The Great Silence

by Juliet Nicolson

  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.’

  The shock of witnessing such extensive devastation both of natural and man-made beauty could be intense and enraging. Charles Whibley on his return from Louvain wrote in despair in Blackwoods magazine at the obliteration of the library there. ‘To gaze upon the wanton ruin and to think of the treasures within the shattered walls is to condemn to eternal obloquy the Kaiser and all his works ... the pitiless annihilation of books and manuscripts is a crime from which all but Huns and Vandals shrink in horror.’

  Even before the war was over, huge parties of hired workers, including at one time an estimated 92,000 labourers, had been sent to tidy up the mess of the battlefields. Many of these were the Chinese recruits who had originally helped in the building of British military infrastructures in France. They were still at work in 1919, wearing their traditional jackets, closed at the front by frogging clasps, and the flat wide-brimmed hats designed as protection from the heat of the paddy field’ an incongruous sight among the grey sodden meadows of France. An atmosphere of distrust had grown up around them, particularly among women. Official reports told of members of ‘le péril jaune’ breaking rules by smoking with the foreman; there were accusations of stealing and reports of several incidents of violence, even one of a suspected murder.

  Plans to repatriate the Chinese had been delayed, although a substantial contingent of Poles, considered to be less volatile, were brought in to help with the battlefield clearances. Gradually the reels of barbed wire, which had been coiled on the backs of soldiers, were now cleared away; trenches were filled in, shell holes covered over, and shattered shapes like stick men, the now leafless and branchless trees, were removed. While a number of graves and headstones had already been built, and the kissing of a name engraved on a stone brought comfort, many graves still consisted of a few feet of earth hastily covering the dead, and bodies were frequently trampled over and unearthed.

  Back in England, a chocolate shop on Richmond Bridge run by a Belgian lady had been closed for the duration of the war, but one day Leonard Woolf, who described himself with no apology as ‘an addict of chocolate cream bars’, walked past the door with his wife Virginia and noticed to his pleasure that the shop was open once again. He and Virginia each bought three bars, carried them home and ate them ‘silently almost reverently’. For Leonard this was the moment when ‘The Great War was at last over’. Rationing of gas and electricity had now been abolished and The Times announced that ‘a cargo of Canary bananas’ had been unloaded at Liverpool and that a further shipment from Jamaica was expected the following week.

  When the 1919 Easter celebrations began, the congregation in Canterbury Cathedral were delighted once again to see the light streaming through the ancient stained glass. The precious windows, including some fragments of those dedicated to Thomas ô Becket just ten years after his death, had been kept in safe storage since 1914 and had now been returned to their rightful place. As the parishioners sang the hymns of the Resurrection, they looked for the country likewise to be miraculously restored to life.

  7

  Performing

  Early Summer 1919

  Dame Nellie Melba was a little apprehensive. The opera singer whose glorious voice and extended trills had delighted pre-war audiences at Covent Garden was remembering her final visit to England before the war. In May 1914 she had celebrated her fifty-third birthday in style. All her friends had been at the party, among them the beautiful Gladys Ripon, indefatigable promoter of the Ballets Russes, the irrepressible fun-loving socialite Mrs Hwfa Williams, and the ebullient Portuguese Ambassador the Marquis de Soveral. Ten of the sixteen men who had toasted her birthday that day were now dead. Nearly five years later, arriving from the warmth of Australia to the unwelcome cold of the English spring, Dame Nellie found herself in ‘this new haphazard metropolis, so grey and so strange’.

  At lunch with Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, Nellie was amazed to see her widowed friend produce from her bag two little gold-lidded pots with a flourish of obvious pleasure. Inside one pot was a tiny pat of butter and in the other a few teaspoonsful of sugar. The expression on the Dowager Duchess’s face was triumphant. Rationing of food was still in place and no exceptions were made, even for the smartest establishments.

  As the evenings began to lengthen there was a renewed determination that something of the gaiety of the capital should be restored. On 4 May a new season of opera was announced by Covent Garden which since July 1914 had been used as a furniture repository by the Ministry of Works. Dame Nellie had readily accepted the invitation to perform the opening ceremony although on the night itself she was disconcerted to see how standards had slipped since the war. Despite the enthusiastic atmosphere, Melba found little of the familiar ‘old brilliance’. She spotted men sitting in the stalls wearing shabby tweed coats. ‘Who were these people’, she wondered, ‘who could afford the price of stalls tickets’ but at the same time apparently ‘could not also afford to wear the proper clothes’? She was not, she insisted to friends, thinking so much of the standard of material things, but rather of the ‘question of spirit’.

