The Great Silence (23 page)

Lloyd George was intrigued by the idea. But such a national event needed royal approval. Two weeks before the anniversary of the Armistice the Prime Minister and the King met to discuss the idea. George V was rather dubious about the practicality of imposing such a scheme on the normal day-to-day bustle of life. A fastidiously punctual man, he could not bear the idea that the concept could be destroyed by one careless individual failing to hold to the allotted time. Members of his own family did not seem able to keep their watches in line with his own and if anyone was tactless enough to mention his mother’s ‘rebellious unpunctuality’, as the secretly amused Prince of Wales put it, they knew that trouble lay ahead. The King discounted the five or even three suggested minutes as far too long. Even to expect a whole nation to keep to the precision of a two-minute silence was, he thought, probably asking too much.

In November 1919 the King was behaving cautiously with good reason. Here was a man whose confidence had been severely undermined by the fear that the country might reassess a previously largely unquestioned belief in his royal birthright. He deliberated long over the reception that every important decision might receive. But Lloyd George, ‘the man who won the war’, remained enthusiastic about the idea and he wore down the King’s resistance, reassuring him that maroons would be fired in London at the beginning and end of the designated time and that the rockets would alert everyone to the importance of observing the precise moment.

An announcement made directly from the King at Buckingham Palace to all his subjects throughout the land was carried in all the main newspapers on Friday 7 November. The statement read:

Tuesday next, November 11, is the first anniversary of the Armistice which stayed the worldwide carnage of the four preceding years and marked the victory of Right and Freedom. I believe that my people in every part of the Empire fervently wish to perpetuate the memory of the Great Deliverance and of those who have laid down their lives to achieve it. To afford an opportunity for the universal expression of this feeling it is my desire and hope that at the hour when the Armistice came into force, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, there may be for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal activities. No elaborate organisation appears to be required. At a given signal, which can be easily arranged to suit the circumstances of the locality, I believe that we shall interrupt our business and pleasure, whatever it may be, and unite in this simple service of Silence and Remembrance.

And so the relevance of the day that marked one year since the Armistice assumed its shape and the day of the Great Silence came into being. The Great Silence would commemorate the Great War, and would provide a time to remember the Glorious Dead and their Great Sacrifice, as well as to celebrate the Great Deliverance.

The King now embraced the idea of the silence with gusto, although not everyone was equally enthusiastic. A 16-year-old schoolboy, Evelyn Waugh, was a pupil at Lancing College in West Sussex. His elder brother had been expelled from Sherborne for writing a homoerotic novel about the school and Evelyn by sibling association was forbidden to follow him there. But he was grateful to find that one of the refreshingly liberated aims of Lancing ‘was to produce prose writers’. Making the most of his developing skill he responded to the idea of the Great Silence. ‘A disgusting idea of artificial nonsense and sentimentality,’ young Waugh wrote in his diary. ‘If people have lost sons and fathers, they should think of them whenever the grass is green or Shaftesbury Avenue is brightly lighted, not for two minutes on the anniversary of a disgraceful day of national hysteria. No one thought of the dead last year. Why should they now?’

But a reason and an excuse to concentrate on that loss was exactly
what millions of frustrated mourners had come to wish for.
The Times’
death announcements page on 11 November 1919 still carried a subdivision entitled ‘Death by Wounds’.

That morning mist and gloom were hovering over Whitehall, and traces of the snow that had fallen two days earlier were still on the ground. Temperatures had dropped during the night to a level lower than any could remember for over fifty years. A dancing sparkle of frost covered the English countryside. Four-year-old Geoffrey Woolley was in the garden with his governess where the gardener was going about the winter business of repairing and sluicing down the tall rockeries. The first chimes of the drawing-room clock that marked the hour began to ring out from inside the house, and the governess suddenly burst into a run, racing towards the gardener, shouting that he must turn off the hose at once. The noise of the water threatened to destroy the imminent silence.

