When the armistice came, “at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month”, Cambridge undergrads made for Bertrand Russell’s rooms on Trinity Street and smashed them up. He had said the war was wrong. They said it had been right, and anyway we won it.
Enormous crowds rejoiced in London far into the night and went waving and shrieking to Buckingham Palace. Others did not feel like rejoicing. Young Vera Brittain had been nursing the wounded in France. Her fiance, her two closest male friends and her beloved only brother had all been killed. Now she walked away from the crowds alone. Later she wrote: “Already this was a different world … a world in which people would be lighthearted and forgetful, in which themselves and their careers and their amusements would blot out political ideals and great national issues.”
This wasn’t quite true. New ideals formed as people made different sorts of sense out of the chaos left by the first world war. But “blotting out” happened. Nearly three-quarters of a million young British men were dead. One-and-a-half million had been disabled, fully or partly. And yet the tissue of British society grew back over the open wound with almost horrifying speed. For a few years there was a slight increase in the majority of women in the population. But the war dead numbered less than the prewar rate of emigration – mostly of young men.
Grief and horror remained. But the general revulsion to the war, imagining it as a pointless mass murder conducted by bone-headed brass hats, really began some 10 years later. It was then that the memoirs and poetry of soldier-authors such as Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg, were published or republished in editions large enough to reach a wide public.
It was different in the immediate wake of the armistice. War propaganda, much more crude and hate-filled than in the second world war, left many – perhaps most – happily certain that Britain had won a moral victory of good over evil. “Hang the Kaiser” and “Make Germany Pay” were the popular slogans. Survivors and the bereaved tried to give traditional, often Christian, meaning to the war deaths. But anyone who visits the military cemeteries in Flanders or the Somme battleground can see how the cult of the “fallen” slowly changed over time. The first monuments talk about “the supreme sacrifice”, or repeat that “they died that we might live”. The later ones tend to leave God and sacrifice out of it. They only ask us not to forget, or assert hopefully that “their memory liveth for evermore”. They express sadness and loss, rather than insisting on noble purpose. The South African memorial at Delville Wood carries the words of then prime minister Jan Smuts: “I do sincerely believe that we are struggling for the preservation, against terrible odds, of what is most precious in our civilisation.” Even a few years later, that sentence upset visitors.
The idea of a tomb for the unknown soldier, and eventually for a Cenotaph, started as a practical idea for bereaved families. Then it turned into a state shrine. This was the first war where the destructive power blasted thousands of soldiers to unidentifiable fragments or to nothing at all – “missing”. The British and the French, whose missing stood in six figures as the war ended, saw that families with no body to bury needed a symbolic “unknown” tomb at which to mourn. The British and their empire, with more than 54,000 missing names on the great vault at Ypres alone, buried an unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey. But the empty Cenotaph soon became simply an official site for the annual commemoration of all the war dead, whether “Known Unto God” or named. The nation’s leaders attend. But the core symbols of the ceremony are spare, as if no gesture can measure up to the memory: a red field poppy and a silence.
The soldiers were rapidly demobilised. Four-fifths of them had been discharged by the summer of 1919. This haste had roots in the violent “mutinies” by fed-up men in French transit camps. (Six Canadian soldiers were killed during a protest at a camp in Rhyl, Wales). For those who had gone through the nightmare of the western front, re-entry into “normal” life was often agonisingly difficult. Nobody then talked about post-traumatic stress. But many came back as damaged men, often disoriented and easy to mislead. In Germany, such veterans were recruited into the unofficial Freikorps militias, murderous fighters against outer and inner enemies – Poles or Communists – and later a source of recruits for the Nazis. In Britain, between 1919 and 1921, such men joined the notorious Black and Tans and auxiliaries – ex-soldiers sent to join Britain’s campaign to suppress Ireland’s armed struggle for independence. But, unlike the Freikorps, the Black and Tans had no future in postwar British politics. In the same way, the British Legion never tried to become a menacing ultra-patriotic force like the Stahlhelm in Weimar Germany.
