Simon Heffer on the Great War that changed our country for ever
As bells sounded to celebrate the end of the conflict, tales of tragedy continued, writes Simon Heffer
Ahundred years ago today, at 9.30am, Pte George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers was killed on a patrol at Mons. His death was doubly ironic: he was the last British soldier to die before the Armistice that ended the Great War came into effect 90 minutes later; and he was an Old Contemptible, who had gone out with the British Expeditionary Force to Flanders in August 1914 and fought at the Battle of Mons that month, a defeat for the Allies that had precipitated a humiliating retreat. Now it was the Germans who awaited the coup de grâce; and poor Pte Ellison, who had survived everything else the Kaiser’s army could throw at him, died more pointlessly than most, with the end of hostilities in sight.
Four and a half hours earlier, in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne, German representatives had agreed to the Allies’ demands for a ceasefire. They could do nothing else. The Germans’ own allies had deserted them. Their army, which in June and July had advanced rapidly and dangerously close to Paris, was exhausted, outnumbered and routed. It was also demoralised: too many letters had come from wives and families at home talking of the shortages of food, clothes and fuel (a testament to the success of the Royal Navy’s blockade). Unrest was widespread: a workers’ soviet, based on those set up the previous year in Russia after the revolution, was established in Bavaria. To underline the irrevocable collapse of the old order, the Kaiser had abdicated the previous day and fled to Holland.
It had been clear from the Sunday papers on Nov 10 that the war was ending. It was merely a question of turning the screw on the wretched Germans until they caved in. Hoping the news would come through that day, crowds thronged the Mall in London – which was lined with captured German guns – and prepared to party outside Buckingham Palace. Despite cool weather, the King and Queen drove round London and were cheered wherever they went. However, they and the crowds would have to wait a little longer for final confirmation.
This was four years before the inception of the BBC, and the press was the main means of circulating news – that, and heavily-censored bulletins put up weekly in post offices. Telegrams were dispatched from London all over the country from press agencies, newspapers and post offices announcing the Armistice after four years and three months of suffering in which around 950,000 British and Empire troops had died.
Having received the news, David Lloyd George, the prime minister, convened a cabinet at the very moment Pte Ellison was fatally wounded. They decided church bells would be rung all over Britain at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the Armistice came into force, and further word was telegraphed around the kingdom to do this. In big cities, notably London, maroons sounded at 11am to signal the end of the war – which caused alarm, as they had hitherto been used to announce air raids by Zeppelins and Gotha bombers. Thus was the news brought to all corners of the kingdom; and there was general rejoicing.
Yet the joy – as opposed to the relief – was not universal.
As the bells rang out in Shrewsbury, the mother of Wilfred Owen received the telegram telling her that her poet son had been killed on Nov 4. As people lined the streets of towns and villages for spontaneous renditions of God Save the King, hundreds of thousands of families and millions of people had cause to remember “the unreturning army”. Many in Britain were unsure that their victorious nation and empire would survive intact any more than the defeated empires of Germany, Austria or Turkey had; or, even more threatening, that in this age of upheaval of old orders Britain would escape the fate of Russia, and avoid its own revolution. It rained heavily in London, causing Arnold Bennett, the novelist, to note that it was “an excellent thing to damp hysteria and Bolshevism”.
Beatrice Webb, the socialist activist whose politics were not Bennett’s, asked: “How soon will the tide of revolution catch up the tide of victory?” King George V was undaunted: to him it was “a wonderful day, the greatest in the history of this country”. Towns went wild with excitement, which increased the longer the pubs were open. Bonfires were lighted, including (rather dangerously) in Trafalgar Square. Siegfried Sassoon, who had risked a court-martial by calling for an end to the war a year earlier, watched the jubilation and called it “a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years”. As AJP Taylor, in his Oxford History of the period, memorably wrote: “Total strangers copulated in doorways and on the pavements. They were asserting g the triumph of life over death.”
Yet once the hangover passed there were grave problems to be dealt with, and not just at the peace conference at Versailles – which the following June would impose terms, dictated by the ravaged French, on the Germans that would fuel the rise of Nazism. Britain was gripped by the Spanish flu epidemic, whose second wave would kill around 150,000 people. Within two months 750,000 women, working in munitions factories, on farms and public transport, were made redundant. Around 3.67million officers and men were on the Army’s payroll at the Armistice, and most would have to find jobs. The national debt was 14 times the level of 1914.
What also resonates, a century later, is how the end of the war gave birth to the modern politician – one who is shameless in his duplicity and dishonesty.
Once the Armistice was concluded, Lloyd George called an election. He had no party of his own – his fellow Liberals had mostly deserted him in 1916 when he deposed his predecessor, Herbert Henry Asquith – and relied on his Conservative coalition partners to put him back into power. On Nov 23, he said to a meeting in Wolverhampton: “What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.” He had scant means or, really, inclination to do that. Of the 500,000 houses the government promised to build by the end of 1921, it managed about 200,000, which is why he was thrown out of office in 1922. Perhaps it was a broken promise rather than a lie. However, he did nothing to discourage the slogan put round by his supporters that he was “the man who won the war”. In fact, he had very nearly lost it.
The previous January and February, after the Bolsheviks stopped fighting the Germans and Austrians in the East, the Germans had moved dozens of divisions to the Western Front. British military intelligence urged Lloyd George to send reinforcements to meet an attack. He refused, because he disliked Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, and believed he would use fresh troops to conduct a disastrous offensive such as on the Somme or at Passchendaele. So, to spite him, troops were not sent: and the Germans attacked on March 21, forced the British into a 50-mile retreat, and once more were within reach of Paris, which they bombarded. The troops were then sent after all.
Had German supply lines not been so long and its men so fatigued, and had Gen Pershing not arrived with a vast US army, the line would probably not have held; and the sort of British retreat witnessed at Dunkirk in 1940 would have been the likely outcome.
In his often fictional war memoirs, Lloyd George puts it differently, seeking to aggrandise himself. But we are lucky that, today, we remember a massive sacrifice that ended in a sort of victory, and not in a disastrous defeat.
Incompetent government is nothing knew. A mess was made of demobilisation, to the point where troops rioted and there were threats of mutinies. The land fit for heroes had an economic boom in 1919-20 followed by a rapid and disastrous bust. Around Britain slums remained uncleared and poverty was rife, breeding unrest that, in 1926, caused the General Strike. But on Armistice Day 1918, that was all in the future; and it was well that people rejoiced while they could because many Germans believed, and more thoughtful Britons feared, that the war between the two powers was not over, but merely paused.
It gave birth to the modern politician, shameless in his duplicity