So recalled French General Weygand. And so began the end.
At the station in the small town of Tergnier, Picardie, 20 kilometres south of Saint-Quentin, a train waited at 0300. The town was in ruins, the station, ‘lit by torches. On the platform a smart company of riflemen presented arms in a fairyland setting.’ The German delegation left its cars to board the train; its saloon draped in green satin still bore the monogram and crown of Napoleon III, defeated by the Prussians at Sédan. A clank and a lurch and a hiss of steam, and the train departed for an unknown destination. The night was pitch-black and the carriage windows had their curtains drawn.
At 0700, the train stopped, its passengers wondering where; the windows were now uncovered but in the words of their accompanying French host, Major de Bourbon-Busset, they saw ‘nothing but a marshy copse, and a lowering sky of leaden clouds’. A few yards away stood another train, wrapped in the morning mist. A gendarme disclosed the secret: they were in the forest of Compiègne.
The two trains had been shunted onto sections of track leading from Rethondes station on the Aisne into the cover of the trees; these spurs had been used by heavy artillery firing on the German lines towards Noyon to the northeast. The wooded location was chosen for its calm and isolation, but also out of respect to a defeated enemy. The Allied Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Foch, preferred it over his headquarters at Senlis, whose mayor and other hostages had been shot by the invading Germans four years ago; the town was unlikely to be magnanimous in victory and was also too close to Paris, with its journalists and sightseers. So the forest clearing was chosen.
Between the carriages, the ground underfoot was so bad that duckboards had to be laid, an apt reminder of the pulverised frontline terrain. From his carriage 2419D, newly refitted as an office by the Compagnie des Wagon-Lits, Foch sent word to the German delegates that he would see them in his train at 0900. Negotiations commenced, although the terms were unconditional; the deadline given was 1100 Monday 11 November. In the small hours of the 11th, the Germans announced they were ready to conclude the talks; they were shown at once into the Marshal’s carriage and the final session opened at 0215.
In the midst of the forest there was darkness. The men talked and when they had finished talking, a new light was dawning. At 0510 Foch was the first to sign and then left for Paris carrying the Armistice agreement. Its twenty-four articles specified the cessation of hostilities six hours after the signing, but Foch refused the German request for an immediate ceasefire to avoid more wasted lives. Another 11,000 men were killed or wounded in those six hours. Canadian Private George Price, from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, was the last soldier of the British Empire to die, shot in the chest by a sniper at 1058. He is buried at St Symphorien cemetery, where also lie the first and last British soldiers killed during the Great War, respectively John Parr and George Ellison. The final fatality was US soldier Henry Gunther, from a German-American family in Baltimore, just one minute before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
‘Cease fire’ sounded along the Western Front. This was the final whistle to a game that had lasted four long seasons. It was not yet a peace, merely a ‘stay of arms’;2 this Armistice was set to last just thirty-six days and had to be renewed three times, on 13 December, 16 January and 16 February, while the peacemakers did their work. The Paris conference began on 18 January 1919. Not until 28 June – twenty-four weeks later and five years to the day since the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo – would the treaty with Germany finally be signed at Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors, where at least they had time for reflection. Section 231 laid the guilt for the war on ‘the aggression of Germany and her allies’ and paved the way for punitive reparations. The peace would last only another twenty years.
That November Monday, notices were pinned to the doors of any churches still standing behind the front line: ‘Onze heures du matin, la guerre est finie.’ Orders were passed to the troops:
Hostilities will cease at 11:00 hours on November 11th – Troops will stand fast on the line reached at that time which will be reported to Corps Headquarters – Strictest precautions will be maintained – There will be no intercourse of any kind with the enemy.
Some made a final ‘gesture of intercourse’ to their enemy and played hard right up to that final whistle, whether out of duty, habit or simply to save carrying away heavy ammunition. They sent up a lethal daylight fireworks display, as Colonel Nicholson of the Suffolk Regiment recalled:
A German machine-gun remained in action the whole morning opposite our lines. Just before 11 a.m. a thousand rounds were fired in a practically ceaseless burst. At 11 a.m., there came great cheering from the German lines and the village church bells rang. But on our side there were only a few shouts. I had heard more for a rum ration. The match was over – it had been a damned bad game.