The day of the Silence fell in the middle of the school term and there was an unusual calm in the Parish household. Three-year-old Pam’s brother and sisters had gone to school. Apart from the cook preparing lunch in the kitchen, the maid upstairs dusting the bedrooms, and the family’s two pet badgers waiting patiently by the front door in the hall to be taken for their morning walk in the fields around Sidcup, all was quiet. Pam and her mother were alone in the house. Just as the grandfather clock began to strike, Pam’s mother, her long thick chestnut hair flying behind her, rushed into the playroom and, gripping Pam by the hand, motioned to her not to speak, not to make a sound. Copying her mother Pam knelt beside her on the kitchen floor. Together they joined their hands together, fingertips touching, in the gesture of prayer. Pam, though still only three, knew she was being asked to remember something terrible and to give thanks that it would never happen again. Her mother had told her that they were remembering ‘The Great War to End all Wars’ and that Pam should be thankful that in her lifetime there would never again be anything like it.

In Whitely’s department store near Paddington, the doors closed at 10.45 a.m. and shoppers and assistants together assembled beneath the vaulted roof at ten minutes to the hour. The Reverend Mr
Murphy, vicar of St Matthew’s, Bayswater, invited them to sing ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’, his Irish boom rising to the balconies four floors above before the hymn came to an end just before eleven o’clock as shoppers prepared themselves for silence.

In Selfridges a solitary bugler walked out on to the central balcony of the store overlooking Oxford Street and sounded his instrument to signal the approaching silence. At Harrods in Knightsbridge the fire alarms were rung. In the City at Lloyd’s insurance brokers the huge 106-pound Lutine Bell rang out as it always did when the need arose to mark an event of national importance. A murder trial at the Old Bailey was interrupted.

In Baltimore, Maryland, the train on which the Prince of Wales was travelling was halted and in England the entire railway network of passenger trains, goods trains and shunting engines juddered and clanked to a standstill. Trading on the stock market ceased. Out in the Channel, ships stayed their course.

Just before eleven o’clock there was a tremendous burst of synchronised noise across the country. In the cities of London, Birmingham and Bradford, maroons were fired into the sky, and burst with a great clatter. Cities that even in the small hours of the night were never silent, were about to experience something unprecedented.

Town clocks struck with mechanical predictability and in village churches up and down the land peals of bells, so often used for celebration, with their repeated tumbling refrains summoned people to stand still and to remember.

In the coastal towns of Britain the signal for those in distress at sea which customarily caused families of sailors to flinch and pause with fear, rang out. At Piccadilly Circus, the place where Londoners felt the pulse of their city, the traffic was still thudding when the first maroon sounded. By the time the second maroon was heard the heartbeat was arrested, the man late for work no longer ran for the bus, families huddled at the edge of the pavement, poised to dash across the street, a window cleaner steadied his ladder, the violet-seller fell silent. Over them all, the elegant stone wings of Eros were as ever frozen in motion. For a moment or two as the traffic came to a halt, a faint under-hum could be heard; then all conversation ceased. The only sound was the splash of the fountain.

Far beneath the London streets all underground trains had ceased to run. Above ground London was normally so frantic that the police were often in despair. Motorcycles carried with them a particular danger, according to the mid-November issue of the
Saturday Review
, and seemed to drive ‘at full speed at pedestrians’, while the police were seen to ‘scold instead of soothing the pedestrians who appeal for help’. But just before 11.00 a.m. motorcycles and cars waited obediently at junctions. Engines stilled as War Office lorries, taxis and motorbuses came to a halt. Horses exhaled deeply as they were pulled up by the side of the road.

Bicycles braked, road menders laid down their spades, telephone exchange operators unplugged their connection boards, factory workers switched off the machinery, dock workers stopped their unloading, schoolchildren stopped their lessons, miners downed their tools, shoppers stopped their purchasing, lovers stopped murmuring, and even villagers talking to one another over the garden fence held their tongues.

