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At only 25, Wilfred Owen had never published a book but had in his notebooks the finest body of poetry about the experience of war written in the twentieth century. At noon on November 11, an hour into the celebrations, Owen's mother received the black-bordered War Office telegram telling her that, a week earlier, her son had been killed in action.

In verses about this day, another poet, Thomas Hardy, wrote:

Calm fell. From heaven distilled a clemency;

There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;

Some could, some could not, shake off misery:

The Sinister Spirit sneered: "It had to be!"

And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, "Why?"

VII. EXEUNT OMNES

22. THE DEVIL'S OWN HAND

THE WAR LEFT what Churchill called a "crippled, broken world." The full death toll cannot be known, because several of the governments keeping track of casualties had dissolved in chaos or revolution by the war's end. Even by the most conservative of the official tabulations—one made by the U.S. War Department six years later—more than 8.5 million soldiers were killed on all fronts. Most other counts are higher, usually by about a million. "Every day one meets saddened women, with haggard faces and lethargic movements," the writer Beatrice Webb noted in her diary a week after the Armistice, "and one dare not ask after husband or son." And the deaths did not end with the war: the Times continued to run its "Roll of Honour" each day for months afterward as men died of their wounds. Except in a handful of lucky neutral countries, on virtually every street in Europe could be found bereaved households where there was, as Wilfred Owen had written, at "each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds."

More than 21 million men were wounded; some carried pieces of shrapnel in their bodies, or were missing arms, legs, or genitals. So many veterans had mangled faces that those in France formed a national Union of Disfigured Men; in Britain, 41,000 men had one or more limbs amputated, another 10,000 were blinded, and 65,000 veterans were still receiving treatment for shell shock ten years after the war.

The toll was particularly appalling among the young. Of every 20 British men between 18 and 32 when the war broke out, three were dead and six wounded when it ended. One of the highest death rates was among those who, like the 18-year-old John Kipling, were born in the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. If the British dead alone were to rise up and march 24 hours a day past a given spot, four abreast, it would take them more than two and a half days. Although this book has concentrated on Britain, which lost more than 722,000 men killed (not to speak of more than 200,000 soldiers dead from the rest of the empire), the combat death toll was more than half again higher in Austria-Hungary, nearly double in France (which had a smaller population than Britain), more than double in Russia, and nearly triple in Germany. Of the many million pairs of grieving parents, we will never know how many felt that their sons had died for something noble, and how many felt what one British couple expressed in the epitaph they placed on their son's tombstone at Gallipoli: "What harm did he do Thee, O Lord?"

Parents of men declared missing sometimes could not bring themselves to accept that their sons would never return. "As a mother deprived of both her children through the war, one a naval officer," read a letter signed "Hope" that appeared in the Times two months after the Armistice, "may I plead with the Government to authorize a strict search being made throughout the North Coast of Egypt and in the islands in the Mediterranean ... for missing English women and men?...There may be some who have lost their memories, and others who have been rescued by native fisherfolk."

Periodically some event would expose the continent's vast reservoir of grief. When Britain's Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey on the second anniversary of the Armistice, across the country, at 11 A.M.,