The Great Silence (18 page)

One by one the delegates signed the Treaty. It was 28 June, the fifth
anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the catalyst for the war.

Suddenly through the open windows Nicolson heard the sound of a gun salute followed by cheering and he remembered some wise words that he had once heard: ‘Success is beastly’ Later he drank some ‘very bad’ champagne at the taxpayers’ expense. The whole procedure was over. The war was won; the peace agreement had been signed. Meanwhile, in Berlin the economic crisis was becoming desperate. Butchers were selling crows, squirrels and woodpeckers from counters that before the war had held juicy joints of beef and succulent legs of lamb.

Maynard Keynes, the chief British economic adviser at the conference, resigned immediately in disgust at the terms. He knew the proposals, in sapping the German economy, would lead to disaster. A forced reduction of military power and a rearrangement of German-owned territory would have been enough. In agreement, Nicolson went to bed that evening ‘sick of life’. A letter was brought across the Channel by aeroplane to Buckingham Palace announcing that the peace was signed. The King wrote in his diary: ‘Today is a great one in history and please God this dear old Country will now settle down and work in unity.’

The Treaty concluded, the Prime Minister suggested that a Peace Parade, in the form of a colourful pageant and victorious march-past, would be a fitting way to mark an end to the recent horrors. Reminders of the war were, he hoped, decreasing as brilliant green leaves unfurled on London’s trees and the grey days of the previous November began to recede. Now was the time for celebration, and in the mid-summer, with London looking its most vital and optimistic, such a performance would be an uplifting event. Not everyone welcomed the idea. Virginia Woolf dismissed the very notion of the parade. ‘A servants’ festival,’ she pronounced it, ‘something got up to placate and pacify the people.’ But the Prime Minister remained convinced of the worth of his suggestion. And in addition to the march, he felt that participants and onlookers would need a central object, something physical on which to focus their attention, which would form the symbolic heart of the march-past and the twenty-mile parade route.

On a sunny morning at the beginning of July, the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens had a meeting with Sir Alfred Mond, the Commissioner of the Board of Works in charge of the building of monuments that would ensure the sacrifice of the war would never be forgotten. After their conversation, Lutyens left Sir Alfred Mond’s office, the sun still high in the sky behind him. He was on his way to an early dinner in Mayfair and while not wanting to be late for his date, his mind was already concentrating on this most important of commissions.

‘I am thinking of something a bit like this,’ he explained to his great friend, the ebullient society hostess Lady Sackville, as they sat in her dining room at 34 Hill Street. And immediately, the architect - ‘that most delightful, good-natured, irresponsible, imaginative jester of genius’ as Lady Sackville’s daughter, Vita Sackville-West, described him - retrieved from his pockets a pad of paper and the blue, red and charcoal pencils he always carried with him. He drew what at first sight looked like an upended box but on reflection resembled an upended coffin. Lady Sackville thought the design to be just the thing, and with characteristic presumption born of a woman rarely refused a favour, she asked him if she might keep the sketch. Lutyens already had in mind a name for his monument. ‘The Cenotaph’ combined the two Greek words,
kenos
, meaning ‘empty’, and
taphos
, denoting ‘tomb’.

A couple of days later, Lutyens received an invitation to come to Downing Street. Lloyd George apologised for the short notice, but explained his urgent proposal that Lutyens should design ‘a point of homage to stand as a symbol of remembrance worthy of the reverent salute of an Empire mourning for its million dead’. The memorial should be non-denominational and carry no cross or any Christian symbol that might alienate soldiers of other religious beliefs, and it would have to be in position within the next two weeks in time for the parade on 19 July. Unaware of Lutyens’s earlier conversation with Mond, the Prime Minister was impressed by the swiftness of the architect’s response. The design was delivered to the Prime Minister’s office that afternoon. It was identical to the one already hanging on the green silk wall of Lady Sackville’s Mayfair bedroom.

A few days before the parade
The Times
pointed out the danger that the intoxication of victory might derail the message of sacrifice and sorrow that the parade was surely intended to convey. While the soldiers would be seen to be ‘marching in the full consciousness of triumph’ these same men will with only a few minutes’ interval also be saluting the temporary memorial ‘with tear-filled eyes’. The obligation felt by the Government to deploy jazz bands, rockets and merry-go-rounds might unsettle the day of quiet memory that many mourners craved.