In London the King and Queen had sent their wreath to Whitehall in advance of their own arrival, and just before Big Ben’s minute hand moved to the top of the clock, Lloyd George, white moustachioed, his long hair touching the collar of his dark tail coat, was seen walking towards the now rather dilapidated wood and plaster Cenotaph that had continued to be a focus for mourners since the summer. He was carrying orchids and white roses, woven into a circlet of laurel leaves. An announcement that the monument would be demolished early in the year had prompted a huge protest against the Ministry of Works for being ‘utterly without soul or sentiment or understanding’.

But while Whitehall and Lutyens’s monument provided the grand backdrop for royalty and statesmen and other leaders of the nation, this was really a silence designed for the common man. Men bared their heads, holding their hats before them in clasped hands. Only the act of breathing, the final affirmation of life, remained as the sign of human activity. In that fraction of a second before the silence began a reporter for
The Times
noticed a ‘certain hesitancy’ in the step, in anticipation of the moment, and within those small gestures an unmistakable determination not to miss it.

The first stroke of Big Ben announcing the hour of eleven gave notice of what was required as the nation fell still. ‘Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of attention,’ wrote an observer. ‘The hush deepened.’

At precisely 11.00 a.m. all movement stopped.

In that silence many prayed that the meaning of death would somehow be revealed. But some questioned whether such understanding would give them relief from unhappiness. No one who had lost someone in the war (and it was estimated that three million people had lost someone close) was immune from grief. Many tried not to give in to it, believing that acknowledgement of the intensity of their feelings would lead them to the verge of collapse. Some found that after the initial shock a state of denial was in itself a comfort.

Others were like Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Chancellor and Leader of the House during the wartime Coalition Government. Bonar Law had lost two of his sons, killed in action, and his friend Lord Blake described how Bonar Law was managing his loss. ‘Night seemed to have descended upon him. For the moment he was incapable of work and could only sit despondently gazing into vacancy. All those dark clouds which were never far below the horizon of his thought came rolling up obliterating light and happiness.’ Silence was unlikely to bring much comfort to Bonar Law. For within silence lies not only stillness but also agitation: the agitation of memory. For the agitated mind silence can become a place of threat and even of terror. At a time when the pain rather than the comfort of memory predominates, ‘the great wings of silence continue to beat’. Absolute silence remains elusive.

That morning
The Times
reporter described how

Even in the high Alps the solemn stillness which sometimes comes with the night is broken by the groan of the creeping glacier or smothered thunder of a distant avalanche. In the depths of a wood at twilight a leaf rustles or a twig snaps.

In London’s Westminster the sudden sharp sound of a woman’s sob was made all the more painful by its unexpectedness, its isolation and its quivering echo, coming and going, strengthening and fading
between the tall grey buildings of Whitehall. Life, breath, sound would go on, but never again without being mistrusted or feared. Certainty and dependability had gone. This was, in Quaker terms, a ‘living silence’: those who took part were actively engaged in thought.

There were some in the crowd around the Cenotaph, who had come with their families to take part in the solemn moment, for whom the outside world no longer held any meaning. The damaging roar of the trenches had made many unable to hear even the slightest sound. For them silence was a permanent state.

But during lulls in the firing in France one unenfeebled sound had persisted through all, usually at its clearest with the first light of day. The unexpected and welcome sound of birdsong was often noticed by Duff Cooper, who had written from the trenches to his girlfriend Diana Manners in 1918 to tell her how ‘still bravely’ the larks continued to sing. ‘Everywhere else in France they are shot by the Français sportifs,’ he wrote. ‘But here since neither the English nor the Germans can ever hit anything they are perfectly safe, with the result that the front line has become a regular bird refuge, and ... one has anyhow always to be awake at dawn which as you know is their favourite hour for kicking up a row.’ Maybe some of those who stood now, their heads bowed, their heads bared, were summoning from memory the beauty of the birdsong, perhaps the only thing of beauty they had encountered during four years.