Frank Mellish was having a second slice of bread and marmalade. The previous day, ‘we had travelled through little villages which had been occupied by the enemy for over four long years’:
Our welcome from the parish priest to the youngest inhabitant had been tumultuous. We could take lots more of this sort of thing, and the joy we were bringing began to make amends for the losses we had suffered and the misery we had endured. There were still mines and booby-traps to be negotiated, but we felt the worst was over.
When a despatch-rider arrived with a message, his battery major ‘threw it across to me and said’:
‘Tell the men, Frank, I can’t.’ It baldly announced that hostilities would cease at 11 am, that there was to be no fraternising with the enemy and we were to remain wherever we were until further orders. You will have heard the expression ‘A slap in the face with a wet fish’ … I just could not believe that after having lived for four years in desolate and torn-up country, there should be no retribution and that our cunning, fierce and ruthless enemy should be allowed to pack up his souvenirs and go back to his practically untouched and unblemished homeland.
That evening a party went to the Officers’ Club in Lille, where ‘we proceeded to get exceedingly intoxicated and where the largest rugger scrum ever to have been formed took place. There must have been three hundred a side and by the time the mythical ball was heeled, the place was a veritable shambles and the party over.’
On other sections of the Western Front, the great world war ended less with a bang than a whimper, according to a corporal of the Honourable Artillery Company: ‘It wasn’t like London where they all got drunk. It was all very quiet. You were so dazed you just didn’t realise that from now on, you could stand up straight and not be shot.’ From Downing Street, Prime Minister David Lloyd George made a formal announcement, largely reiterating what the church doors had said in France:
At eleven o’clock this morning the war will be over. You are well entitled to rejoice. The people of this Empire, with their allies, have won a great victory. It is the sons and daughters of the people who have done it. It is a victory greater than has ever been known in history.
A young New Zealand officer, Leslie Averill, who had just distinguished himself in scaling the fortified walls of Le Quesnoy by ladder, was more concerned with dwindling opportunities for wristwatch trophies:
A few souvenirs would have come in very handy especially as it appears there won’t be any more prisoners. Peace looks very close now. The official news today is that the German fleet is out. Mutinied, & the German Peace Delegates meet Foch today, so it’s quite on the cards that the war will be finished by Xmas.3
Most soldiers celebrated the end of fighting and the prospect of finally going home. Frank Cobb, with the 1/4th Northamptons in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, wrote to the Rushden Echo on 12 November, from Abbassia Command Depot, Cairo:
… we are having a royal time out here, celebrating the Armistice. I had the honour of playing the glad tidings on the piano. We had a tableau on the stage, including all flags of our Allies. As each flag was presented cheers were given by a ver
y large audience, and I played the National Anthem as each one was presented. The boys gave vent to their voices; in fact, they sang till they were hoarse. I played all popular patriotic tunes, which suited immensely, but I think the two most popular ones were ‘Take me back to Blighty, and ‘I want to see the dear old Home again’. There are numerous boys here from our county, so you can imagine we had a decent night together.
In peaceful Oswestry, far from Cairo, Mrs Susan Owen was surprised to hear the unexpected peal of church bells from nearby St Oswald’s on a Monday morning. Much louder was the knock at the door as a telegram boy brought news that her Shropshire lad who had marched away in 1915, had been killed just seven days before, almost to the hour, at the Sambre–Oise Canal and would never return home. What passing bells.
In London, before the news arrived (and the drinking started), the sports pages reported the results of Saturday’s rugby matches between the military teams in the capital’s multi-national melting pot. South Africans beat London Canadians heavily at Richmond 27–0; Royal Military Academy beat Guy’s Hospital at Woolwich; a Machine-Gun School side bullied a Public Schools Services side 29–0 at a busy Richmond ground; and New Zealand Headquarters Staff beat Australian Headquarters Staff at Herne Hill. The fixtures reveal just what a world war this had been.
