The Great Silence

by Juliet Nicolson

  I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

  Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, Sweet Home’

  And there’d be no more jokes in music-halls

  To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

  How were soldiers to find a way to describe to their isolated, sometimes disbelieving families what happened out there? Although the sound of gunfire was occasionally audible on this side of the Channel, there was an inevitable remoteness about the battlefield. Comfort for those in love but separated might be found in pulling a ragged silk stocking belonging to a sweetheart over the head before hoping for sleep. The soldier’s way of life in war remained unrecognisable to anyone who had not experienced it. One soldier, Alfred Finnigan, called it ‘hell with the lid off’. How were these men to convincingly describe the rats as large as otters who gorged themselves on the human flesh that lay rotting all around them, or the stomach-churning death-reek whose smell could not be shifted even by the scent of the strongest Turkish cigarette? The rats had developed a reaction to the meat of dead men. Eating it would make their faces swell and whiten visibly at the top of their greasy, grey bodies. Luminous in the darkness of the bottom of a muddy trench, these ghostly creatures would move swiftly towards sleeping men, waking them with a start as they dragged their tails across the men’s faces in the constant search for another meal. Lice were transparent when hungry, but turned black after sucking on blood. The poet Robert Graves met a group of men trying to remove the lice from one another. They were discussing whether to kill the young or the old insects. ‘Morgan here says that if you kill the old ones, the young ones will die of grief,’ Graves was told as the men continued their debate. ‘But Parry here says that the young ones are easier to kill and you can catch the old ones when they come to the funeral.’

  Crawling lice crept in a steady file over the soldiers’ filthy clothing. They could be temporarily halted by turning a vest inside out or by lighting a match along the seams of trousers, only for the insects to re-emerge moments later. Body heat itself encouraged the hatching of the eggs. Bluebottles and cockroaches fed off the live bodies.

  The mud, the rats, the wet, the dirt and the lack of medicine meant that almost every soldier in the trenches was affected at times by trench foot. The infection, an extreme form of athlete’s foot, produced a swelling the pain of which was so acute that men dreaded the slightest physical proximity, lest the foot be casually brushed against, causing them to scream out in agony.

  The daily food rations included twenty ounces of bread, three ounces of cheese, eight ounces of vegetables, four ounces of jam, four ounces of butter - flavoured by half an ounce of salt, one thirty-sixth of an ounce of pepper and one twentieth of mustard. But the irregular supply made meals achingly inadequate. The quality was disgusting, the quantity pathetic. The bully beef and bullet-hard dog biscuits provided little comfort or nourishment. Twenty ounces of tobacco a day was allocated per man and the rare treat of a bar of chocolate, to be shared between three. Half a gill of rum, amounting to one double measure, or when supplies were exhausted, a pint of porter (the soldier’s version of lager) had promised a tantalising moment of numbness before the recipient was expected to go and fight for his life. One soldier, Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall, who did not like the taste, saved his ration, finding that the alcohol helped as a sort of anaesthetic for the pain he suffered from trench foot.

  In between the conflict, boredom was intense. Albert remembered from his childhood the ‘glamour of the redcoats’ as he watched them in admiration returning to his village after the Boer War. There was little glamour surrounding him in his trench. He missed four village Boxing Day celebrations, a day when the villagers would tie a lead and collar on all the pets, making a fine procession of pigs, goats, ferrets, cats, dogs, tame mice, and the splendid cockerel. The menagerie would race towards a greased pole in the middle of the green. The first to reach the dead duck attached to the top was the winner. Sergeant Jack Dinham found himself thinking of Otford, his village in Kent where at the Boxing Day meet the hounds would be treated to porridge bubbling in huge steaming metal pans, while in summer the Vicar, the Reverend William Lutyens, cricket-mad brother of the famous architect, would be seen in church, his white cricket flannels just visible beneath his cassock. Jack had wondered if his job at Knole, the big house nearby where he worked as Lord Sackville’s coachman, would still be open to him after the war.