Plenty has been said and written about the traumas of the “lost generation”, the young men who came home from the trenches. Few write about the impact on the parents’ generation. They had often lost their husbands and brothers, above all their sons and, in upper-class families, their heirs. The young, by and large, recovered quite well. In the brief postwar boom, smart London danced and partied, while in the rest of the country wages rose and returning soldiers without a job received free unemployment insurance.
In post-1918 Britain, the middle and upper classes began to feel threatened in new ways. Everyone, almost, now had the vote: women over 30 were enfranchised in 1918. The impact of Lloyd George’s 1909 People’s Budget taxes on land, death duties and high incomes, was made suddenly sharper by the inflation that followed the war. As the confidence given by wealth and rank crumbled, English class distinctions became more brittle and nervous. One per cent of the population still owned 66% of national wealth. But to the old entitled, the wrong sort of people seemed to be gaining power. Stanley Baldwin, then a rising Tory star who posed as a simple country gentleman, looked at the parliament elected in 1918 and claimed to see “hard-faced men who had done well out of the war”. Antisemitism, never absent, became nastier, and not only because many Jews had German names. In the “thriller” literature that sprang up around the end of the war (Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond novels, Dornford Yates, even some of John Buchan’s work), the villains tended to be swarthy cosmopolitans, sometimes directly identified as Jews, out to subvert the British empire for the sake of gold.
Politics, Liberal or Tory, grew less imaginative in the 1920s and more improvised in response to events. Brittain had a point when she foresaw that “political ideals and great national issues” would be blotted out. Britain’s problems in the early 1920s might seem trivial compared with the gigantic triple crisis that had loomed in 1914. Then, organised labour was preparing a combined assault on private capitalism. Rising suffragette militancy was wrecking government authority. Finally, and worst, the Conservative opposition was arming Ulster Protestants to resist home rule for Ireland. Incredible as it now seems, Tory leaders were ready to unleash Irish civil war in order to destroy the Liberal government in London. As in today’s Brexit deadlock, the main parties at Westminster were hopelessly split and parliament faced a crisis too vast for it to manage. Only the outbreak of war in August had saved the UK in a recognisable shape.
The war, like a tsunami, tumbled all three challenges about. When the flood withdrew, they all emerged again, still recognisable but now separately manageable. War production, coupled with the surge of unskilled workers into armaments and shipbuilding, had led to conflicts but also to forced cooperation. A tougher, more experienced race of militant shop stewards came forward in 1918.
But a fateful division in the Labour movement also appeared. Coal mining had been nationalised during the war and miners had been encouraged with job security and better wages. After the armistice, the industry was handed back to the private owners (perhaps the most narrow-minded and callous group in Britain’s economic history). Conflict with the employers broke out in 1919. But it soon became clear that the old “triple alliance” between miners and the railway and transport unions had weakened. The miners were out to smash the owners for good and, later, eager to overthrow capitalism itself. The others, then and through the 1926 general strike, stayed loyal allies up to a point, but – when the heat was on – preferred to seek a deal, rather than a revolution.
Ireland in 1918 was already lost to Britain. The Easter Rising of 1916, or rather the insane British decision to put its leaders before a firing squad and then to impose conscription, had tilted Irish opinion towards independence. Home rule, though granted, was now irrelevant. IRA squads were shooting British soldiers and burning Anglo-Irish country houses, and the British responded in kind. The only question for London was how to cast Ireland adrift without a war over partition.
After several years of brutal and pointless reprisals by the army, the British government, led by Lloyd George, decided to negotiate. A “free state” was proposed, a compromise short of full independence that accepted the partition of Ireland into north and south. Cynically, Lloyd George – now prime minister – managed to split the Sinn Féin delegation by bamboozling some of them into signing this deal. It was repudiated in Dublin, pitching free staters and republicans into a tragic civil war for which Lloyd George was largely responsible.
The suffragette movement, once a torrent, parted into many channels and fertile wetlands after 1918. One reason was that it had achieved some of its original aim: the wartime coalition government had agreed to give women over 30 the vote, which they used powerfully in the 1918 election. A second was that two of the three Pankhursts who had led the movement – Emmeline and her daughter Christabel – became loudly patriotic when war broke out (Sylvia, the socialist daughter, stayed a pacifist). In 1915 Christabel had led a famous women’s march through London behind the slogan “We Want Work”. Lloyd George, then minister of munitions, was delighted to oblige and recruit women into war production: by the armistice nearly a million women had jobs in the metal and chemical industries. It was an experience of (temporary) empowerment and (limited) equality with men that women refused to forget.
