Introduction

Abstract

Towards the start of her popular history The Great Silence 1918–1920: Living in the Shadow of the Great War, Juliet Nicholson offers an account of Armistice Day made up of a series of vignettes culled from diaries, letters and memoirs.¹ We learn of Harold Nicholson, looking up from his desk in Whitehall to see David Lloyd George excitedly announcing peace from the steps of 10 Downing Street; of Duff Cooper, looking down at the celebrating crowds and feeling ‘overcome with melancholy’; of Vera Brittain, working as a voluntary aid detachment (VAD) nurse, whose ‘joylessness grew with the same speed as the elation that surrounded her’; of Cynthia Curzon celebrating in Trafalgar Square, but afterwards admonished by Oswald Mosley for her lack of consideration of ‘the loss of life, the devastation and misery’; and of D.H. Lawrence and his famous outburst at a Bloomsbury party. The war isn’t over’, he is reputed to have said, ‘It makes me sick to see you rejoicing like a butterfly in the last rays of sun before the winter … Whatever happens there can be no peace on earth.’ Nicholson valiantly struggles to introduce the voices of more ordinary individuals into her account, but the famous names of the aristocratic, the literary and the politically powerful mount up: Lucy Duff Gordon, Thomas Hardy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, Serge Diaghilev, David Garnett, Vanessa Bell, Osbert Sitwell, Virginia Woolf, Adolf Hitler and so on.

Naturally the crowds found their way through the doors of the picture houses and with lighter hearts than they have had for over four years settled down to enjoy the movies, which have been such a solace and comfort during the dark days which we have passed.

Kinematograph Weekly, 21 November 1918

I felt more and more melancholy and hopeless of the human race. They make one doubt whether any decent life will ever be possible, or whether it matters if we are at war or at peace.

Virginia Woolf, Diaries, 11 November 1918