Saturday 19 July was a dark, damp day in London and at lunchtime it had even started to rain, but the parade had gone off beautifully. People had started to line the streets overnight on the Friday and Trafalgar Square was once again jammed with crowds. The numbers exceeded those who had turned out for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and for the Coronation of Edward VII, and hotels and boarding houses in central London were so booked up that visitors were looking for accommodation as far north as Harrow and Watford. Troops had gathered in Kensington Gardens and in Hyde Park, sleeping under canvas the night before. Despite the rain, an open-air programme of folk dancing and the enactment of the fairy scenes from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
were due to take place in Hyde Park later in the day.

As the parade passed the new memorial and saluted the dead, many of the parading soldiers were in tears. It was estimated that if, instead of the living, the British dead had been assembled to march, three and a half days would have elapsed before all those who had died would have been able to file past the monument.

Eventually the parade arrived at Buckingham Palace where the King and Queen were waiting, seated near the Members of Parliament, under the imperial and imperious gaze of George’s white marble grandmother splendid in her position at the top of the Mall. The specially built terraces opposite the royal party were filled with wounded men and officers, and the brilliant scarlet-coated uniforms of Chelsea Pensioners. There was a small and touching stand on the west side of Constitution Hill for the Service Orphans Home while opposite them were the dark dresses and hats of widows and mothers, sitting together in specially reserved seats at the suggestion of the Queen herself.

Every corner of London was determinedly
en fête
. As the procession marched through Vauxhall the sound of cheering came from the windows of tenement buildings, from the floors of huge warehouses, from those pushing wheelbarrows, and those standing on packing cases, from the narrow streets, from the crammed corner shops, from the crowded pavements. The sound seemed to enliven the whole city. One elderly observer believed the reception was comparable to the welcome given to Wellington on his return from Waterloo, witnessed by the old gentleman’s father. The soldiers sometimes had to duck the potentially dangerous hail of biscuits and apples that was showered on their heads from the windows above, while girls with Union Jacks wound turban-style around their hair ran into the crowd with handfuls of cigarettes.

Later in the evening Londoners waited with excitement for the fireworks. Lady Diana Cooper rose from her host’s Mayfair dinner table, as ‘eager as a child’ according to her new husband, and led the other guests up the attic ladder on to the open roof in order for them all to get a better view of Constitution Arch in Hyde Park where 10,000 rockets were to be fired. The 24-year-old beauty had once been assumed by many in Society, among them her own mother the Duchess of Rutland, to be a natural choice of bride for the Prince of Wales. But nothing could have been further from Diana’s own independent mind. She had fallen in love with the young diplomat Duff Cooper and against her parents’ wishes had married him.

Once up in the open air Diana did not notice the glass skylight obscured by the chimney pots, and missed her footing. Duff was still downstairs finishing off a last glass of port and at first heard nothing beyond a sudden silence and then the sound of breaking glass followed by ‘the terrible thud of a falling body’. Diana herself felt just like Alice passing through time, the wonderland shelves whizzing by her until she landed twenty-five feet below on the floor of a large linen cupboard. Looking up she saw that her wide-brimmed hat had been too broad to go through the hole made by her slim body and Alice-like was still sitting out of reach on the skylight several floors above her.

*

Six weeks earlier Duff Cooper had held his final bachelor dinner party in the Savoy’s Pinafore Room overlooking the river. The night was as lovely and fine and full of hope as an early English summer evening can be, the windows flung open to the river below. The table was covered with red roses and there was a gardenia for each of the twelve guests’ buttonholes. But the beauty of the room, the delectable food and the prospect of marrying one of the loveliest girls in the land had not been able to dispel Duff’s gloom, and the next day at lunch at the Hyde Park Hotel, with a sharp steel-brace of a hangover, he confided to Diana of how easily he could have ‘replaced the eleven living with eleven dead all of whom - or at least eight of the eleven -’ he had loved better.

