got in at Cambridge and said they had received an official wireless to say that the armistice had been signed. As we got nearer London we saw flags flying and in some places cheering crowds… In spite of real delight I couldn’t resist a feeling of profound melancholy, looking at the crowds of silly cheering people and thinking of the dead… The streets were full of wild enthusiasm. Diana shared the melancholy with which these filled me–and once she broke down and sobbed.
Dorothie Feilding‘s war–and its personally happy ending–has run a year or so ahead of Duff and Diana. She is married and safe, her husband back from the front and herself long finished with driving ambulances under fire. But she, too, thinks mostly of those who were lost, including her brother. She will write to her mother tomorrow, and sound–perhaps sincerely, perhaps for her mother’s benefit–the approved note of righteous solemnity.
I couldn’t bear to hear the people laughing & clapping yesterday. One was so haunted by the memories of those dear boys who have gone. But Mother dear thank God that supreme sacrifice was not for nothing as I have often feared it would be.
Back to Belgium we go, now, with Dorothie’s distant cousin Rowland Feilding. He shares that sense of a sacrifice redeemed but with, perhaps, a caveat: it was worth it–but a more complete victory would have been worth more.
As we marched away the band played a tune well known to the men, who are accustomed to accompany it with the following words:
When this ruddy war is over,
Oh! how happy I shall be!
This, no doubt, was very appropriate, but nevertheless, what a thousand pities that we should have had to draw off at such a moment—-just as we had the enemy cold!
Perhaps, though not quite for the world-historical reasons he would adduce. But I would rather have our last glimpse of Fielding, perhaps our most steadfast correspondent from the front, looking forward to the rewards of peace. Four days ago, he wrote one of the last of his many hundreds of war letters to his wife Edith, the mother of their young daughters.
How strange it will be when the fighting stops. I am already beginning to look back upon the last 4 1/2 years as a sort of dream, in which there outstands a single tall figure in black;–always the last to have been seen by me when leaving for the war, and the first on coming home for leave. I will leave you to guess whose is that faithful, patient figure.
Olaf Stapledon, too, has lived to love. Soon Agnes Miller will make the journey from Australia, and they will be married–is it the happiest who are most struck by a sense of disbelief?
Peace Day
My Olaf,
It is 5 minutes before midnight, but I must write just a line because this is such a great day… I can’t believe it is really the end of the war. The war seems like a whole life & I can’t believe that that life has come to its last day. What a tumult of thoughts must be rising tonight from all over the world—mostly of thankfulness that it is over & much rejoicing & alas! much sorrowing. Tomorrow we will begin a new chapter. . .
“Chapter” will do for a segue… so, what about fiction? If so many of those who wrote their own war-lives stopped to take stock, today, a century back, and try to figure out how this day changed their feelings about all those that went before (and those that will come), how much more must a novelist struggle to take a long view, emplotting and implying meaning with a light yet accurate touch?
Ford Madox Hueffer, like his erstwhile temporary superior Herbert Read, was far from the celebrations in London. He is still stationed at Redcar, in Yorkshire, and will recall only a final day of bumf: “I remember Armistice Day very well… because I was kept so busy with military duties that I was on my feet all day until I fell into bed stone sober at 4 next morning.” But he, like other ardent lovers (never mind his legal wife and recent pseudo-wife, this letter is to Stella Bowen, his latest love) wrote first to the one he wants to be with:
Darling… Just a note to say I love you more than ever. Peace has come, & for some reason I feel inexpressibly sad. I suppose it is the breaking… after the old strain!
But despite this sadness–and this remoteness–Ford will go on to write perhaps the longest and most important fictional treatment of Armistice Day (and Armistice Night.) Most of the third volume of the Tietjens Tetralogy, A Man Could Stand Up takes place today, a century back, inside the consciousnesses of first Valentine Wannop, the Stella-Bowen like love interest, and then the distinctly Fordish Christopher Tietjens himself. Valentine walks away from her job as a gym teacher at a girl’s school and through the increasingly raucous celebrations, while Tietjens does his own wandering before eventually uniting with her. They will consummate their as-yet-chaste relationship tonight, but not before they receive a series of visitations from strange figures marked in different ways by the war… it’s very difficult to describe, not least because I read it several years ago now, but mostly because it is a bewildering High Modernist novel of consciousness. It’s a lot like Pynchon’s manic evocations of life in London toward the end of the next war, and very little like the long-nineteenth-century novels which also discuss the last days of this one.
