by Simon Heffer
The following day Lloyd George told the Commons details of the armistice with Austria–Hungary, including a complete evacuation of all remaining foreign territory occupied by forces of the Dual Monarchy and the surrender of its navy. The capitulation of Austria–Hungary exposed Germany on its southern and eastern borders, and its own end was now but a matter of time. On 8 November, a Friday, the Allies and Americans outlined terms for an armistice with Germany and gave the Germans until Monday – 11 November – to decide whether to accept. The victorious powers offered terms that reflected the matters on which they agreed, so based largely but not entirely on the fourteen points, and (a particular concern of the French) allowing discussion of reparations. A Bavarian republic had already been declared in Munich the previous evening. Prince Max of Baden, the German Chancellor, resigned. The German army withdrew support from the Kaiser; the next day he abdicated and fled to the Netherlands, and the Crown Prince renounced his claims to the throne. The dynasty of Frederick the Great had lost power for ever.
On Sunday 10 November crowds thronged the Mall (which was littered with captured German guns) and the front of Buckingham Palace in expectation of an announcement of peace, much as they had four years earlier in expectation of a declaration of war. The King and Queen went for a drive around London and were cheered wherever they went; the King, about to undertake the umpteenth morale-boosting tour of munitions works, cancelled it to be in London at the crucial moment. The government issued details, the evening before the Armistice, of what would happen to munitions workers and soldiers. All overtime would be stopped, and anyone wishing to leave and return to civilian employment could do so forthwith. Most factories would go on half-time work and some workers would be discharged; they would be given rail warrants to return home, and special unemployment pay until they could be found work. It took just a few days for displaced workers to realise that the benefits offered were inadequate: on 19 November 6,000 women, mainly from Woolwich Arsenal, marched on Whitehall demanding more generous support. For the services, ‘pivotal men’ – those essential for reconstruction – would be released at once. This, too, satisfied few of those anxious to come home.
A cabinet meeting that evening discussed the imminent collapse of Germany into Bolshevism unless an armistice were agreed in time to leave the authorities in Germany some chance of regrouping: thus the decision was taken. ‘Our real danger now is not the Boches but bolshevism,’ Henry Wilson noted in his diary.85 At 2 a.m. on 11 November Foch met German delegates in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne: at 5 a.m. the Armistice was agreed, to come into force at 11 a.m. Private George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers was the last man to die, killed on a patrol at Mons at 9.30: he was a veteran of Mons in 1914, as well as of Ypres, Armentières, Loos and Cambrai. His grave adjoins that of the first man to die, John Parr.
The cabinet met at 9.30 a.m. and decided bells would be rung at 11 a.m.; it then delegated to officials the start of work on demobilisation. Amery got off his number 24 bus in Whitehall and reached Downing Street as a crowd ran into the street ahead of him ‘and was in time to see LG at his doorstep telling them (being then about five minutes to eleven) that the war was over at eleven o’clock … [they] started singing “God Save the King”, a performance politically though not musically quite satisfactory.’86 A maroon – the usual way of announcing an air raid – went off in London at 11 a.m. to mark the end of the war, and sirens and church bells sounded and rang all over Britain. It was a cheerless, dull, wet day, and Arnold Bennett, in his office at the Ministry of Information, noted his pleasure when the rain fell heavily, ‘an excellent thing to damp hysteria and Bolshevism.’87 Even Mrs Webb had to admit London was ‘a pandemonium of noise and revelry’.88 Yet, as always, she was peering ahead: ‘How soon will the tide of revolution catch up the tide of victory?’
