The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson Read Free Book Online Page A

who stood on the banks shouting abuse as the train passed by, indicating with a swipe of the hand how they would like to cut the former leader’s throat.
    In the English Channel the crew of HMS
Amazon
, which was patrolling the stretch of sea at Beachy Head, were amazed to see a French fishing boat covered in flags. As fishermen shouted out that the war was over, the incredulous captain of the
Amazon
retorted that the boat should return to harbour at once and stop giving false hope to other passing ships.
    In London, a young diplomat Harold Nicolson was working in the basement of his office in Whitehall, sufficiently confident in the imminent announcement of an armistice that he was already drawing up plans for the proposed peace conference. In fact he knew the ceasefire agreement had been signed in a railway carriage nearly six hours earlier in Compiégne. Leaving his desk for a moment in search of another map, Nicolson passed a window that overlooked the Prime Minister’s official residence. The time was five minutes to eleven on 11 November.
    At that moment the door of number 10 was flung open and a hatless Lloyd George emerged. His thick white hair, barely restrained behind his ears, reflected the eagerness of his mood. ‘At eleven o’clock this morning the war will be over,’ Nicolson heard Lloyd George cry out as if he was a street newspaper seller hoping to attract the attention of anyone who might be listening. He repeated the words several times. As Nicolson watched, the street began to fill up and within a few minutes there was no room to move. There was silence in the crowd, an interruption for cheering and then silence again. But by this time Lloyd George appeared flustered, his flushed face in contrast to the bright white of his hair which, owing to the absence of his customary homburg, was now flying all over the place in the wind. After a burst from the crowd of ‘God Save the King’, Lloyd George pushed his way back again through the mass of people towards the sanctuary of his famous front door.
    That afternoon, on the first day the guns fell silent, the announcement of the Kaiser’s abdication and his flight to Holland was posted outside
The Times’
office in Printing House Square. A group of passers-by gathered around the billboard and began to cheer. Butthe newspaper staff noted that the tone of the cheers was not ‘hilarious’. ‘The shadows of the last few years remained,’ the reporter noted, even though ‘the silver lining of passing clouds’ seemed to be reflected in the eyes of the passers-by.
    A week earlier, although there had been no official word that the Germans were planning a surrender, hundreds of German guns without public explanation or fanfare were placed along the length of the Mall from Buckingham Palace. Brought directly from the French battlefields, they resembled the wounded enemy soldiers themselves, pockmarked and stained. Final, brutal evidence of the war had arrived in the heart of the capital.
    In New York there had been a muddle. On Thursday 6 November rumours that the end of the war was imminent had become so pronounced that they were taken for fact. Glancing out of the window of her couture cutting room on to the pavement below, Lucy Duff Gordon, the famous British dress designer, New York resident and survivor of the
Titanic
disaster six years earlier, was amazed to see old men letting off fireworks and staid-looking fathers kissing lovely young women who were quite clearly perfect strangers. At 2.30 p.m. the Stock Exchange closed and one hundred and fifty-five tons of ticker tape fluttered down into the street. Lucy found herself swept up in the excitement and, although her couture business had not been thriving in the manner she would have liked, she impulsively offered all her dress-cutters time off and unlimited champagne for the rest of the day. The day passed, Lucy noted, ‘in an orgy of celebration’. As dusk was falling another official announcement was