  May turned out to be a deliciously warm month and in many parts of the country no rainfall was recorded for three weeks. Despite the lack of rain, the Meteorological Office reported that ‘the countryside looks prosperous’. Even the funeral of the martyred Nurse Edith Cavell that took place at Westminster Abbey on 15 May was treated as an occasion of national pride. Nurse Cavell had helped two hundred Allied soldiers to freedom in Belgium and was caught and executed in 1915. Now with the written permission of the German minister of war, her body had been exhumed from its Belgian grave in March and returned to England. Large crowds had waited all along the route to see the train that carried her coffin as it passed by on its way to Norwich, Nurse Cavell’s birthplace. As her body was gently placed in a grave at the east end of Norwich Cathedral, the choir sang the hymn ‘Abide With Me’, reiterating the words, ‘I fear no foe with Thee at hand to bless’, that Nurse Cavell had spoken aloud to her executioners immediately before being put to death.

  Life was beginning to move forward. Or back. Society appeared to carry on as if
the war had not even taken place. Dowagers unpacked their dusty jewels from tissue-wrapped velvet cases and concealed their double chins with strands of pearls tightly wound round their throats. Queen Mary appeared at a court ball, her impressive chest laden with full jewelled regalia, looking – according to the diary of a young American socialite, Chips Channon – like ‘the Jungfrau white and sparkling in the sun’. Channon was less taken with the Queen of Romania in her ‘green sea foam crêpe de chine saut de lit spotted with goldfish’ that she had painted on herself.

  Debutantes slightly past the age at which they would usually make their debut, suntanned and worldly-wise after years of working on the land or driving ambulances in France, put on their dancing frocks. The June weather continued to reflect May’s sunny mood. Garden parties were held at Buckingham Palace for war-workers, and the odd bowler hat made its appearance among the silken seal-bobbing sea of toppers. One socially ambitious Minister’s wife was enjoying herself thoroughly until she realised ‘me shoes is tight, me corset is tight, me ‘usband is tight, time to go home’.

  A 19-year-old French girl, Suzanne Lenglen, with a first name that was to become synonymous with sporting prowess, won the Wimbledon tennis singles tournament. Much attention was given to her tennis dress, sleeveless on the top and so short at the hem that it barely reached the ankle. The County Cricket Championships had resumed again after their suspension in 1914. Gaggles of geese that had been given a wartime playground no longer honked their way across the grassy stretches of Lord’s, and Old Trafford’s temporary Red Cross enacampment had been disbanded. Although many excellent cricketers had been killed in the conflict and the greatest star of them all, W. G. Grace, had died of a stroke in 1915, bats were once more taken out and oiled.

  John Alcock, a charming, extrovert 26 year old, shared a passion for flying with his friend Arthur Brown, a shy Mancunian. Both men had been part of the Royal Naval Flying Corps during the war, although Alcock had spent the final year in a Turkish prison camp. On 14 June 1919 the two men had accepted the Daily Mail challenge to be the first to fly the Atlantic in seventy-two consecutive hours. The newspaper, a publication always first to associate itself with mankind’s scientific advances, put up a reward of £10,000.

  Alcock pronounced his Vimy IV twin-engined plane ‘absolutely top-hole’ but the journey was terrifying. When the exhaust pipe burst at the beginning of the flight, noise was their first problem. The roar of the engine accompanied them throughout the 1,890 miles from Newfoundland. Cold was the second obstacle as the batteries in the pilots’ flying suits ran out and the two men shivered and shuddered their way through storms of snow, sleet, rain and hail, losing all radio contact when ice froze the gauges in front of them. A bottle of whisky and another of beer warmed them briefly before the empty bottles were thrown over the side. Sandwiches that had helped stay their hunger were soon finished. Thanks to Brown’s death-flirting crawl from the cockpit to the wing to clear the air filters of snow, they managed to maintain an average speed of 118.5 mph. Fog was another hazard and once, barely able to see where their machine was taking them, they tasted the salt of the waves on their lips. Alcock estimated that they were flying just sixteen feet above the surface of the freezing waters of the Atlantic. Having come through polar extremes of weather, they eventually landed in a bog in Clifden in Ireland, 16 hours and 27 minutes after their departure and well within the Daily Mail deadline.

  The victorious pilots were presented with the winning cheque of £10,000 by the Secretary of State, Winston Churchill, at a celebratory lunch on midsummer’s day at the Savoy Hotel. The menu included oeufs pochés Alcock, suprême de sole Brown and gĊteau Grand Succès.

  A painting by Ambrose McEvoy shows Alcock pink cheeked and proud, dressed in his flying clothes of high-waisted boiler suit, with a tight-fitting flying cap wrapped round his head, covering his ears and meeting beneath his chin. The fur on his huge gauntlets stretches up his arms to his elbows and his thick flying goggles are pushed back from his face. Alcock had made flying irresistibly glamorous. General Seely, President of the Air Council, was among a growing number of private individuals who owned a plane; he was even known on occasion to hand the controls over to the care of his wife.