It was not a planned peace: in October, the War Office was actively making plans for another two years of war. They had expected to continue fighting, but the collapse of German morale was swift, with whole regiments surrendering en masse; this later gave rise to the Hitlerian myth of the brave German soldier being stabbed in the back by faint-hearted (and Jewish) cowards at home. Liverpool FC’s Henry Royle, wounded in 1915 and gassed at Passchendaele in 1917, rejoined his KLR battalion, ready to fight again. Thankfully for him, it was seven days after the Armistice; he had to wait until 25 January for his battalion to disperse.
With no prospect of any resumption of regular rugby at home, the situation for clubs was parlous. Rosslyn Park’s Harry Burlinson, redoubtable organiser of the Old Deer Park Public Schools and Services games, sent out another arm-twisting circular appealing for subscriptions:
… since the commencement of the War nearly one hundred subscriptions have lapsed owing to the very heavy casualties amongst the members on Active Service, and no new members have been enrolled for the past four seasons. The Annual income, therefore, is greatly reduced, and to add to the anxiety everything has increased in cost.
Even in those days of amateurism, money mattered. We know it was not the first time ‘Burly’ had written: in October 1915, Rifleman Jack Bodenham came out of the frontline trenches near Ypres to find a letter from his rugby club, requesting a guinea and a photograph (‘I don’t know what they can want with it & hope it is not for the police’, he quipped). He wrote to his father:
I should be grateful if you would pay the subscription of £1. 1s which I should like to go forward with this, but money orders are difficult to get here & I am afraid I must ask you to trust me for it till I can return it later on.
He would never pay his father back: he was killed on the first day of the Somme, his bodily remains churned into the battlefield by a second passage of slaughter in 1918, with only his name on the bulk of Thiepval to recall him.4
For some troops, their war went on; they just moved to a different front. While haggling went on at Versailles, old wounds reopened: the Third Afghan War started on 6 May 1919 and lasted until 8 August. The RAF’s 31 Squadron was there in 1919; they were the last to leave in 2014. Pre-war Eastern Counties skipper Lieutenant Colonel Barry Wells, commanding his 4th Essex battalion found himself in Murmansk, Russia, fighting Bolsheviks, as did Ira ‘Taff’ Jones, the Welsh fighter ace from Carmarthen. The Canadians sent a Siberian Expeditionary Force to the other, eastern extreme of Mother Russia’s vast bulk for the same purpose. Most came back, although Wells lost men when some of his allied ‘White’ troops mutinied, murdered and went over to the Reds. Many South Africans, including the commanders of both 1st and 4th infantry regiments, preferred to volunteer in support of the Whites, rather than returning home, and were awarded Russian service honours.
Naval stoker Jack Finnis, one of thirty-eight Wasps to die, would stay another nine years before what was left of him returned for burial in Portsmouth. His submarine L55, launched too late for the Great War, was in the Baltic in June 1919. She engaged two Bolshevik destroyers laying mines to guard Petrograd; her torpedoes missed, and she was pressed towards an area sown with British mines and sank. Although the Bolsheviks claimed the kill, L55 may have fallen victim to ‘friendly mines’. The remains of its forty-two officers and men would stay in their tin-can coffin until L55 was discovered by a trawler in 100 feet of water and raised in 1928. Since Britain had no diplomatic relations with Communist Russia, no British warships were allowed in its waters; the skeletons were handed over to a merchantman and transferred to HMS Champion in Tallinn, Estonia, before returning for burial at Haslar, Portsmouth.
The killing was over but the dying was not yet done. Wellington’s apocryphal boast that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton must be balanced by his verified observation, on surveying the carnage, that ‘next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won’. England’s Reggie Schwarz, MC, Richmond fly half and leg-spinner for South Africa, died aged 43 at Étaples camp from ‘Spanish’ influenza seven days after the Armistice was declared. Fred Perrett, Royal Welch Fusiliers, a Neath and Wales forward who had turned professional with Leeds, died of his wounds on the first day of December. James Gibson Grant, of Liverpool FC’s great team, died of tuberculosis in February 1919, in a sanatorium at Banchory, Aberdeenshire. He had twice been invalided from the front through illness and resigned his commission in November 1917, when his health broke down irreparably after three years of fighting. His entry on Loretto’s Honour Roll blames ‘hardship and exposure on service’. In the same February the wounded Major William Beatty of Ireland succumbed to pneumonia at a casualty clearing station at Charleroi.