After the armistice, supporters of the old suffrage movement no longer smashed windows or burned country houses. Instead they acted “constitutionally”, usually through lobbying MPs for private members’ bills. The Pankhurst era had been about equality with men. But, after 1918, a more fundamental feminism broke the surface, arguing that women had rights to their own body. The dauntless Marie Stopes published Married Love in 1918, the first of her books to teach sexual technique and discuss the female orgasm. In 1921 she set up Britain’s first birth control clinic. Book and clinic became overwhelmingly popular, with all but the nervously stuffy establishment. (When Stopes, a married woman, had a son in 1924, the Times refused to accept the birth announcement).
The right to pleasure began a slow general breakthrough after the armistice. A new, impudent individualism jumped aboard new technologies. By 1930 there were more than a million private cars. Going to the cinema, often several times a week, became a national habit. The BBC – the newsreaders really did have to wear dinner jackets – started broadcasting in 1923. Popular newspapers with stories about sex-mad vicars grew gigantic in circulation. Dog-racing came in. The palais de danse multiplied. While class divisions remained rigid – accents, dress, how to hold a knife and fork – deference began to wither. In 1916 a youth from a public school only had to blow a whistle and intelligent men would get out of a trench and walk towards the machine guns. By 1939 their sons wanted a convincing reason before they walked. Perhaps that was the most profound change after 1918.
Britain had coalition governments in both world wars, and wartime coalitions felt free to plan bold reforms for peacetime. Lloyd George (a greater orator than Churchill) announced that “the nation is now in a molten state. We cannot return to the old ways, the old abuses, the old stupidities.” After the armistice, in his most magnificent speech, he declared that “the Great War has been like a gigantic star-shell, flashing all over the land, illuminating the country and showing up the deep, dark places. We have seen places that we have never noticed before, and we mean to put these things right.”
Short of a revolution, reality could never live up to that. Such reforms as were carried out were mostly nibbled away later by Tory chancellors or by the national government during the Depression. The historian AJP Taylor said cattily that free treatment for venereal diseases was “the only innovation in ‘welfare’ directly attributable to the first world war”. Nonetheless, it was the Tories who now laid more foundations for a welfare state, to be extended by the brief Labour government of 1924, rebuilt by Churchill’s wartime coalition, and made into a coherent settlement after 1945. A Ministry of Health was created. The 1918 Education Act raised the school leaving age to 14, introducing two-year optional further education and state nursery schools.
Lloyd George, beginning that “star-shell” speech, asked: “What is our task?” He famously answered himself: “To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.” Between the armistice and the 1929 slump, there was a hectic house-building programme driven first by Lloyd George’s postwar coalition, then by the Tories pouring money into the private housing sector, then by John Wheatley, minister in the 1924 Labour government, whose Housing Act subsidised the building of council houses.
As the war ended, the British wanted to hear no more of tragic, hopeless Europe. The Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had all collapsed. From Galway in the west to Kiev in the east, chaotic fighting was raging across the continent as emerging nations fought out their frontiers or suppressed revolutions. But Lloyd George had agreed that this had been “the war to end wars”, which meant British engagement in a European peace. Dodging the “Hang the Kaiser” chorus, he astonished the other allied leaders – Georges Clemenceau of France, US president Woodrow Wilson, Vittorio Orlando of Italy – by arguing for a just peace that did not inflict intolerable punishment on Germany. The harsh option, he prophesied, would mean that “we shall have to do the whole thing over again in 25 years at three times the cost”. But the others thought he was mad. Lloyd George subsided. The terms Versailles imposed on Germany were even harsher than he feared, and his predictions came true.