Ralph Mottram‘s novel sees the war without much fuss at all. He’s already done it once, yesterday, with his protagonist’s final shrug, but in another volume of the multi-faceted work he circles back for one more bathetic stroke of bureaucratic nonsense, buck-passing, and general incompetence, all set in the larger context of casual destruction and deliberate cruelty which the fighting troops can often ignore, but those who have to confront displaced civilians cannot.
Not long after the armistice, an officer of middling talents named Dormer finds himself in possession of 140 prisoners. But there is no glory here, and even a bit of a sticky wicket:
In the little time-keeper’s box, turned into the company office, he found a tall, good-looking man, who immediately addressed him in perfect English, giving the rank of Feld Webel, the quantity and regiment of his party and adding: “I surrender to you, sir.” Dormer gave instructions that the party should be marched to Brigade Head-quarters. He wanted to send some report as to the capture, but his subordinate replied: “We didn’t capture ’em. They just marched up the street. The post at the bridge let ’em through.” Dormer let it go at that, and having seen the street cleared, he walked over to see his Colonel…
No one knows what to do with the prisoners, and eventually their dithering is “interrupted by noise outside, shouts and cries, the sound of marching, and orders given in German.” The indecisive British officers go outside to find their German prisoners surrounded by a French mob:
…to the number of some hundreds, mostly people of over military age, or children, but one and all with those thin white faces that showed the long years of insufficient and unsuitable food, and the spiritual oppression that lay on “occupied” territory. They were shouting and shaking their fists round the compact formation of Dormer’s prisoners, who had just been halted, in front of the house. The N.C.O. in charge had been ordered by Brigade to bring them back. A chit explained the matter: “Prisoners taken after 11.00 a.m. to be sent back to their own units, on the line of retreat.”
The Feld Webel enlightened the Colonel’s mystification: “We refuse to obey the order, sir. Our regiment is twenty miles away. All the peasants have arms concealed. We shall just be shot down.”
It was a dilemma. Dormer could not help thinking how much better the Feld Webel showed up, than his own Colonel. The latter could not shoot the men where they stood. Nor could he leave them to the mercies of the natives. How difficult War became with the burden of civilization clogging its heels…
Indeed. The officers fall back upon their strengths, however, and simply waste time until the mob disperses and lorries arrive to transport the Germans into someone else’s sphere of responsibility…
Henry WIlliamson marks the day as one more bleak mood in the long up-and-down of Phillip Maddison’s agonizing bildung.
It was over. It was ended. He sat in his bedroom of 9 Manor Terrace, at non on 11th November, and mourned alone, possessed by vacancy that soon the faces of the living would join those of the dead, and be known no more.
But Maddison–still, incredibly, a callow youth, even after four years of war and as many volumes of his Chronicle–manages to drag himself through the forced revelry that follows…
C.E. Montague is the only one of these coming novelists to give his own experiences of precisely today, a century back (on which see above), to one of his characters. Auberon, the hero of Rough Justice, is everything a good middle class Georgian boy should be. He is kind, athletic, sporting, lovable, honorable, and neither dull nor terribly clever. His terribly clever friend came to an awful end, and their less honorable fellow-traveler suffered the indignity of being heavily decorated for desultory staff-work, but Auberon, though he loses an arm, will get the girl. In the meantime, he, like his creator, is minding journalists in Mons, where he comes across the body of a dead German sniper.
Montague loves Auberon, because he’s a good boy, but he neither spares him maiming nor allows him any last flash of understanding: he may represent much that is good about the old Public School outlook, but that also means that he is unequipped to comprehend the squalor of the war’s ending.
The war’s last morning brought him with our leading troops into the little grimy town of Mons where, for England’s armies, the war had begun. It struck eleven on a little tinkling church clock in the square, and the British soldiers and the people of the town shook hands and cheered and tasted all they could of the fulfilment of the deep desire that had moved them for more than four years. A German sniper, killed a few hours ago while covering the retreat of his friends, lay under a tree with his hundreds of used cartridge-cases scattered round him. He looked lonely amidst all the rejoicings at the defeat of the cause for which he had been, perhaps, the last man to die. Like many of the dead in war, he had a drowsy, troubled look, as if he had wondered, while dying, “Why has this overtaken me?”
Auberon wanted to do what an English private will do in the ring when he has beaten a plucky opponent at last — put his arm round the stout loser’s neck and say, “Good lad!” Why should war be the only ring void of sportsmanship? And yet this morning’s General Order to cease firing at eleven included a clause forbidding fraternisation. Oh, it was all very difficult.