Their wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 2 June had been one of the spectacular social events of the summer. Sir John Lavery gave them a picture he had made of Duff, Lord Beaverbrook had presented them with a gleaming new car, and Ellen Terry arrived on the wedding day at Diana’s home in Arlington Street carrying a rose that she had picked that morning from her garden at Small Hythe in Kent.

The preceding four years had swallowed up nearly all of Diana’s greatest friends, during what she called ‘the nightmare years of tragic hysteria’. Diana’s war had been a strange and schizophrenic experience. During the day she had been immersed in the demanding occupation of nursing, at first in the converted ballroom of her own family house in Piccadilly and later at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City. But by night she went to parties as lavish as any held before the war. The best of them had been at the house of the philosopher G. E. Moore where there had been ‘wine in plenty - it was said too much’, the atmosphere ever undercut by the diminishing attendance of the young men who had never missed a party in their lives. Diana was haunted by the sense that she had not spent enough time with those she loved. ‘If only one happened to know Death’s plans,’ she lamented. Whenever a close friend had returned to London on leave there were exotic drinks like vodka and absinthe and the dinner menu would be ‘composed of far-fetched American delicacies -avocado, terrapin and soft shell crabs’.

There had sometimes been three bands, one of white musicians,
one of black and one Hawaiian. Flowers would be replaced even in the course of one evening, the orchids of earlier exchanged for the wild flowers that accompanied the equally wild music that played on till dawn. And then when they eventually went to bed, they wept in secret into their pillows, half dreading the next time when they would again ‘brace ourselves to the sad revelry’.

One Sunday during the fourth year of the war, on a precious day off from her hospital duties, Diana had taken particular care to pack a delicious picnic that she had planned to share with Duff at a lake not far from London, near Cobham. Into the basket went eggs in jelly, chicken breasts, butter, bread, strawberries and cream from Belvoir, the Rutland family estate in Leicestershire, and a bottle of hock to be chilled in the lake. But Diana tripped on her way to meet Duff, dropped the basket and spilled the valuable contents in a sticky mess all over the pavement. She rushed to Duff in tears. ‘Who will comfort me when Duff is killed?’ she wondered. ‘Who will comfort me for
his
loss? Who will keep me sane?’

In the final few months of the war Duff was sent to the front. Diana wrote to him constantly. One evening crossing Westminster Bridge, which appeared ‘wonderful in the pale dead crepuscule light’, she spotted a half-built building. ‘Great straight aspiring pillars cut off at the same time before they bore the weight they were built for - too lovely an edifice to be half-built, but so beautiful in its abrupt cessation’. The building seemed to her to symbolise her own generation.

Absent from the gaiety of Diana’s life were her brother-in-law, Ivo Charteris (Diana’s sister Violet had put his uniform in a glass case and his framed photograph was placed next to her pillow as she slept), Billy and Julian Grenfell (whose beauty had brought tears to the eyes of his master at Eton), George Vernon, Edward Horner, Patrick Shaw Stewart and Raymond Asquith. All had been casualties of the war. All were Diana’s dearest friends.

The remaining bachelors in London all longed to be loved by the woman who Duff Cooper said ‘intensified all colours, heightened all beauty, deepened all delight’. But she had long been more than half in love with Duff, although people were baffled by her choice. Lady Sackville thought him ‘a wretched looking little specimen’. Duff himself was not sure he was quite up to the standards required for
such a husband. Not only was he poor, but he knew that his reputation as ‘a wild young man who played too high and drank too deep’ would hardly endear him to the Rutlands. But Diana’s parents finally agreed to the engagement and the
Daily Sketch
went to town filling its front page with pictures of the wedding.

On 20 July, the day after Diana’s accident, the rain came down even harder and London had a bedraggled, neglected air about it. Duff Cooper walked through the wet streets, on his way to visit his injured wife, passing the sad-looking bunting and flags, and noticing the silence of yesterday’s procession route. ‘There was no sign of life,’ he noted, ‘except in Piccadilly’, where he was passed by several lorries packed with cheerful-looking German soldiers. ‘I suppose they were going home.’ He wondered how long it would be before Diana was back on her feet.