Crowds again congregated outside Buckingham Palace, and several times during the day the King and Queen – who noted in her diary that it was ‘the greatest day in the world’s history’ – came on to a balcony to acknowledge wild cheering that persisted for hours.89 There was singing and much waving of flags, and cries of ‘We want King George’; King George frequently obliged.90 The cheering reached a climax at lunchtime, when the band of the Brigade of Guards paraded playing a triumphal march before going through the card from ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ to ‘Tipperary’. Newbolt told his wife that ‘I can hear as I write the cheers rolling along Fleet Street and the Strand. The sound of the guns over London this morning was thrilling …’91 Duff Cooper, in a taxi from Liverpool Street as he returned to London after a shooting weekend, noted that ‘amid the dancing, the cheering, the waving of flags, I could think only of my friends who were dead.’92 Mrs Asquith recorded how for days ‘my heart has been so heavy at the raging chaos, famine and huge volcanic upset of all Europe’.93 To the King, it was ‘a wonderful day, the greatest in the history of this country’: yet there was a note of old-world sentimentality when, noting in his diary his cousin’s abdication, he observed that ‘William arrived in Holland yesterday.’94 In the afternoon, despite the rain, he and the Queen drove in an open carriage through cheering crowds down the Strand to Mansion House, then home via Piccadilly. While Lloyd George basked in victory, the King sent Asquith a telegram thanking him for his ‘wise counsel and calm resolve’ in earlier times; Mrs Asquith transcribed it in her diary with the note: ‘this is well worth a little ridicule’.
In the high streets across Britain, as soon as the news was telegraphed to post offices, men and women massed in the streets and cheered, flags were raised and work came to a standstill. Those schools not already closed because of the flu epidemic declared half-holidays. The Revd Andrew Clark, in his Essex parish, heard that ‘Braintree was wild with excitement’ and in his village ‘the cottagers were very excited.’95 The ringing of bells, which in some places lasted all day, became infectious as word travelled from village to village in the countryside: it would be another three and a half years before the advent of broadcasting, with the inception of the BBC. Flags were hung out of windows and on the fronts of pubs. Esher, in Perthshire, recorded in his diary: ‘I was on the moor with Kenneth McLeod, who had a few minutes before shot a woodcock. We heard the village bells, and knew that the Armistice had been signed … A few men, no better and no worse than the mass of their Countrymen, will be glorified for all time. The real glory rests upon the thousands of young and nameless dead.’96 In Dublin, supposedly a seat of pro-German sentiment, Plunkett (using a term from celebrations during the Boer War when a siege was lifted) witnessed ‘Mafficking … in which Sinn Féiners caught the infection.’97
Russell, recently released from Brixton, was in the Tottenham Court Road at 11 a.m.: ‘Within two minutes everybody in all the shops and offices had come into the street. They commandeered the buses, and made them go where they liked.’98 A bonfire burned in Trafalgar Square, causing serious damage to the plinth of Nelson’s Column. Munitions workers left their factories and danced in the streets, their appearance made distinctive by the yellow staining of their skin from picric acid. Virginia Woolf, with self-conscious preciousness, noted the guns going off and observed: ‘A siren hooted on the river. They are hooting still. A few people ran to look out of windows. The rooks wheeled round and wore for a moment the symbolic look of creatures performing some ceremony, partly of thanksgiving, partly of valediction over the grave … so far neither bells nor flags, but the wailing of sirens and intermittent guns.’99
A sign that normality was being restored was that from 1 p.m. Big Ben, silent for the duration, began to strike the hours again: the government announced that because of the complexity of the mechanism, it would be two or three weeks before the Westminster chimes were heard again too. Lloyd George formally announced the Armistice in the Commons that afternoon. The Germans were to evacuate all the invaded territories in the west – not just Belgium, but Luxembourg and Alsace-Lorraine – within fourteen days, to be replaced by Allied force
s, which would take prisoner any Germans still in the territories. Within those fourteen days all nationals from those territories being held in Germany would be repatriated. Allied prisoners of war were to be returned too: the fate of German ones would be decided at the peace conference. Large amounts of machinery and weaponry were to be surrendered, and the Germans were ordered to destroy nothing in their retreat, and to hand over railways, coal and rolling stock to the formerly occupied territories. Much of the German navy and auxiliary fleet was to be handed over too, and all its submarines.