Just as it was always very difficult to work these carefully shaped and rarely dated novels into the fabric of this project. (Of course it was! But still, I had hopes…) With fiction concluded, I want to close with a memoir–Vera Brittain‘s Testament of Youth, as it must be–and then, finally, a poem.
Now that the war is over, many of the young survivors will go to school, take up professions, and generally find ways to put the war behind them, nevertheless knowing that they will one day want sit down and write about it. Their two greatest motivations to do so were surely either to unburden themselves of their own experiences or to remember and memorialize those who died. Vera Brittain will return to Oxford, begin her writing career as a novelist, get married, and start a family. But the memoir was coming, and when it did it proved to be the one that could best do both: she tells the story of her own growth from “provincial young-ladyhood” to university student to V.A.D. nurse to veteran of emergency nursing in overseas hospitals, but her story is never just hers–it’s a quintet, containing a four-part threnody, the major parts assigned to her fiancé Roland Leighton and her brother Edward and the minor ones to their friends and hers, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow.
The beauty of her memoir is in the writing, and the pathos earned through the binary vision of retrospection, by which the story comes across in two registers: the experienced woman looking back at the self-centered, dramatic youth running eagerly toward such terrible sorrows. And although many men wrote, and wrote well, of the friends they lost, it’s surely true that Brittain’s book derives from her unusual position at a time when gender roles were only just beginning to change. In a traditional way, she takes up the task of mourning and remembrance, as a sister and near-widow of the “fallen;” and yet she was there, under the bombs at Étaples, learning to handle shattered minds and bodies every day, and she writes as a then-rare female veteran. But the fact that she was able to write an extended elegy at the same time as a Bildungsroman-like memoir (which replaces, in many ways, the first novel, a roman à clef she will abandon) is a testament to her skill as a writer, just barely able to master the emotions of memory and tell a true, affecting story.
Enough commentary! What I means is this: Brittain does a better job than all the others of being there both for herself and for the dead.
When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other’s faces did not cry jubilantly: “We’ve won the War!” They only said: “The War is over.” From Millbank I heard the maroons crash with terrifying clearness, and, like a sleeper who is determined to go on dreaming after being told to wake up, I went on automatically washing the dressing bowls in the annex outside my hut…
And as I dried the bowls I thought: “It’s come too late for me… Why couldn’t it have ended rationally, as it might have ended, in 1916, instead of all that trumpet-blowing against a negotiated peace, and the ferocious talk of secure civilians about marching to Berlin? It’s come five months too late — or is it three years? It might have ended last June, and let Edward, at least, be saved! Only five months — it’s such a little time, when Roland died nearly three years ago.”
But on Armistice Day not even a lonely survivor drowning in black waves of memory could be left alone with her thoughts. A moment after the guns had subsided into sudden, palpitating silence, the other V.A.D. from my ward dashed excitedly into the annex.
“Brittain! Brittain! Did you hear the maroons? It’s over — it’s all over! Do let’s come out and see what’s happening!”
There is time yet for one more cruel twist of fate, one more toss of crass casualty.
Mechanically I followed her into the road. As I stood there, stupidly rigid, long after the triumphant explosions from Westminster had turned into a distant crescendo of shouting, I saw a taxicab turn swiftly in from the Embankment towards the hospital. The next moment there was a cry for doctors and nurses from passers-by, for in rounding the comer the taxi had knocked down a small elderly woman who in listening, like myself, to the wild noise of a world released from nightmare, had failed to observe its approach. As I hurried to her side I realised that she was all but dead and already past speech. Like Victor in the mortuary chapel, she seemed to have shrunk to the dimensions of a child with the sharp features of age, but on the tiny chalk-white face an expression of shocked surprise still lingered, and she stared hard at me as Geoffrey had stared at his orderly in those last moments of conscious silence beside the Scarpe. Had she been thinking, I wondered, when the taxi struck her, of her sons at the front, now safe?