For most people in Britain, the armistice brought deep pride as well as relief. But the war of 1914-1918 had done profound, at first invisible, damage. The late historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that “Britain was never the same again after 1918, because the country had ruined its economy by waging a war substantially beyond its resources”. Overseas investments had been sold, a huge debt incurred to the US. Worse, the war economy fossilised business minds into thinking that Britain could go on digging coal, building warships and guns and selling cotton goods for ever. Industry was far too slow to modernise or diversify. When the postwar period ended in the great slump of 1929-31, families where the man worked down the pit and the wife worked in the mill went hungry.
In spite of all the valour and victories, the war had knocked much of the stuffing out of Britain’s leadership. The courage to innovate, to think and act right outside the box, had gone. Where was the spirit of Gladstone’s home rule and land policies in Ireland, or of Lloyd George’s prewar assault on the wallets of the rich, or the daring of normally cautious Herbert Asquith as he attacked and smashed forever the veto power of the House of Lords in 1911? After the war, John Maynard Keynes and Oswald Mosley (in his pre-fascist days) both offered far-sighted analyses of what was wrong and what to do. But they were marginal figures. Many years passed before governments “did Keynes”, and by then Mosley had disgraced himself.
In his book Hope and Glory, the historian Peter Clarke writes that “the navy, the empire and the gold standard, interlocking and mutually supportive, were at once the three symbols and the three pillars of British power and pre-eminence”. In 1900, that is. They emerged from the first world war apparently intact, even majestic. The navy was vast and victorious. The empire, India especially, had shown its loyalty by sending its young men to die at Gallipoli and on the western front. Britain had stopped pegging sterling to the price of gold as the war began, but Winston Churchill, as chancellor, restored the gold standard in 1925.
Soon all three pillars began to shiver. The Royal Navy was demoralised by the Geddes Axe personnel cuts in the 1920s, and by the Invergordon mutiny of 1931; when seamen rejected pay cuts and stopped work, the news touched off a run on the pound. That, in turn, forced a terrified government off the gold standard (nothing much happened as a result, and the relieved Labour chancellor, Sidney Webb, said: “Nobody told us we could do that!”) In 1926 the empire became the Commonwealth as it divided into dominions (mostly and misleadingly considered “white”, over which Britain gave up sovereignty) and the United Kingdom with its colonies. India, which had contributed much the largest imperial contingent to the war, continued to agitate for independence.
After the joy of Armistice Day, British people did not go on celebrating for long. Spanish flu, the most lethal pandemic ever to hit the human race, was at its peak; it killed something like a quarter of a million people in Britain (16 million in India), cruelly preferring young adults as its victims. And the war had left few heroes. Douglas Haig was not as stupid a commander as he was soon made out to be, but the fearful slaughter on the Somme in July 1916 was senseless and his fault. Lloyd George had been an inspiring war leader, but he was devious and nobody quite trusted him.
Curiously, King George V comes very well out of the first world war. He called himself “an ordinary little man”, but he repeatedly intervened to head off some of his ministers’ worst impulses. He ordered the Admiralty to stop roughing up U-boat prisoners, saw that the Zinoviev Letter smearing Labour was a forgery, and stopped the government penalising workers who came out in the general strike. Best of all, he personally offered dominion status to Ireland at a moment when Lloyd George’s government was playing with the idea of full-scale military reconquest.
Out in France, the war graves commission began to assemble the dead into new cemeteries, changing the wooden crosses into the silent forests of white gravestones we know today. Back home, ex-soldiers looked for work, hoped the awful dreams would stop, and tried to keep in touch with the others.
In Bradford, the writer JB Priestley went to a reunion dinner with his old battalion from the Somme, the 10th Duke of Wellington’s. He couldn’t find most of his comrades; they were dead. Surviving pals told him how hard they found it to like this cold new world of peacetime.
The reunion shook him to the core. Priestley cursed people who grew sentimental about wartime. “They do not seem to see that it is not war that is right, for it is impossible to defend such stupid long-range butchery, but that it is peace that is wrong, the civilian life to which they returned, a condition of things in which they found their manhood stunted, their generous impulses baffled, their double instinct for leadership and loyalty completely checked.”
He ended: “Men are much better than their ordinary life allows them to be.” A hundred years after the armistice, that’s the one revelation of war that we don’t commemorate.
