A Broken World

by Sebastian Faulks

  In the brief Christmas days, when the slackening of propaganda gave me respite, I went with Smyth to see the havoc wrought by the Scarborough bombardment. Travelling by night we arrived in a cheerless dawn. The sky and sea were a leaden grey. The big amusement ‘palaces’ on the front were scarred and battered by shell-fire, iron columns twisted and broken, brickwork crumbling, windows gone. Yawning breaches disclosed the pictures and furnishings, riddled and rent by the firing, dimmed and discoloured by blustering winds and spray. The little steep streets, leading up from the foreshore, were barred by wire entanglements – the first I had ever seen – great stakes driven into the ground, with a mass of stout barbed wire threaded around and around them, and tangled about between. At many points were high barricades of sand-filled sacks, with a row of loopholes for the rifles.

  We knocked at one of the sea-front boarding houses. The woman who opened to us was weary and dishevelled as though she had spent the night out in the storm. She gazed at us, startled and hostile, when we asked for a lodging. When we urged that we had come from London and understood she was accustomed to let, she hesitated suspiciously, then reluctantly explained that she had promised to hold herself in readiness to receive any shipwrecked seamen who might be saved from drowning. ‘I’ve been up with them all night – some of ’em’s gone, some of ’em’s still here. We have to put ’em in hot blankets as soon as they’re carried in.’

  ‘But there won’t be another wreck to-night!’ we essayed, rather feebly, to rally her.

  ‘There were three lots brought in here yesterday, and two the day before,’ she answered mournfully, and pointed to the many craft out in the bay, telling us they were all minesweepers engaged in the perilous work of clearing away explosive mines laid by the German warships and daily causing the loss of many vessels.

  This was an aspect of the German visit not recorded in the Press. In our ignorance of war, we heard her with shocked surprise.

  She agreed at last that we should stay with her, on condition that we would leave at once if another party of shipwrecked mariners were brought in. Barely an hour had passed when her daughter flung open our door:

  ‘Another boat’s blown up! You’ll have to go!’

  Out we went to the blast. Groups of shawl-wrapped women were gazing seaward. ‘They’ve landed some of them at that slip,’ a woman told us, and pointed to a small dingy brown steamer with a cluster of people looking down at her from the quay. ‘A motor-car’s gone off with one of them – he was covered with a white sheet!’ a shrill voice cried; and even as the words were uttered another car dashed away. A bent old crone ran by us wailing: ‘He was a young man with black hair; with thick black hair; his head was all smashed in!’

  Groups of people moved about us, awestruck, with a hand shading the eyes, gazing out to sea, or across to the little steamer at the end of the slip.

  Someone advised us to enquire for lodgings at a near-by cottage, the front door of which opened directly on to the foreshore. A fisherman in his blue jersey was seated by the fire; his wife was too much troubled by the peril of the men out there in the bay, to consider whether or not she would give us a bed. She talked to us a long time before she could bring her mind to it. She spoke of the bombardment; it was terrible, the noise so loud, so fearfully loud, she thought she must go mad. Little children were killed; many people were injured. ‘A lady who not five days before was singing in this Bethel’ was helping a poor old woman down into her cellar, when she was struck dead by a piece of shell. No one knew when it might happen again; people could not settle down to ordinary life; all sense of security was destroyed. Her husband and the other fishermen were prohibited from following their calling because of the mines. Their means of support was stopped; yet he was best at home; yes, even if they should have to starve! She had a son in the Navy and a son-in-law on a mine-sweeper; that was enough!

  […]

  On Christmas morning, climbing by winding ways above the town we saw the trenches recently dug by British soldiers along the cliffs; and higher still, great heaps of stone which fell from the old castle when its walls were shelled by the German ships.

  Lodging among the cottages of the fisherfolk in these terraced streets of the old town seven years before, I had wandered often beneath those ancient walls, regarding them curiously as a relic of an age of barbarism long dead, confident in my faith in the sure advance of progress. To-day in face of the evidence of present barbarism, my thoughts were sad.

