The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  Dr W. R. Houston, a professor of medicine from the University of Georgia who had looked after many shell-shocked patients at the front, noted that some had emerged from battle with their vocal cords destroyed and their tongues paralysed, making them incapable of talking. Not only was speech denied them, but they had also become incapable of making ‘the slightest sound, to whistle or to blow, or even to imitate the movements of the lip in speech’. Silence had become an absolute way of life. Sight was often affected and memory weakened, and yet the intensity of hallucination brought the sufferer into a world filled with fire and battle that became a constant torture. It was the agitation of the mind, according to Dr Houston, that demonstrated the most acute form of this ‘wreckage of men’s souls’ and he was profoundly shaken by the time he spent with what had once been ‘the flower and vigour of youth,’ now become ‘doddering palsied wrecks, quivering at a sound, dreading the visions of the night’.

  Robert Graves had recovered quickly enough from the physical symptoms of the flu but in the refuge of his bedroom, shells continued to explode with such ferocity on his bedclothes that the sound of his own screams woke him. Strangers suddenly assumed the faces of those friends he had last seen rotting in the trenches. Graves made some effort to check his ‘unrestrainedly foul language’ picked up in the trenches, but the telephone became an instrument of terror to him, and he would relieve himself by the side of the road with no attempt at discretion. The effort of seeing more than two people in one day prevented him from sleeping. Peaceful fields became tactical challenges for wartime defence strategies. Wives were baffled by husbands who complained they had been covered with lice since 1917.

  The medical establishment was at a loss as to how to deal with this mental plague. Sir Anthony Bowlby, Surgeon in Ordinary to the King, wrote in the Lancet that he had always been convinced that the remedy for shock was warmth and that the physical wounds should be given the greatest attention. ‘You can increase blood volume by fluids,’ he wrote, adding that when soldiers are unable to keep the fluids down ‘a rectal injection is most useful’.

  C. S. Myers was one of the leading psychiatrists who tried to restore peace to troubled minds. Myers thought that if appropriate ideas were suggested to anaesthetised patients, memory might return. But when the words, ‘German shells’, were shouted into a soldier’s ear it took the strength of five men to restrain him. Another neurologist, the Canadian Louis Yealland who worked at the National Hospital in Queen’s Square in London, used a mixture of electrical therapy and chastisement. ‘Remember you must behave as the hero I expect you to be,’ he would tell his patients. ‘A man who has gone through so many battles should have better control of himself.’ Other ‘cures’ included the introduction of ‘galvanic currents’ as electricity was pumped into the patient, often ‘until the deaf hear, the dumb speak or those who believe themselves incapable of moving certain groups of muscles are moving them freely’.

  A product called ‘Tabloid’ had been promoted in the pages of the British Medical Journal during the war as an antidote for ‘a vital war-time problem’. This codeine-based effervescent tablet was recommended as helping with ‘nervous disorder attributable to shock and acute tension’. Daily warm baths, a month in the country and the therapeutic exercise of basket weaving were also proposed as help for the condition. But a suspicion that cowardice lurked behind some of this mental distress prompted certain doctors to treat the suffering men with impatience. Those reluctant to return to the trenches after being invalided home were suspected of deliberately affecting the shuddering and shaking common to shell-shock cases, and doubters would mutter cynically under their breath, in the colloquialism for a shirker, ‘He’s swinging the lead.’ Doctors saw dreadful self-inflicted wounds, cut inches deep into the hands, indicating the desperate lengths to which men would go not to be sent back to battle. There was little sympathy for those who stated simply that the prospect of returning to the front was intolerable. Cowardice and subsequent desertion was an offence punishable by death.