  While away at war, Siegfried Sassoon missed any sense of intellectual stimulus, or even the reassurance of clarity of thought. ‘Mental activity was clogged and hindered by gross physical actualities.’ Loneliness was constant. Men missed women. Most of all they missed their mothers and called aloud for them with increasing frequency. They sang a song together:

  H stands for happiness that you should find there

  O stands for old folks in the old armchair

  M stands for mother; you’ll never find another, no matter where you roam

  E stands for everyone as everyone knows

  H.O.M.E. spells home.

  The men missed their wives and their fiancées, too. The Government and the army chiefs were well aware of the physical longings and the dangers of frustrated abstinence in an army made up largely of thousands of lusty young men, confused and ashamed of their feelings. Thousands of young British men had grown up in families where bodily functions and the natural instincts and affections of marriage went largely unmentioned. Even the coy enquiry concerning the proper functioning of the digestive system, ‘Are you consti?’, from a mother to her child was too intimate to express in full.

  Not many men however remained ignorant of the ever-widening spread of venereal disease. Just behind the battle lines only a mile or two from the front, girls waited to ‘comfort’ men, irrespective of whether they were German, British or French, waiting for them in abandoned chateaux, village houses, hay barns, caravans, farm buildings and the upper floors of inns. Different coloured lanterns indicated the rank of clientele allowed entry. Blue denoted a place reserved for officers, the light sometimes swinging from a pole that stood next to a sign declaring ‘No Admittance for Dogs and Soldiers’. Common soldiers were directed towards the red light establishments. Sometimes the queues outside these places could number a hundred men or more, with three worn-out French women waiting inside.

  The price per slot varied from two and a half to ten francs or two to eight shillings, although a bartering system involving bread and sausages was also prevalent. One innocent young officer, hearing his turn called, made his way to room number six where in the bitter-sweet, dirt-smelling near darkness he could see the outline of a female figure who, turning towards him, hiked up her black nightdress to her waist and fell backwards on the edge of the bed. He realised that the highly anticipated delights of seduction were already over. She was ready.

  These women estimated that operating a strict schedule of ten minutes per man, they could service an entire battalion every seven days, a production rate that most were usually able to sustain for only three weeks before retiring exhausted, and invariably unwell, but proud of their staying power. This experience had been, for many of the prospectively syphilitic young men, their introduction to the ‘joy’ of physical love. Even the virginal Prince of Wales went in 1916 with some fellow officers to watch naked girls performing erotic poses in a brothel in Calais, concluding from his own ‘first insight into such things’ that it was a ‘perfectly filthy and revolting sight’.

  Only the Austrian army paid much attention to either contraception or hygiene, the prostitute requiring her ‘guest’ to use a ‘preventative instrument’; if he refused, the girl was to ‘lubricate his organ with borated Vaseline’, a paste made of boric acid, and after the experience was concluded, he was required to visit the ‘disinfectant room’. No such rules had applied to British troops and the threat of venereal disease sometimes led soldiers to seek sexual relief with each other. The Field Almanac issued to Lieutenant Skelton cautioned men not to
‘ease themselves promiscuously’, although the detailed instructions on the necessity for cleanliness of the body at all times were impossible to implement in the filthy conditions of the camps. George V, hearing of the extent of homosexual activity in the army some two decades after the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, had been heard to mutter: ‘I thought men like that shot themselves. ‘There was also a belief that homosexuality might be infectious and Scotland Yard kept a register of known homosexuals. Recovery from prosecution was at best rare and in reality unknown. Two hundred and seventy soldiers and twenty officers were court-martialled for ‘acts of gross indecency with another male person according to the Guidance notes in the Manual of Military Law’.

