To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [191]
The Armistice was signed in Foch's railway car at 5 A.M. on November 11, 1918, to go into effect six hours later. Senselessly, to no military or political purpose, Allied infantry and artillery attacks continued full steam through the morning. On this final half day of the war, after the peace was signed, 2,738 men from both sides were killed and more than 8,000 wounded. The first and last British soldiers to die in the war—16-year-old John Parr of Finchley, North London, a golf caddy who lied about his age to get into the army, and George Ellison, a 40-year-old miner from Leeds who survived all but the last 90 minutes of fighting—were killed within a few miles of each other near Mons, Belgium. It was recently discovered that, by coincidence, they are buried beneath pine trees and rosebushes in the same cemetery, Saint-Symphorien, seven yards apart.
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In the newspapers secretly supplied him by his Irish fellow inmates, Fenner Brockway read of socialists rising to power in Germany. He was in his prison cell, still on a punishment diet, when he heard the news that the Armistice was to take effect at 11 A.M. on November 11. Allowed no watch, he had learned to tell time by the position of a sunbeam on the wall.
I remember sitting on the shelf-table in the denuded cell, my feet on the stool, watching the sun creep along the wall towards eleven o'clock. I cannot reproduce the chaos and intensity of my thoughts.
Was the slaughter of four years to end?...Was I to see my family and children?...Was I to see the fields and woods and hills and sea?
The line of the sun on the wall approached eleven.
When horns began to blare all over the city, Brockway wept.
In a prison at Ipswich, another resister, Corder Catchpool, recorded an event that afternoon when he and other COs were in the exercise yard: "An airman suddenly swooped down from 3,000 feet and skimmed over our heads, waving a black arm and oily rag. I was deeply touched by this little incident. I took it as peace overtures from the Army to us—a message of goodwill for the future, by-gones by-gones, all recrimination and misunderstanding, all heart-burnings over, wiped out by that kind, dirty bit of cloth."
Bertrand Russell, recently released from prison, walked up Tottenham Court Road and watched Londoners pour out of shops and offices into the street to cheer. The public jubilation made him think of the similar mood he had witnessed when war was declared more than four years earlier. "The crowd was frivolous still, and had learned nothing during the period of horror.... I felt strangely solitary amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other planet."
Alfred Milner was woken that morning by a message that the Armistice had been signed. At 11 A.M. fireworks were shot off, bugles sounded, church bells rang, and Big Ben began striking again after more than four years of silence. Later in the day, Milner and other War Office officials were received by the King and Queen. They emerged from Buckingham Palace to join a huge crowd wildly cheering the appearance of the royal family on the palace balcony while bands played. Another crowd started a celebratory bonfire in Trafalgar Square, ripping signs off the sides of London buses to feed the flames. That evening, "Lady Edward dined with me," Milner noted in his diary. Then, like the consummate bureaucrat he was, he recorded escorting her to her lodgings "through crowded streets of rejoicing people—very orderly. Walked home again and sat up working till 2 A.M."
As church bells rang triumphantly throughout Britain, Carrie Kipling wrote in her diary, "A world to be remade without a son."
John Buchan toured the Department of Information, shaking hands with members of his staff. Above all, he felt exhausted: "I never realised how tired I was till the war stopped." The war had cost the lives of his brother and half of his closest friends.