  Shell shock was suspected of being open to calculated abuse. On 3 January 1919 an officer, Lieutenant Charles Robert Melsomm, was court-martialled for drunkenness at his mess in Peckham. Lieutenant Melsomm however denied the charges, alleging that he had been sent home from France suffering from neurasthenia and that his behaviour in the mess was caused by no more than a few alcoholic ‘appetisers’ that had an impact on a nervous state that was outside his control. The Times had reported the imaginative testimony given by James Kendall during his prosecution by Kent Police. The suspect milk that Kendall had been found to be selling had, he claimed, come straight from innocent cows, but as the poor animals had been milked shortly after an air raid, the milk had emerged tainted as a result of bovine shell shock.

  Invaluable psychoanalytical work had been done under the supervision of the neurologist, Dr William Rivers, at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. In 1917 Siegfried Sassoon had come under Rivers’s care when suffering a mental breakdown after refusing to return to his regiment. At the hospital that Sassoon called ‘Dottyville’ he discovered a physician who recognised that fear was not a failure of courage, but an emotion that outweighed patriotism and hatred of the enemy. Rivers believed in the effectiveness of talking about the trauma in the open, and in him Sassoon found a clever, kindly man with ‘peace in the pools of his spectacled eyes and a wisely omnipotent grin’. Wilfred Owen was at Craiglockhart at the same time under the care of another doctor, Arthur J. Brock, who encouraged Owen to translate his experiences into his poetry.

  But after the war ended, and after Wilfred Owen’s death in action, both Rivers and Brock left Craiglockhart. No official governmental provision was made for looking after the thousands of shell-shocked soldiers. A group of individuals, concerned that sufferers would be sent to asylums run by the Ministry of Health, applied to register the Ex-Services Mental Welfare Society for charitable status. The aim was to look after ‘cases of acute nervous and mental breakdown as would otherwise be sent to asylums including those cases known as GPI or General Paralysis of the Insane’. The public response to appeals for donations was heartening, but the association was not large enough to make a difference to the many thousands of sufferers who were venturing unprotected into the post-war world.

  Those seeking work were compelled to humiliating shifts. Match-sellers on street corners tried to hold on to their dignity, dressed in their best suits, hats firmly in place on their heads. A friend of the reporter Philip Gibbs, an officer from a good family, well educated and accustomed to the highest standards, accepted an offer to sell magazine subscriptions by cold calling on private houses. He told Gibbs that the work took more courage than facing shellfire and that he felt relief each time the maid returned his card telling him the lady of the house was not at home.

  Some men had given up trying altogether, unable to find the energy to address the next day. Philip Gibbs recognised the attitude. ‘“That can wait”, they said, ‘I’ve done my bit. The country can keep me for a while. I helped to save it. Let’s go to the movies.’” Sometimes involuntary anger forced its way through the apathy. ‘Here and there an elderly officer blew out his brains. Another sucked a rubber tube fastened to the gas jet.’ Newspapers and commentators speculated on the lack of stability in returning troops after such long exposure to battle and the brutalization of war. Would there be a resulting outbreak of uncontrollable violence?

  E. P. Osborne, an historian writing about fallen soldiers, concluded that: ‘A great war is invariably followed by efforts to dissolve the existing social order and by an increase in the number of offences against the law, which is the backbone so to speak of the national organism.’ But the fears were not well founded. Post-war figures soon began to show that crimes involving murder or attempted murder had barely increased since before the war, whilst the numbers for aggravated assault had decreased by half. Only the figures for burglary and assault on women remained the same, demonstrating that covetousne
ss and lust, two biblical prohibitions, were unaffected by global turmoil.

  Men were not the only lustful offenders. A laundress, Ellen Henson, had become pregnant three times during her husband’s absence at the front. Mr Henson stopped giving his adulterous wife any money and removed the children from her custody. In retaliation Mrs Henson locked herself and the three children in a room with the gas jet open. They all somehow survived. But fear and suspicion of potential violence continued to seep into silent crevices of insecurity, abetted by alarmist newspaper speculations. The News of the World described the court appearance of one defendant, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Rutherford, accused of shooting dead a man who had apparently developed a special relationship with Rutherford’s wife. According to the newspaper, the defendant ‘stood straight and tall, eyes to the front’, whilst it noticed with a direful lick of the lips that Rutherford’s prosecutor had throughout the trial held ‘his lithe, perfect body motionless’ as if poised for revenge.