  Speed in the air, agility on the sports field and glamour in the gardens of royal palaces combined to prove that all the pleasures of an English summer had resumed after four years of interruption.

  The delegates in Paris had been working on the Peace Treaty for five months while the rest of the world had been waiting for the outcome, anxious for the protracted proceedings to be at end. Europe still did not feel a safe place. Continuing violence was not confined to Germany. Communist demonstrations in Berlin and Munich were matched in Hungary and in Austria. In Italy, a 200-strong Fascist party had been founded by Benito Mussolini, the son of a blacksmith and a school teacher. A month earlier, an anarchist had succeeded in wounding the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau.

  But Germany remained the focus of punishment and recrimination. Behind what the 33-year-old British delegate Harold Nicolson called ‘the sham cordiality of it all’ plans for revenge on Germany were being slowly worked out. One evening Nicolson dined at the Paris Ritz with Marcel Proust. The writer had arrived looking dishevelled, ‘white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced’ but avid for detail. Imploring Nicolson not to hurry over his description of what was happening behind the closed doors of Versailles – ‘Précisez, mon cher, n’allez pas trop vite!’ - Proust listened ‘enthralled’ as his companion fleshed out the minutiae of a day in the negotiating chamber, careful to omit nothing, ‘the handshakes; the maps; the rustle of papers; the tea in the next room; the macaroons’.

  The proposed conditions had been agreed upon by the four main delegates, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Lloyd George of the United Kingdom, Georges Clemenceau of France and Vittorio Orlando of Italy. Germany would no longer be allowed a navy or air force. The army was to be confined to 100,000 soldiers. Territories that had provided the country with revenue from coal, iron and steel were to be removed from her ownership. And onerous financial penalties were to be imposed, amounting to a bill for over £6½ million to meet the cost of reparations to France and the provision of pensions to war widows in England. In addition the victorious powers planned to insist on an Allied peacekeeping occupation of the Ruhr, the centre of German industry.

  On 28 June, the day the Treaty was to be signed, the muted clatter of conversation filled the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles ‘like water running into a tin bath’. The ushers motioned for the packed room to fall silent and for a moment nothing happened at all. The Allies were all waiting for the German delegates. They were the last to enter, appearing ‘isolated and pitiable’. As they were guided towards their seats, ‘the silence was terrifying’. Harold Nicolson was watching carefully.

  Their feet upon a strip of parquet between the savonnerie carpets echo hollow and duplicate. They keep their eyes fixed away from those two thousand staring eyes, fixed upon the ceiling. They are deathly pale. They do not appear as representatives of a brutal militarism. The one is thin and pink eye-lidded: the second fiddle in a Brunswick orchestra. The other is moon-faced and suffering: a privat-dozent. It is most painful.

  One by one the delegates signed the Treaty. It was 28 June, the fifth anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the catalyst for the war.

  Suddenly through the open windows Nicolson heard the sound of a gun salute followed by cheering and he remembered some wise words that he had once heard: ‘Success is beastly’ Later he drank some ‘very bad’ champagne at the taxpayers’ expense. The whole procedure was over. The war was won; the peace agreement had been signed. Meanwhile, in Berlin the economic crisis was becoming desperate. Butchers were selling crows, squirrels and woodpeckers from counters that before the war had held juicy joints of beef and succulent legs of lamb.

  Maynard Keynes, the chief British economic adviser at the conferen
ce, resigned immediately in disgust at the terms. He knew the proposals, in sapping the German economy, would lead to disaster. A forced reduction of military power and a rearrangement of German-owned territory would have been enough. In agreement, Nicolson went to bed that evening ‘sick of life’. A letter was brought across the Channel by aeroplane to Buckingham Palace announcing that the peace was signed. The King wrote in his diary: ‘Today is a great one in history and please God this dear old Country will now settle down and work in unity.’

  The Treaty concluded, the Prime Minister suggested that a Peace Parade, in the form of a colourful pageant and victorious march-past, would be a fitting way to mark an end to the recent horrors. Reminders of the war were, he hoped, decreasing as brilliant green leaves unfurled on London’s trees and the grey days of the previous November began to recede. Now was the time for celebration, and in the mid-summer, with London looking its most vital and optimistic, such a performance would be an uplifting event. Not everyone welcomed the idea. Virginia Woolf dismissed the very notion of the parade. ‘A servants’ festival,’ she pronounced it, ‘something got up to placate and pacify the people.’ But the Prime Minister remained convinced of the worth of his suggestion. And in addition to the march, he felt that participants and onlookers would need a central object, something physical on which to focus their attention, which would form the symbolic heart of the march-past and the twenty-mile parade route.