Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith
London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2009
Copyright © Peter Parker 2009
Peter Parker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007357963
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007440078
Version: 2014-12-01
For my godson Julius Lunn
– next generation –
CONTENTS
ONE: The Unknown Warrior 1919–1921
TWO: A Nation Remembers? 1921–1939
INTERLUDE: Old Soldiers 1939–1945
THREE: Fifty Years On 1945–2000
Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years’ dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, ‘Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?’
THOMAS HARDY, ‘And There Was a Great Calm’
News that the Great War for Civilisation had finally come to an end was greeted by noisy rejoicing on the streets of London and other cities around the world, but what struck most people on the battlefields of France and Belgium was the silence. At 11 a.m. on Monday, 11 November 1918, after four and a quarter years in which howitzers boomed, shells screamed, machine guns rattled, rifles cracked, and the cries of the wounded and dying echoed in no man’s land, everything suddenly fell quiet. Across parts of Belgium a thick fog had descended that morning, with visibility down to ten yards. In the muffled landscape the stillness seemed almost palpable. Since for most soldiers news of the approaching armistice did not reach them until an hour or less before it was implemented, it is extraordinary that the guns really did fall silent at exactly the planned time. In one part of the line near Le Cateau a German machine gun was firing at the British troops in the opposite trench until the very last minute. ‘At precisely eleven o’clock an officer stepped out of their position, stood up, lifted his helmet and bowed to the British troops. He then fell in all his men in the front of the trench and marched them off.’
Of those who survived, Air Mechanic Henry Allingham of the Royal Air Force was still in Belgium on the morning of 11 November. Ninety years later he recalled that his fellow servicemen ‘grabbed hold of anything that would make a lot of noise – to celebrate, you see. They let off stray shells, Very lights and whatnot. A lot of men, some who’d been right through the war, didn’t make it through the night.’ Others merely got very drunk, while Allingham himself went to bed and enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of a good night’s sleep. The revelling of his fellows took its toll and the following morning few of the ranks were ready to move out at 8 a.m. as planned. It was therefore not until three hours later that they began their long route march through Belgium to Cologne, where the defeated German people surprised Allingham by their friendliness. They may have lost the war, but they were presumably as relieved as the victors that it had finally ended. It was ‘a cheerless, dismal, cold misty day’ in the Forêt de Mormal on the Franco-Belgian border, Gunner B.O. Stokes of the New Zealand Field Artillery recalled. ‘There was no cheering or demonstration. We were all tired in body and mind, fresh from the tragic fields of battle, and this momentous announcement was too vast in its consequences to be appreciated or accepted with wild excitement. We trekked out of the wood on this dreary day in silence.’ Captain Guy Chapman of the Royal Fusiliers had a similar experience,