The duration of the Armistice was set for thirty-six days, subject to renewal; and the arrangement could be cancelled by any of the contracting parties at forty-eight hours’ notice. But Germany was leaderless, starving, humiliated, exhausted, and in no state to carry on the fight. After the prime minister’s statement the Commons and Lords adjourned and went across to St Margaret’s, Westminster for an impromptu thanksgiving service. Lloyd George and Asquith walked to St Margaret’s together, discussing, with an appropriate lack of controversy, their respective daughters. For the next five days the King and Queen drove round different areas of London – mainly the poorer parts – in an open car, the King saluting and taking the salute of his people.
Many who had fought, or had been bereaved, thought only of what came to be called ‘the unreturning army’, and found celebration harder to manage. It was hardest on the legion of widows, orphans and parents who had lost sons, many of whom faced financial hardship as well as an emotional vacuum. There was scarcely less pain for the men who survived. Robert Graves, in a camp in Wales, went out for a long walk ‘cursing and sobbing, and thinking of the dead.’100 His friend Sassoon, in Oxford recovering from a wound, came to London for the evening ‘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.’101 In Shrewsbury, the mother of his friend and protégé Wilfred Owen received the War Office telegram informing her that her son had been killed in action while crossing the Sambre–Oise canal exactly a week before. As Owen had written in his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, finished the previous March but which would not be published until 1920: ‘My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/Pro patria mori.’
A. J. P. Taylor, in his account of Armistice night, wrote: ‘Total strangers copulated in doorways and on the pavements. They were asserting the triumph of life over death.’102 The authorities became concerned about the partying, which lasted several nights, notably the habit of lighting bonfires in the streets. However, the War Cabinet minutes report that at 10.30 p.m. on 12 November Eric Geddes had visited ‘some of the principal centres affected’ and found ‘the temper and the conduct of crowds were everywhere good. There was very little drunkenness, and few excesses were committed at that hour. Of those few, Australians were prominent participants.’103 The London that celebrated was still being ravaged by flu. Between 27 October and 2 November there were 2,200 deaths from it in the capital alone. Altogether, 150,000 died in England. Hankey, exhausted after a spell in Paris with Lloyd George settling the Armistice terms, went down with the flu on 6 November, though his wife (who like the rest of their household had the virus too) ‘threw open the windows for a minute’ at 11 a.m. on 11 November ‘that I might hear the joy bells’ pealing for the Armistice.104
In his private diary Hankey congratulated himself extensively and without restraint on all he had done to win the war: ‘I initiated and forced through all our preparations for war … the War Cabinet itself is my design and my conception; and my creation … I have been the confidant and consultant first of one great Prime Minister and then of another … I have steered the great ship of state round one dangerous headland after another into a port of serenity.’ He managed a modicum of self-effacement in his memoirs: ‘The war was won primarily by a tremendous combined system of co-ordination and goodwill, which focused all the efforts of the Allies on the supreme task of defeating the enemy, but which only reached its zenith in the last year of the war.’105 So far as it went, and with a discount for Hankey’s obsessive self-regard, that was true: but the exhalations of relief in November 1918 ought also to have recognised the good fortune of the Americans eventually reaching the Western Front, the Germans over-reaching in the spring offensive, and the long-term success of the blockade. Tommy Atkins’s massive sacrifices had kept the Germans at bay, but British sea power had played the decisive part in winning the war.
While strangers copulated in doorways Lloyd George, Churchill, Smith and Henry Wilson dined in Downing Street. The election was the main topic; Churchill, indeed, had been badgering Lloyd George about his role in a new administration, fearing that with the war won the Tories might not agree to his joining the cabinet – which Churchill assumed would be reconstituted on ‘Gladstonian’ lines.106 However, another, not unrelated, issue was discussed. ‘LG wants to shoot the Kaiser,’ Wilson recorded in his diary. ‘FE agrees. Winston does not.’107 Walking back to his house in Eaton Place after dinner, Wilson encountered ‘an elderly, well-dressed woman, a pathetic figure in deep mourning, alone and sobbing her heart out.’ The General asked whether he could help her, but she answered: ‘Thank you, no. I am crying, but I am happy, for now I know that all my three sons who have been killed in the war have not died in vain.’
