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

made. It had been a false alarm. There was no armistice as yet. America who had joined the war nineteen months earlier remained at war.
     
    Five days later, on 11 November New York felt both sheepish and exhausted and Lucy noticed that the champagne they still felt compelled to drink had lost its fizz.
    In London, the newspaper compositors had been given six hours’ notice for assembling the size of type suitable for announcing the news that people had been longing for. The Armistice headlines were an inch high and small boys on bicycles careered through therain-drenched streets carrying bundles of damp newspapers yelling the single word ‘Victory’.
     
    In front of Buckingham Palace the white marble statue of Queen Victoria turned black with the number of people who had climbed into the old sovereign’s lap and clung to the winged statues that surrounded her seated figure. The royal family appeared briefly on the balcony acknowledging the cheering crowds, a reassuring symbol for some that Britain was returning to normal.
    In London’s East End, the eleven o’clock sirens were at first confused for those that announced an air raid. The death of several children in Poplar two years before, when a Zeppelin bomb had exploded in the grounds of a school, had not been forgotten. Children in Canning Town were terrified when a shop handed out armfuls of free fireworks. The noise made by the rockets and Catherine wheels were frighteningly reminiscent of the deadly German bombs.
    Duff Cooper, glamorous diplomat and Grenadier, had returned from the battle lines a few days earlier. Back in London he felt overcome with despondency and unable to go down into the streets and join the Armistice Day party. As he watched the scene below him, with the coloured fairy lights threaded through the tricolour draperies, the cheering and the waving of flags, he was ‘overcome with melancholy’. He shuddered at the dancing and the noise of celebration and could think only of his friends ‘who were dead’. After dining at the Ritz on food that was ‘cold and nasty’ he slipped away as soon as possible, feeling the infinite sadness of loss wash over his girlfriend, Diana Manners, reducing her to tears. There was another reason, however, for Duff’s low spirits. He had a temperature of 102 and he suspected that he might be suffering from ‘a sharp attack’ of influenza.
    Florence Younghusband, wife of General George Younghusband who had commanded British and Indian troops during the Turkish invasion of Egypt, was travelling on the top of a London bus at the moment of the ceasefire. In front of her was a soldier, his face shattered by a shell. As Florence watched, the soldier ‘looked straight ahead and remained stonily silent’. Suddenly the lady bus conductor collapsed into the seat beside her and, leaning her head on Florence’s shoulder, she wept. Her husband, she confided to Florence, had died two monthsbefore and she felt incapable of celebrating. Florence, whose husband had been invalided home in 1916, felt herself to be a lucky one.
    Susan and Tom Owen listened as the church bells of Shrewsbury began ringing, and said a prayer of thanks that their three sons had been spared, before going to answer the knock on the front door. A young man stood outside patiently, a telegram in his hand. The news concerning Wilfred, their eldest boy, could not have been more terrible.
    Vera Brittain heard the sounds that signalled of the end of the war through the window of the London hospital annexe where her hands were buried deep in a basin of pinkish water. Standing in her nurse’s uniform she continued to wash out and disinfect the bloody dressing bowls. Her pointed chin was set firm in concentration at her task. She did not interrupt her work, because ‘like a sleeper who is determined to go on dreaming after being told to wake up’ she had no interest in the jubilation going on outside the window. Only three years earlier she had written