  At home morale was shored up by the belief in the value of sacrifice and the reflected pride it bestowed on those who survived. Edward Grey, the former Foreign Secretary, had said, ‘None of us who give our sons in this war are so much to be pitied as those who have no sons to give.’ For those who had died young, the lines of Laurence Binyon’s 1914 poem with its Shakespearian echoes continued to reverberate as the idealisation and myth-making of sacrifice was encouraged.

  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  Nearly ten million dead soldiers and sailors and airmen had died in the conflict, three quarters of a million from Britain. A further twelve and a half million had been wounded; nearly one and three quarter million of these were British. An estimated 160,000 women lost husbands and double that number of children emerged fatherless at the end of the war. An estimated 30 per cent of all men aged between 20 and 24 in 1911 were now dead. There were no figures for the fiancées, girlfriends, mothers, children, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends for whom life had changed for ever. On 11 November 1918 the colossal roar finally stopped. Those who had survived hoped the wound would begin to heal in silence. After the catastrophic death of Victorian certainties, silence was beginning to seem like the only possible articulation of the truth.

  2

  Shock

  Armistice Day, 11 November 1918

  Just after breakfast on a Monday morning in the middle of November, Maude Onions, the young woman from Liverpool who had become a signaller with the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, sat down at her stenograph, the shorthand machine she used in the little signal office at Boulogne. Her job was to relay messages to the front. That morning she tapped out the following words:

  Hostilities will cease at 11.00 a.m. November 11th. Troops will stand fast at the line reached at that hour which will be reported to army headquarters. Defensive precautions will be maintained. There will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy. Further instructions follow.

  Three hours after she had sent the communication, Maude took ‘an involuntary glance’ at the clock in her office and saw that the moment the world had been waiting for had arrived. But nothing happened. There was silence. It was, observed Maude, ‘as though France had just heaved a vast sigh of relief.’

  Maude had arrived in Boulogne eighteen months earlier on a lovely June day in 1917. She was excited at the prospect of joining her country’s young men in teaching ‘the Hun a lesson’. Soon after her arrival, she had made friends with some of the men. Her skill at the piano was warmly welcomed as she tried to please them with song after song, the requests coming with ‘merciless rapidity’. She had asked a Scottish private in the packed canteen how long he thought the war would last and was surprised by his disillusioned response. ‘I don’t care,’ he had replied, ‘all I want is home and wife and kiddies and I don’t care who England belongs to.’

  Maude’s earlier mood of eager anticipation gave way to a sense of unease as she worried that ‘the seeming futility and endlessness of the war was eating into the souls of men’. One of them, ‘a look of inexpressible weariness’ on his face, described to her a job worse than that of fighting: ‘I’ve been digging up dead bodies - digging them up for their identification discs so that we can send word home ... the fellow I was working with dug up his own brother and cried like a child.’ Maude found it impossible to look the man in the eyes as he spoke.

  Later that day, as Maude walked down towards the port the eerie atmosphere persisted. Then as the church clock struck three, ‘Every siren and hooter was let loose, every church bell clanged out - a deafening roar.’ But things were still not right. Even though the streets were packed with people, ‘not a word was spoken, not a single cry of celebration was made’. To Maude it seemed as if’the stricken soul of France had not been able to find within itself the desire to rejoice’.

  Suddenly her attention was caught by a sound, ‘the noise and din, the sobbing of a woman, a few yards away, finis - finis - incroyable’. Later on she remembered that almost unconsciously she had found herself’in the little military cemetery behind the congested street of the town where our men were buried three deep, for land was dear in France, and where the graves had been so beautifully kept by the loving hands of a khaki girl. I could not distinguish the names for the mist of tears.’ Barely able to drag herself away, Maude stumbled and then almost fell over something in the ground; a broken piece of wood that had sunk so deep that it was scarcely visible. She had come across the grave of a German soldier and, anxious not be spotted, she hurriedly laid a few flowers at the foot of the broken cross. She knew that ‘somewhere a woman was sorrowing’.