Hop Maddock was awarded the MC in April 1918 for covering the retreat of his unit from Le Mesnil. Although practically surrounded, Maddock continued firing until all had crossed a bridge and was the last man to retire to safety. He saw out the war but never fully recovered from his Somme wounds from 1916. He died in Cardiff in December 1921, still young at 40: London Welsh wore black armbands in his honour. France’s Albert Chateau, the talented Aviron Bayonnais back from their 1913 championship team, succumbed to his war wounds in 1924, six years after hostilities ended.
As if to add insult to injury, the Armistice came as wintry bleakness was again settling on northern France and Flanders. The mizzle and gloom of the Compiègne forest in November presaged another harsh winter. Few soldiers would have lived through all four since 1914, or survived the killing seasons that began in spring. Bad weather had its compensations: it had slowed movements of men and munitions and so afforded some brief, if frozen, respite from bloody mass attacks. This was not yet a peace, but a cessation of hostilities, which could break out again: the enemy had to be disarmed and occupied territory retaken. There was still work to be done, albeit no longer under fire.
The Allied war machine had built an astonishingly efficient logistics system to move unprecedented masses of men and matériel to the front, but it had not been much used in the opposite direction. There were not enough trains and boats to get millions of men back to Blighty, let alone distant Dominion homes. There was also the ticklish problem of battle-hardened men who had accumulated – to paraphrase Liam Neeson – ‘a very particular set of skills, acquired over a very long war’ and might not have purged the instinct for lethal violence from their system. After six-month tours in Afghanistan, twenty-first-century British soldiers spend weeks ‘decompressing’ in Cyprus, where the stresses of combat can be released through a unit-based safety valve, before returning to the unfamiliar normalcy of home. In 1918, after four years of fighting and little leave, it was vita
l to occupy a massive Allied force in productive and harmless activity: sport was one answer.
Burlinson had pointed out the value of the ‘great amount of Rugby Football now played, in fact the military authorities attach much importance to it, and recognise it as great help in training and keeping men from getting stale, and do everything possible to encourage it.’ In the sudden, unexpected silence of peace, the military authorities would again discover the importance of sport. After the Armistice it came into its own, as Australian Lieutenant G.H. Goddard put it, in ‘keeping a couple of hundred thousand home-hungry men contented’.5
They had lived. It was time to make life-affirming choices. War was over; now it was time to play rugby.
Notes
1 Général Maxime Weygand, Le 11 novembre, author’s translation.
2 From the Latin arma (weapon) and statium (a stopping).
3 Lt Leslie Averill, letter written on 7 November 1918.
4 Jack’s diary and letters survived and his story is recounted in The Final Whistle.
5 Goddard, Soldiers and Sportsmen.
14
The Return of the King
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious.
War has many unintended consequences, very few of them happy. But the ‘greatest imperial emergency’ and the influx of Dominion troops into Europe made the period 1916–19 a golden age for international rugby – or at least a gunmetal one. The gilding, by royal patronage, would come in the spring of 1919.
In January 1919, the War Office decided on a rugby competition in Britain for the Services and Dominions or, in the language of the hated trench stores return, an ‘Army Football Competition (Rugby)’. On 8 February, representatives met at the Junior United Services Club, London, with General Harington, a senior War Office figure, presiding, to finalise arrangements, grounds and fixtures for an ‘Inter-Services Competition’, to be played under the auspices of the Army Rugby Union. The event was given the royal seal of approval – and a snappier name – by the offer from His Majesty of a cup to be presented in his name. This would be the only ‘international’ rugby played in Britain in a 1918–19 season whose first half was spent overseas on shell-pocked pitches under raining lead.
After the Final Whistle Page 23