  Many criminal cases turned out to be comparatively innocent. After five years in the RAF, Second Lieutenant John Trinder was charged with exposing himself to a young married woman in a railway carriage of a Great Eastern train, although drink, not a warlike lack of control, was said by the defendant to be the cause. Bigamy was on the increase, but the Recorder at the Central Criminal Court put the new figures down to ‘considerable carelessness’ on the part of girls entering into marriages without making enquiries into the past history of the men. There was an occasional disturbing story of unaccountable brutality. On 9 January The Times reported that John Meaton, aged six, from Maidstone in Kent had been found ‘in a dying condition’ under a hedge on the outskirts of the town, his throat slit apparently by a razor blade. ‘A young man named Philpot, said to be mentally deficient’, was detained on suspicion.

  While little evidence emerged from most crimes to suggest an uncontrollable appetite for violence unleashed by the war, there was a growing restlessness among those who had survived the fight relatively unscathed. They were eager to inhabit that ‘Land fit for Heroes’ promised by Lloyd George. But hundreds of thousands of men were still officially part of a now redundant British Army. All they could think of was the return home and of a new, rewarding and productive life ahead. But the demobilisation process was becoming increasingly chaotic and the men who had fought for their country were beginning to despair.

  5

  Anger

  New Year 1919

  On the last day of 1918 most of the population of the island of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides gathered at the little port of Stornoway waiting to greet five hundred returning soldiers and sailors. There was a particular sense of jubilation in being demobbed in time for the New Year. Over six thousand men from Lewis had volunteered to serve in the war, a fifth of the island’s total population. More than a thousand had been killed, so this was a homecoming that was filled with a particular longing.

  The small mail-boat, SS Sheila, was not big enough to accommodate all five hundred men, so while the soldiers and some civilians crowded on to her decks, HM Iolaire came across the Minch from Stornoway to the Kyle of Lochalsh to help bring the two hundred and sixty naval ratings across the final stretch of sea. The Iolaire set off from Kyle first. It was already late in the evening but the cold mid-winter darkness did nothing to suppress the exuberance of the men’s spirits.

  Forty miles away the mood was matched by the families waiting on the Stornoway quayside. A few miles from home, the strong wind intensified, whipping huge waves across the Iolaire’s deck, drenching the sailors. But nothing mattered that evening except the promise of reunion. As the waves grew larger and fiercer the Iolaire struggled to stay on course, plunging and rising between the huge walls of water. Then within wading distance of the shore, the boat overshot the entrance to the harbour. This dreadful ‘error of judgement’ baffled the islanders, who knew that the captain of the Iolaire was familiar with that stretch of water and with the dangers of the rocks. Later on, rumours of drunkenness among the crew were denied but never fully quashed.

  The ship no longer responded to the Captain’s direction and smashed into the Beasts of Holm, a mass of deadly rocks that jutted from the surrounding cliffs into the harbour’s mouth. Fifty men leapt into the thundering icy sea and were drowned instantly, only twenty feet from land. Not long afterwards the whole ship went under, one man clinging to the mast that remained protruding just above the water.

  Because of the night-time darkness the waiting families were unaware of the dreadful tragedy unfolding in front of them. Over two hundred men were lost that night but only when daylight came did the desperate truth become clear. The dangers of war had been overcome only for these young men to die on the very shore of their childhood home. The Scotsman wrote of’a grief that cannot be comforted’.