  Vainly seeking my old landlady, for she had left the town, I was accosted by some neighbours of hers who remembered me. It was the anniversary of their wedding, and hospitably they would have us enter to celebrate it with tea and plum cake, in their warm kitchen. It was a Yorkshire custom, they said, to exchange visits of Christmas morning. The wife was a very pretty woman, turned forty, with the bluest of blue eyes, a little shy and diffident and pleased to let the rest of us talk. The husband was black-eyed and swarthy as a Spaniard, with great gold rings in his ears. He told us, as others in the town had done, that the German battleships came so close to the shore that the people (believing them British) feared they would run aground. He was at the window when the firing began, and he called to his wife: ‘It’s no good, lass, the Germans have come!’

  Then he told her to go next door and help their neighbour to pacify her children. She was running to the back door, but he locked it and said: ‘I’m an Englishman and a Yorkshireman, and they’ll not make us go the back way!’ He walked to the end of the terrace and stood facing the battleships. He was not hit, but he showed us a big bit of shell which had fallen beside him. Believing, like everyone else, that the Germans intended landing, he looked around for our soldiers. They were nowhere to be seen. After the bombardment ceased they got into their trenches and sang a hymn. ‘They were no better than wooden soldiers!’ he cried, indignant. His wife reproved him, with a timid glance at us: ‘What use would it have been for our British soldiers to come out to be killed?’

  […]

  Returning to our lodging we learnt that yet another boat had been blown up. It was bitterly cold; the wind howled fiercely. We huddled by the fire, saddened and chilled. A girl ran past the window sobbing and wailing. A few minutes later she passed again. As I heard her coming a third time I went out to her, and saw that she was about sixteen years of age, hatless and poorly dressed. In abandonment of grief, she flung herself now against the wall, now leaned her head for a moment upon a window-sill, crying: ‘Dad! Dad! Oh, Dad!’ As I came up with her two women met her. They knew her and understood what she muttered between her sobs better than I. They told me that her father was on one of the mine-sweepers out in the bay. She shrank into trembling reserve and, faltering nervously that she must go to her mother, fled from us in the dusk.

  Next morning we called on our first landlady to learn the news of the night. As we came in sixteen lately shipwrecked mariners, who had recovered in her house, were leaving the door. She told us six others had been drowned, and a third vessel since our arrival blown up. Another, another, and yet another vessel was sacrificed during the morning. Again we had notice to quit our lodging to make way for the sea-drenched men. Scarborough was too sad for me. ‘Let us get away to-night,’ I said to Smyth.

  As we stood on the breakwater before leaving we saw the lifeboat set forth again to the rescue, over the cold grey waves in the gathering dusk.

  W. F. TAPP was a child at the time of the First World War. This letter was an answer to a call for contributions by Professor Stanley Weintraub in 1979. Eyewitness accounts of the Armistice would be used to compile his book, A Stillness Heard Round the World: The End of the Great War, November 1918 (1985). Here W. F. Tapp details the moment when the Armistice was announced in Devonport, Plymouth.

  Newton Abbot

  12th October 1979

  Dear Prof. Weintraub,

  […]

  You ask for memories of Armistice Night at the end of World War I. I am 67 years old, having been born in August
1912, so I was only six years old at the time, but I am writing to you because there is one memory of that night which is still quite vivid in my mind.

  I was born, and lived throughout that war, in the town of Devonport which was at that time a separate town but which was subsequently amalgamated with the City of Plymouth.

  Devonport has for a couple of centuries been a very important depot for the Royal Navy, and throughout World War I an immense number of warships were built, repaired, fuelled, victualled and based in Devonport Dockyard.

  At about 7 p.m. on Armistice Night I went to bed as usual, and soon fell asleep. A while later I was awakened by the most enormous racket I had ever heard. The news of the Armistice had been received by the navy in Devonport (the techniques of communication were pretty primitive then compared with those of today). And an instruction had obviously been signalled to every ship, of whatever size, to sound its siren in a staggering signal of victory and peace. Each warship had a very long siren which made a whooping sound, with a sudden rising note to a high-pitched peak, and each ship’s siren had different characteristics from the others. The resulting din was almost enough to awaken the millions of dead from that war.