Churchill was realistic about what a close call it had been, and not just because he was acutely aware of Lloyd George’s dereliction in denying soldiers to the Western Front at a crucial time the previous winter. In 1914 France ‘was within an ace of being destroyed. A vy little more & the submarine warfare instead of bringing America to our aid, might have starved us all into absolute surrender … it was neck and neck to the very end.’108 At Buckingham Palace the King carried out the plan he had devised for when he could consume alcohol again: he sent for a bottle of 1815 cognac that the Prince Regent had laid down to celebrate Wellington’s victory at Waterloo. He found it ‘very musty.’109
VI
Gwynne wrote to Esher on Armistice Day about the next challenge: Bolsheviks. ‘The whole of the burden of their song is that England is corrupt, that the Government is corrupt, that Northcliffe is the real Prime Minister … They are just going along the right lines to create a revolution. The last man to stop a revolutionary feeling in this country is Lloyd George, for the simple reason that the Bolsheviks look upon him as the most corrupt man in the country …’110 Haig, visiting soldiers in hospital in France, had overheard some of them asking why the British needed a king: it was not just those on the losing side who were taking the opportunity to question the prevailing social conditions.
Law was keen to maintain a strong coalition with Lloyd George, seeing it as the only way to keep Bolshevism down in Britain. However, some influential figures, notably the ever-pessimistic Northcliffe, were unsure it could be warded off: he felt the working class, especially that sizeable proportion who had been at the front, were ready for revolution on the European model if their wishes were unmet. To this end he had talks with Henderson and donated space in the Daily Mail to the Labour Party to express its views: he felt that accommodating the party and showing respect for its concerns was as good a way as any of calming potential revolutionaries. Luckily for him and for Britain, many in the Labour Party – not least Henderson, having been to Russia – were as keen to keep Bolshevism out of British politics as Northcliffe was. Nor was that his only concern: he had been anxious to go in an official capacity to the peace conference not solely out of megalomania, but because of a sincere fear that the Allied Powers would effectively let Germany off with a caution, and fail finally to destroy the Prussian militarism that he believed would remain a standing threat to British security.
With the announcement of the Armistice came an immediate end to recruitment and the easing of some war
restrictions. Hotels and restaurants were allowed to open later; people could light bonfires and let off fireworks; bells could ring and public clocks could strike. For Armistice night only shops could light their windows, a concession withdrawn thereafter pending an improvement in the coal supply. It was announced that the Christmas meat ration would be doubled. Clothing manufacturers were told to stop making uniforms and start making civilian clothes. The resumption of association football was excitedly discussed, as was that of first-class cricket for the following summer. Within a fortnight most of the DORA restrictions – such as being forbidden to take photographs or make sketches of coastal areas, and the controversial Regulation 40D, which criminalised a woman with venereal disease copulating with a member of the Armed Forces – were lifted, as was most press censorship.
When a general election was finally called, there were also demands to end censorship completely, to allow freedom of speech during the campaign: this was especially potent in Ireland, where Sinn Féin, which would contest the election, remained a prohibited organisation. The government said some restrictions could go, but with peace not finally settled others had to remain. It was brave, in the circumstances, to give details – inaccurate and incomplete, but still awesome in the scale they suggested – of British war casualties sustained up to the day before the Armistice: an estimated 660,000 officers and men dead, 2.1 million wounded and 360,000 missing, including prisoners.111 The gamble was that the perception of victory would cause calm acceptance of these figures. Had it failed, an already volatile society could have become unmanageable.