  As the first full year of peace began, the Scottish tragedy seemed to compound a growing despair generated by broken promises and false hopes. First the long-delayed demobilisation process was being handled with appalling bureaucratic inefficiency. Secondly, the end-of-year general election had left many sceptical of Lloyd George’s promise to provide a ‘land fit for heroes’. There was also a strong desire for revenge on an enemy who had killed and maimed so many men. And there was growing sympathy and support for the escalating power of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution. Unemployment, anger and disappointment all combined to destabilise a despairing country.

  An incident had taken place just after the Armistice that warned of the incipient anger among the troops, only barely contained beneath the surface. Fifteen thousand recently demobilised but disabled soldiers had assembled in Hyde Park. Special dispensation had been given for even lightly wounded soldiers to be brought home in advance of the others. A never-ending line of special trains made their way through Kent from Dover, curling through the countryside towards the yawning mouth of Charing Cross Station, carrying the wounded home. Many were still covered in trench mud, and many were destined for hospitals where desperately cheerful nurses would tell visitors to ‘Keep it bright. Keep it light.’

  The men who had assembled in the park that winter day were now out of uniform but most wore the silver badge indicating an honourable discharge for disabilities. Some displayed a series of stripes reflecting the number of wounds received. The War Office, aware of the men’s obvious restlessness at delays over pension payments and lack of job opportunities, had alerted George V of their mood but hoped that the sight of their King might somehow calm them.

  The King arrived in the park on horseback wearing army uniform, accompanied by his two elder sons, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York. His mother Queen Alexandra and his wife Queen Mary followed in an open carriage. Barely two weeks had elapsed since the brief and sporadic elation surrounding the ceasefire. The troops stood to attention, army bands played and the Prince of Wales detected that while at first ‘everything appeared in order’ a sinister sort of mood soon became apparent, ‘a sullen unresponsiveness’.

  The King held his nerve in the tense atmosphere, riding his horse down the front rank, until suddenly from the back came a commotion and loud cries of’Where is this land fit for heroes?’With no warning the orderly line of men dissolved as the disabled soldiers rushed at the King, pushing at each other and crowding round the King’s horse and threatening to topple him to the ground. They approached, however, not in anger but in a simple spirit of appeal to the King to listen to their distress.

  Queen Alexandra found herself badly jostled in her landau as her mounted police escort forced his horse firmly up against the door of her carriage in an attempt to protect her. But the excited and confused horse suddenly thrust its huge head right into the Queen Mother’s regal lap. Sensing the nervousness of the frightened creature, Alexandra, always a lover of animals, began to stroke the horse’s nose, holding it gently between her white-gloved hands until the animal quietened. At the same time Alexandra continued to smile at the crowd as if she were delighted to see them and not in
the least disturbed by the chaotic scenes around her.

  ‘Those men were in a funny temper’, the King shrugged afterwards as the royal procession trotted back down Constitution Hill and through the gates of Buckingham Palace into the inner courtyard. But unlike the King, who shook his head ‘as if to rid himself of an unpleasant memory’ before striding inside for lunch, the Prince of Wales was prepared to acknowledge that something more disturbing had just taken place. ‘It dawned on me that the country was discontented and disillusioned,’ he wrote.

  The official process of demobilisation had begun only on 9 December, four weeks after Armistice Day, and huge numbers of soldiers and their families were becoming incensed with the delays. Demobilisation camps had been intended as holding points for a maximum of twenty-four hours, after which soldiers were expected to be released, and provided with railway coupons, a ration book, a clothes allowance and a weekly pension of 38 shillings calculated to last twenty weeks. But the administrative process was slow and unfair. Men who had jobs to return to were usually dismissed quickly, while the jobless found themselves held in camps for weeks rather than days.

  Miners had been exempt from conscription but more than 40 per cent of them had signed up. Given the volatile mood of the remaining workforce it was essential to return as many as possible as soon as possible to the pits. But no one had found the time to start addressing the relevant administrative paperwork until a full month after the Armistice. The Daily Herald, a newspaper sympathetic to the Labour party, had reported on the growing frustration. On 7 December it demanded to know