  Being awakened by such noise, I was at first almost scared out of my wits, but older members of the family soon came rushing to my bedroom to tell me what it was all about. As a great treat, and to mark the occasion, I was allowed to go downstairs and drink a small glass of milk while the older ones had a drink of what I assume was something a bit stronger.

  I expect you will get more accurate details about this victory celebration from older people, but I can vouch for its tremendous effect even on a young child.

  Yours sincerely,

  W. F. Tapp

  HERMIA MILLS responded quite differently to Stanley Weintra‘ub’s request for memories. Her letter reports the possible suicide of a pilot on the day of the Armistice. She was sixteen years old at the time.

  London

  10.X.79

  Dear Professor,

  In reply to your letter in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ I enclose my recollections of Armistice Day 1918. The episode is a purely domestic one of which there must be many similar tragedies.

  I was 16 years old at the time and with a school friend (we were both of St Paul’s Girls School Hammersmith) was spending the half-term holiday with my friend’s mother, Mrs Wildon Carr at her cottage at Houghton in Sussex. (Incidentally Mrs Carr’s husband, Professor Wildon Carr, later became the Professor of Philosophy of the South California University at Los Angeles.)

  Well I cannot recall which day of the week the Armistice was announced but we were all set to walk to Arundel to catch our London train. Just as we were leaving the cottage a telegraph boy arrived with a telegram stating the husband of an elder daughter of Mrs Carr had been killed falling from his aeroplane while waving the news of the Armistice to friends on the airfield below. It was later stated, and believed by his widow, that he was intending to commit suicide. He came of a well-known business family in the West Country and would have had no need to fear un-employment or post-war problems of that kind.

  We walked into Arundel where all was jubilant. Flags were flying from every building, church bells were pealing, people dancing in the streets and troop trains passing through the station with soldiers either exultant or drunk.

  Eventually we boarded our train and the poor mother wept quietly throughout the journey; while my friend and I, with adolescent gaucherie, knew not what to say or do.

  Yours very truly

  Hermia Mills

  ALEX J. BOOTH also wrote to Professor Stanley Weintraub in 1979 in response to his call for memories of the Armistice (see also Tapp and Mills). This letter is from a file in the Weintraub collection entitled: ‘Armistice in Remote Places and at Sea’.

  Glasgow.

  Dear Professor Weintraub,

  Your letter a few days ago to the London Daily Telegraph prompts me to send you my recollections of 11/11/1918, which are as clear as if they happened yesterday.

  With many others I had been brought down the Tigris River from Baghdad to Basrah, in Mesopotamia (now Iraq of course). The flat-bottomed hospital boat advanced about 500 miles on the journey, which, as the crow flies is about 100 miles.

  Active hostilities had ceased and most of us were suffering from malaria and/or dysentry. The attendant discomforts of the latter were epitomised by one man who remarked ‘There are 23 patients in this ward and 25 toilets, not nearly enough!’

  On the fateful day we were in bed having had tea. The time there was about 6p.m. A nursing sister appeared at the end of the ward and stood silent. Then from the adjacent docks we could hear the sound of ships’ sirens, and suddenly it was as if an electric current circulated through every man with the realisation that this was the end of the war.

  Patients, bed-ridden, seriously ill, some with temperatures up to 105°, lurched out of bed, donned their overcoats, scrambled to the door, and went out into a heavy downpour and sea of warm mud, about a foot deep. In the first two steps slippers were sucked off and bare-foot we congregated at a central point. A military band of sorts miraculously appeared and played all the popular well-loved tunes – ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’, ‘Good-bye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square’, ‘Keep the home fires burning’, ‘Dear Old Blighty’, and then finally ‘God Save the King’. There we stood at attention as far as the mud would allow with hearts very full, and visions of Homeland ahead; then trudged back to the ward and bed, apparently none the worse, ready to endure further injections and copious doses of quinine with its resulting deafness. Surely, if ever, a triumph of ‘mind over matter’.