…I remembered her at intervals throughout that afternoon, during which, with a half-masochistic notion of “seeing the sights ” I made a circular tour to Kensington by way of the intoxicated West End. With aching persistence my thoughts went back to the dead and the strange irony of their fates — to Roland, gifted, ardent, ambitious, who had died without glory in the conscientious performance of a routine job; to Victor and Geoffrey, gentle and diffident, who, conquering nature by resolution, had each gone down bravely in a big “show”; and finally to Edward, musical, serene, a lover of peace, who had fought courageously through so many battles and at last had been killed while leading a vital counter-attack in one of the few decisive actions of the War…
Late that evening, when supper was over, a group of elated V.A.D.s who were anxious to walk through Westminster and Whitehall to Buckingham Palace prevailed upon me to join them. Outside the Admiralty a crazy group of convalescent Tommies were collecting specimens of different uniforms and bundling their wearers into flag-strewn taxis; with a shout they seized two of my companions and disappeared into the clamorous crowd, waving flags and shaking rattles. Wherever we went a burst of enthusiastic cheering greeted our Red Cross uniform, and complete strangers adorned with wound stripes rushed up and shook me warmly by the hand. After the long, long blackness, it seemed like a fairy-tale to see the street lamps shining through the chill November gloom.
I detached myself from the others and walked slowly up Whitehall, with my heart sinking in a sudden cold dismay. Already this was a different world from the one that I had known during four life-long years, a world in which people would be light-hearted and forgetful, in which themselves and their careers and their amusements would blot out political ideals and great national issues. And in that brightly lit, alien world I should have no part. All those with whom I had really been intimate were gone; not one remained to share with me the heights and the depths of my memories. As the years went by and youth departed and remembrance grew dim, a deeper and ever deeper darkness would cover the young men who were once my contemporaries… The War was over; a new age was beginning; but the dead were dead and would never return.
Finally, we’ll have Thomas Hardy end the project, as he began it.
But before I do I want to offer thanks to everyone who has helped out with corrections, clarifications, comments, new materials, or information on the veterans and writers in their families, or simply sent an encouraging message. This has been a strange experience, and I do hope still to use all of the reading and thinking about the war to write a book about the writing of the Great War–one that’s sufficiently different from all the good ones already out there. If and when I do so I will post updates here, if the site is still up, or let those of you with whom I’m in email contact know what’s happening. In fact, if you’d like to know about future projects, send an email to admin @ acenturyback.com so I can assemble a list…
But that’s all well in the future. What about tomorrow?
Tomorrow I am taking a day off.
After that, I will begin posting again at irregular and probably increasing intervals, beginning, if not on the 13th, then some day fairly soon. I’m not sure how long this will go on, but I would like–mindful of the risk of depression associated with too-abrupt demobilization!–to get to the end of some of these stories.
In many cases, I haven’t read the biographies or letters or journals any further than the armistice and would like, without time pressure, to learn what happened “après la guerre fini.” In other cases, I know something of the writer’s after-life and would like to think and write about how post-war experiences shaped both writers’ telling of their own stories and the ways in which those stories were read. So, perhaps, there will be a handful of posts–a few handfuls, at most–linked less to post-war dates than to particular writers. Some of the survivors and mourners will meet to offer consolation–and help with editing and publishing the work of the dead. There are pieces to pick up, ways to move forward forward.
It will be something, after all of this, to read of lives conducted in peace, without paying the “tax of quick alarm,” without suffering spasms of terror at the sound of the telegraph-boy’s bicycle, without wondering if the foolishness or incompetence of those in power are likely to kill you tomorrow. There are long-delayed marriages to celebrate, and children to be born and raised and loved, books to be written and art to be made.
Of course that will be only part of the story: there is enduring trauma, too, and madness and despair, and lives that will never recover from loss. And when the wind sown this morning, a century back, whips up into the whirling fury of a much worse war, it will carry off some of those children. But for now, today, a century back, it’s over.
And There Was a Great Calm
(On the Signing of the Armistice, 11 Nov. 1918)
I
There had been years of Passion—scorching, cold,
And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,
Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,
Among the young, among the weak and old,
And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”
II
Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught
Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,
Philosophies that sages long had taught,
And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,
And “Hell!” and “Shell!” were yapped at Lovingkindness.
III
The feeble folk at home had grown full-used
To ‘dug-outs’, ‘snipers’, ‘Huns’, from the war-adept
In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;
To day-dreamt men in millions, when they mused—
To nightmare-men in millions when they slept.
IV
Waking to wish existence timeless, null,
Sirius they watched above where armies fell;
He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull
Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull
Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.
V
So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly
Were dead and damned, there sounded ‘War is done!’
One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,
‘Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,
And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?’
VI
Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years’ dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’
VII
Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not,
The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.
One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot
And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, ‘What?
Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?’
VIII
Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: ‘We are not whipped to-day;’
No weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn.
IX
Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: ‘It had to be!’
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, ‘Why?’
