AS we approach Remembrance Day, SUSAN MANSFIELD talks to the authors of two books that examine the long-lasting impact of the First World War, not just on the soldiers who survived it, but on the whole of society
ON 11 NOVEMBER 1920 a very unusual funeral made its way through the streets of London. Crowds thronged the Mall, heads bowed and silent, as the casket was drawn past by six black horses. A nation mourned as a man was interred. A young man whose name
no-one knew.
The Funeral of the Unknown Warrior was an extraordinary event. One young man with no identifying features was chosen from the hundreds of thousands who fell on the battlefields of the Western Front. Buried among kings and queens in Westminster Abbey, he came to represent the husbands, sons, brothers whose bodies never returned. He became a focus for a nation's grief.
The funeral was pivotal in British history, the moment at which the country began to emerge from its stupour of grief and disbelief. "Being able to invest that young man with the identity of the person you loved allowed a shift in public feeling and allowed the new decade to begin," says historian Juliet Nicolson, whose new book, The Great Silence: Living in the Shadow of the Great War, deals with the two-year period between the Armistice and the beginning of the roaring 1920s. "It is an overlooked period, but it was so fundamental for people living in it."
It is a period which begins with silence, the final long-awaited stilling of the guns on 11 November 1918. The "war to end all wars" was over, one of the most costly conflicts in human history, which claimed 15 million lives and left behind it another longer silence of shock and grief.
"One would imagine that, at the end of such a catastrophe, there would have been much celebrating, much champagne, many fireworks," says Nicolson. "I think there was a certain amount of that, but more as a result of feeling that this is what we ought to be doing. I think relief was the dominant initial emotion, and then came the realisation that the world, and the individual circumstances of hundreds of thousands of people, had changed for ever."
The sinking of the Iolaire, carrying troops home from the trenches to the Isle of Lewis, on Hogmanay 1918, seemed to symbolise the futility of celebration. The loss of more than 200 lives within sight of home created a more acute version of a deep sadness that was enveloping the whole country. This was a peace that few people could celebrate.
Of those who did return from the Front, many were disabled, shellshocked, changed in mind and body. Benches for the disfigured were painted a different colour, warning the public to look away. "I am sure there were families who wished their men had not returned," says Nicolson. "Those men were very often slumped, trapped in silent shock of what had happened to them, and no-one knew how to help them."
Meanwhile, a menace even deadlier than war was sweeping through Europe. Spanish flu struck fast and fiercely, often killing within the day. Soldiers returning from the Front hastened its spread. It claimed 50 million lives worldwide, many of them young, healthy adults.
"I think that first year after the war ended was really one of the most difficult years that a country could go through," says Nicolson. "The Spanish flu decimated whole communities that thought they had survived the conflict. The more I think about that period, the more I think: 'How did anybody manage?' It's something to do with the resilence of the human spirit, that it survives and triumphs no matter what."
It's hardly surprising that the Allied Victory Parade, organised by the government to celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in summer 1919, felt somewhat hollow. What the public responded to was the cenotaph, Sir Edward Lutyens's memorial in Whitehall, which was festooned with flowers in a public outpouring of emotion. When it was announced that the temporary version was to be removed, there was an outcry. What people wanted was a focus for their grief.
They also sought diversion from it. These were years of drinking, dancing and drug-taking. People queued for the newly opened cinemas, and to hear Lawrence of Arabia tell of his daring exploits on a nationwide tour. There was an obsession with flight. "As if you could overtake the great void inside you if you could somehow go fast enough." says Nicolson. "The passion for aeroplanes, the exhiliration of speed, was a sort of drug in itself."
Soldiers who returned from the Front found little of the "land fit for heroes" which Lloyd George had promised. Peter Parker, writing on veterans' experiences in The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War, says that some found a country more ready to venerate the dead than look after the living.
Within a few years, columns of veterans were marching past the same cenotaph, their military metals pinned to their banners, asking for work. The silent years were also turbulent years, when a tide of social change which began even before the war reached its high point and ushered in fundamental changes to the social order.
"There was a feeling, particularly among the more radical elements of the unemployed, that Britain was so busy commemorating the dead that it had forgotten its obligations to people who had survived and now needed help," says Parker. "There was mass unemployment, and in the early 1920s this kept rising at an alarming rate. A very large percentage of the unemployed were former servicemen."
Some, however, were able to immerse themselves in ordinary life. Harry Patch, the last surviving veteran of the First World War, who died in July at the age of 111, returned to his home county of Somerset where he worked all his life as a plumber. He did not talk about his experiences in the war until he was tracked down by a researcher after his 100th birthday.
When he did, it was to denounce the horrors of war. "He thought war was a terrible thing," says Parker. "He never wanted to fight; he was a conscript, not a volunteer. As he said, 'I didn't have any choice in the matter; I didn't ask to go, and I did what was asked of me and no more.' He hated it and he was very determined always to say that we should be remembering everybody who fought in the war irrespective of what uniform they wore."
In some respects, he shared the ambivalence among veterans about the practice of Remembrance, which began with the first two-minute silence in November 1919, and in its earliest years focused entirely on the dead. In Dorothy L Sayers's novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, protagonist Lord Peter Wimsey, himself a veteran, is dismissive of it.
Harry Patch felt that Remembrance Day had been in part usurped by "the bigwigs", as television cameras were trained on political leaders seeking to outdo each other in the reverential laying of wreaths. Peter Parker says: "I remember reading an interview with a veteran who said: 'Of course there should be a two-minute silence, but it shouldn't be so much a reverent two-minute silence, it should be an appalled two-minute silence. It's not a question of saying we should remember the dead as we should rather remember the reality of warfare, and that it should never happen again'."
The deaths of Harry Patch and fellow veteran Henry Allingham, who predeceased him by a week, aged 113, has brought us to another pivotal point in history. The First World War has slipped from living memory. Questions are likely to be asked in the years to come about what "remembrance" means when there are none left who remember.
Many things shape our view of the First World War: the poems of Owen and Sassoon, Blackadder Goes Forth, novels such as Birdsong as much as the history books.
Revisionist historians point out – with some justification – that the war was a military victory as well as a waste of life. But now a vital element of that composite picture is missing. "Until now, we've always had people like Harry Patch who could say: 'Never mind what the politicians thought, this is what it was like.' All future history will be written without that."
Parker believes the funeral of Harry Patch forms a parallel with the funeral of the Unknown Warrior: another representative of the same group of men is buried, also chosen randomly, in this case by longevity. Interestingly, a state funeral for the last surviving veteran was discussed, but became politically contentious. Harry Patch had the last word. It was a fair enough idea, said this ordinary man who remained all his long life a Tommy, a plumber, a conscript. But it wasn't for him.
• The Great Silence 1918-1920: Living in the Shadow of the Great War, by Juliet Nicolson, John Murray, £20. The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War, by Peter Parker, Fourth Estate, £14.99.