  I was 22 years of age then, a gunner/driver in the artillery; now nearing 83, and grateful to the good Lord, for sparing me and giving me good health and unimpaired faculties to the present time.

  I trust these reminiscences may be of interest to you in connection with your laudable project.

  Yours sincerely

  Alex J. Booth

  MURIEL DAYRELL-BROWNING (1879–1935) worked during the war as a translator for the War Office. Her daughter Vivien married Graham Greene in 1927. The letter below, written to her mother, describes the destruction of a German airship SL11, brought down at Cuffley, Hertfordshire, on the night of 2–3 September 1916. It was the first enemy Zeppelin to fall on British soil.

  Strathmore Hotel

  15 Tavistock Square, W.C.

  Sept 4. 16

  Dearest Mums,

  I will now tell you about The Raid last night – the Sight of my Life!

  It was the second night of London’s lighting or rather no-lighting orders. At 2.30 I was wakened by a terrific explosion & was at the window in one bound when another deafening one shook the house. Nearly above us sailed a cigar of bright silver in the full glare of about 20 magnificent search lights. A few lights roamed round trying to pick up her companion. Our guns made a deafening row & shells burst all around her. For some extraordinary reason she was dropping no bombs. The night was absolutely still with a few splendid stars. It was a magnificent sight & the whole of London was looking on holding its breath. She was only a little way to the East of me & I had a topping view as there’s a stone balcony outside my window. I yelled for field glasses to Captain Hermani but he was escorting the whole houseful to the cellars (cook was howling – she’s Irish) so I sat on the window ledge in my dressing gown. The Zepp headed slowly north amid a rain of shells & crashing artillery fire from all quarters. She was pretty high up but was enormous, 600 ft long I shd say. Capt. H came up & joined me & we watched her for another 5 minutes when suddenly her nose dropped & I yelled ‘Getroffen’ [‘hit’ in German]. But she righted again & went into a cloud (wh – possibly she made herself!) then the searchlights scientifically examined that cloud to help the air men but she didn’t appear & we thought the fun was over as the guns stopped. Then—from the direction of Barnet & very high a brilliant red light appeared (we thought it was an English fire bal
loon for a minute!) Then we saw it was the Zep diving head first. That was a sight. She dived slowly at first as only the foremost ballonet was on fire. Then the second burst & the flames tore up into the sky & then the third & cheers thundered all round us from every direction. The plane lit up all London & was rose red. Those deaths must be the most dramatic in the world[’]s history. They fell – a cone of blazing wreckage thousands of feet – watched by 8 millions of their enemies.

  It was magnificent, the most thrilling scene imaginable.

  This afternoon I went out to Barnet (& so did 3/4 of London!) The wreck covers only 30 ft of ground & the dead are under a tarpaulin. The engineer was gripping the steering wheel & one man was headless. I hope they will be buried under full military honours. They were brave men. R.I.P! They say the air man who bombed them was only 18. His name won’t be given as they will try for revenge as in the case of Warneford. The engine is at the W/O [War Office]. The Zepp fell close to Cuffley Church & telescoped when she hit the ground.

  JOHN FREDERICK MACDONALD sought to strengthen understandings between French and English cultures in his writing. He died in 1915, and the volume from which the excerpt below has been taken, Two Towns – One City; Paris – London (1917), was published posthumously.

  Lest this article should fall into the hands of the German Emperor – worse still, into the possession of Count Zeppelin – it is ‘undesirable’ to disclose the precise route taken by my friend into London’s deepest darkness. Discreetly and vaguely, let me state that certain parts of Fulham, Hammersmith and Chelsea are plunged into almost total obscurity, whilst, here and there, stretch unimportant little streets enveloped – save for dim lights in the windows – in complete, silent blackness. Why should unimportant little side streets take ‘precautions’ against Zeppelins?