  As soon as Maude’s signal reached the field units, messengers on foot, bicycle and horseback spread out in all directions, carrying up to the troops at the front line pink slips of paper torn from signal pads on which news of the ceasefire was written.

  But the announcement that the war was over did not deter all those still caught up in the process of slaughter. Three hundred and twenty American soldiers lost their lives at Meuse on the morning of the 11th with a further three thousand wounded. General Pershing, Commanding General of the American Expeditionary Forces, remained stubbornly reluctant to observe the ceasefire before teaching the Germans one final lesson.

  Many British soldiers on the front line were too exhausted to celebrate. A muted cheer and a half-hearted attempt to send a hat spinning in the air was the most that some could manage. There was no crossing over into the enemy lines for the gentlemanly shaking of hands. The comradeship felt for fellow human beings during the Christmas truce four years earlier had evaporated.

  In the northern French village of Malpaquet on the Belgian border, Brigade Major Wilfred House of the 57th Brigade wanted to demonstrate his gratitude for having survived the last four years. ‘We hurriedly organised a tea with rationed food for all the children in the village school’, and in their turn the villagers arrived with flowers and wine and pâté, and some rationed eggs and butter. Major House found the party to be ‘very moving and very simple’.

  In Paris as the bells of Notre-Dame began to ring, flags sold out in every shop; so the scientist Marie Curie, with the help of the daily lady from the Radium Institute, stitched together some blue, red and white material and hung the home-made flag from the Institute’s window.

  In Germany a young corporal of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry lay on his hospital bed wondering if he would ever fully regain his sight. A few weeks earlier he had been blinded in a gas attack after four years of fighting at the Western Front. The gas had begun to gnaw at his eyes and although the cloudiness was beginning to clear, his vision was still hazy. The news of the Armistice, given to him in the convalescent hospital by the local padre, reduced him to a state of despair as he thought of ‘so many a dear friend and comrade’ who had died in the fighting. On hearing the news the young soldier had ‘tottered and groped’ his way back to the ward and at the thought of defeat ‘threw myself on my bunk and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow’. The medical staff were worried. They wondered if Corporal Adolf Hitler was going out of his mind.

  In Holland a train was on its way to Arnhem. Inside a curtain-shutt
ered carriage sat the white-faced Kaiser Wilhelm. A chink in the curtains made it impossible for him to ignore the thousands of people who stood on the banks shouting abuse as the train passed by, indicating with a swipe of the hand how they would like to cut the former leader’s throat.

  In the English Channel the crew of HMS Amazon, which was patrolling the stretch of sea at Beachy Head, were amazed to see a French fishing boat covered in flags. As fishermen shouted out that the war was over, the incredulous captain of the Amazon retorted that the boat should return to harbour at once and stop giving false hope to other passing ships.

  In London, a young diplomat Harold Nicolson was working in the basement of his office in Whitehall, sufficiently confident in the imminent announcement of an armistice that he was already drawing up plans for the proposed peace conference. In fact he knew the ceasefire agreement had been signed in a railway carriage nearly six hours earlier in Compiégne. Leaving his desk for a moment in search of another map, Nicolson passed a window that overlooked the Prime Minister’s official residence. The time was five minutes to eleven on 11 November.

  At that moment the door of number 10 was flung open and a hatless Lloyd George emerged. His thick white hair, barely restrained behind his ears, reflected the eagerness of his mood. ‘At eleven o’clock this morning the war will be over,’ Nicolson heard Lloyd George cry out as if he was a street newspaper seller hoping to attract the attention of anyone who might be listening. He repeated the words several times. As Nicolson watched, the street began to fill up and within a few minutes there was no room to move. There was silence in the crowd, an interruption for cheering and then silence again. But by this time Lloyd George appeared flustered, his flushed face in contrast to the bright white of his hair which, owing to the absence of his customary homburg, was now flying all over the place in the wind. After a burst from the crowd of ‘God Save the King’, Lloyd George pushed his way back again through the mass of people towards the sanctuary of his famous front door.