The silent morning

Culture and memory after the Armistice

Trudi Tate, Kate Kennedy, Trudi Tate, Kate Kennedy

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784991166
  9780719090028
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526103406
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first book to study the cultural impact of the Armistice of 11 November 1918. It contains 14 new essays from scholars working in literature, music, art history and military history. The Armistice brought hopes for a better future, as well as sadness, disappointment and rage. Many people in all the combatant nations asked hard questions about the purpose of the war. These questions are explored in complex and nuanced ways in the literature, music and art of the period. This book revisits the silence of the Armistice and asks how its effect was to echo into the following decades. The essays are genuinely interdisciplinary and are written in a clear, accessible style.

1

The parting of the ways: The Armistice, the silence and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End

John Pegum

By 1925 Douglas Haig, Field Marshal and former commander-in-chief of the BEF, was, like the vast majority of those who had fought and survived the First World War, an ex-serviceman. Though his reputation would endure peaks and, mostly, troughs over the next several decades, in the ten years left to him following the end of the conflict he was generally thought of as ‘the man who won the war’.¹ He used that reputation, in his unobtrusive way, to champion the causes and concerns of the ex-serviceman community. He established the Haig Fund in 1921, the same year that he retired from the army and also accepted the presidency of the newly formed British Legion.² Both the charity and the association were committed to supporting the welfare of the veteran; the former through sales of remembrance poppies (quickly adopted by the mourning British population), the latter by acting as a unified voice for veterans’ concerns. Truly, Haig became as synonymous with the remembrance of the war as he had been hitherto with the running of it. And the ceremonies and civilities surrounding that remembrance were fractious indeed. The opposing impulses to celebrate and commemorate, so often represented by ex-servicemen and grieving civilians respectively, struggled for dominance on successive anniversaries of a day which became increasingly incapable of encompassing them both.

Following the raucous and feverish civilian celebrations of 11 November 1918, the tone of the day moved rapidly towards sobriety and reverence. It was unseemly to be festive on the anniversary of the war’s end as the full cost, in every sense, was brought home to the nation. Thus the ceremonies and rituals that grew up around the day – the Cenotaph, the Silence, the Exhortation, the Last Post and the poppy – resonate with sentiments that have come to embody the popular feeling of that war: absence, sacrifice, grief, eternal remembrance and unspeakable loss. But many veterans felt forgotten on this day of remembrance when, as Peter Deane remarked in 1930, ‘we neglect the survivors as though they didn’t exist, and keep our pity for the dead who have no need of it’.³ Charles Carrington thought of it more personally. He shunned the ceremonies at the Cenotaph, feeling that it was ‘too much like attending one’s own funeral’. Instead, he went to an annual reunion of army friends for ‘no end of a party’.⁴ This is just the sort of thing that the editor of the Saturday Review would object to. Writing shortly before the Armistice anniversary in 1924, he complains ‘what ought to be a day of humble remembrance has been transformed into a day of forgetfulness, a day on which they [the veterans] drown their own selfish cares in the oblivion of rowdy and extravagant frivolity’. He goes on to ask ‘Did they give their lives to make the world safe for saxophones?’⁵ Forced alliteration aside, the editorial gives vent to a popular feeling. Celebration was an insult to both the sacrifice of the dead and the grief of the bereaved. Ex-servicemen were often in conflict with civilians on Armistice Day anniversaries, sometimes violently so, and the situation could not be permitted to escalate. It was into this climate and with that intention that Douglas Haig wrote to the papers shortly before Armistice Day 1925.

Notionally representing, or being particularly aware of the feelings of, the two groups, Haig believed the day should be made to fit them all. He urged the people of the British Empire to conceive of the anniversary as a ‘day of remembrance’. In the morning there should be a thanksgiving service and a parade of veterans to the local war memorial. The afternoon should be filled with ‘games suited to the climate’ and the evening could be given over to rejoicing ‘according to taste’.⁶ Haig’s proposition that all parties and sentiments could be accommodated on the anniversary seems naive. Indeed, by the following year, the Scotsman was reporting on gala dances and balls taking place in Haig’s native Edinburgh for the ‘Peace Anniversary’ on 12 November 1926. This was ‘in accordance with the recommendation that the observance of the anniversary on its solemn and festive sides should be separated’.⁷ The veterans looking to celebrate were ‘out of key with the new age’ as the ‘Feast-Day became a Fast-Day’.⁸ But Haig wasn’t alone in troubling over the ex-serviceman’s place in the remembrance of the war. Ford Madox Ford, veteran and man of letters, spent much of the decade following the end of the war considering the Armistice, its impact and its opportunities.

Having been invalided from the Western Front in 1917 and then employed as an able administrator in Britain, Ford Madox Ford was at his regimental depot in Redcar, North Yorkshire, when the Armistice was declared. His Armistice Day was somewhat unusual for a soldier fortunate enough to find himself in a land untouched by the ravages of war. Rather than joining enthusiastically in the revels, Ford seems to have organised and catered for them:

I remember Armistice Day very well because I was kept so busy with military duties that I was on my feet all day until I fell into bed stone sober, at 4 next morning. We barbecued whole regimental pigs for the civilian population in the market-place, we organized mixed banquets, concerts, heaven knows what.⁹

But, apart from being exceptionally tired, he also found himself ‘inexpressibly sad’.¹⁰ At the time he attributes that sadness to the ‘breaking of [sic] after the old strain!’ but over the following years he grows to more fully understand the depth of meaning of the day; the moment that a great many possibilities opened up and just as many snapped shut. In Parade’s End, Ford famously describes the Armistice as a ‘crack across the table of History’.¹¹ In all its seismic imagery it is wholly appropriate and justifiably oft-quoted. Less famously, Ford employs a qualifying phrase immediately before this where he describes the event as ‘a parting of the ways’ (PE, 510). This is gentler and more personal rather than societal but it is just as unalterable. The Armistice was, as we shall see, a moment when two distinct groups parted ways or, at least, were forced to acknowledge the distance that had come between them. The Armistice Day ceremonies of the 1920s paraded that distance and Ford sought to explain it and even redress it.

The four volumes that make up Parade’s End were written and published in quick succession between 1924 and 1928 – the years running up to the tenth anniversary of the end of the war and preceding what has commonly come to be known as the ‘boom’ in books by ex-servicemen that sparked with the publication of the novels and memoirs of Remarque, Graves, Aldington, Sassoon, Blunden and dozens of less-literary veterans. The ceremony and sense of the Armistice was still being defined and the spirit of disenchantment, associated with those writers, had not yet become pervasive.¹² Parade’s End engages with this societal and literary ambiguity and both have their locus in the Armistice Day scenes in the third book in the series, A Man Could Stand Up – (1926). The Armistice is, as Saunders points out, ‘essential’ to the form and structure of not just the third book, but the entire tetralogy.¹³ That book, like the others, is as much about relations as it is about retrospection. It is about looking back at the parting of the ways from ten years on, but long before he started work on the series Ford had understood the principal feature of the new peace and found what would become the central theme of his series.

In a poem written shortly after the Armistice, entitled ‘Peace’, Ford ties together the end of the war with the end of his long-term affair and the freedom that this permits him and his new lover, Stella Bowen:

The black and nearly noiseless, moving, sea:
The immobile black houses of the town,
Pressing us out towards the noiseless sea
No sounds …
And, Thou of the Stars! Beneath the moving stars
Warm yellow lights upon the moving sea …
Moving …¹⁴

Bowen clearly offers Ford the warmth and stability that the unfathomable, rudderless relationship with Violet Hunt has hitherto blocked. But that rolling void is more precisely intended to depict the uncertainty thrust on him by the end of the war. The most resonant, threatening aspect of the sea is its noiselessness. Its silence is felt as an uncomfortable, pressing absence which is at odds with the peace and quiet that the title suggests. Ford was not alone in finding the new silence of the Armistice destabilising, but he explores the auditory qualities of the war and the peace and their terrors and freedoms in a more profound and personal way. This chapter will examine Ford’s depictions of silences and sensibilities in Parade’s End and look at how his characters respond to the noise of society and the noise of war. Through Ford’s work, I will explore the changes to the experience of silence that were brought about by the Armistice and crafted over ensuing years. How does the Two Minutes’ Silence come to be thought so appropriate and does Ford’s view of the Armistice anniversary align him more with those wishing to celebrate or commemorate? Before looking at Ford’s Armistice Day scenes and that moment when silence is reborn, it is important to understand the noise of war and how it beats the senses of the soldier.

All noise and no noise

From the very outset of the first book, Some Do Not… (1924), Christopher Tietjens, Ford’s principal character, is defined by his silences. Macmaster, Tietjens’ colleague and his opposite in affability and ambition, certainly believes that women in general, and Tietjens’ beautiful but ruthless wife Sylvia in particular, are ‘alarmed’ by his taciturnity (PE, 19). The two men, when introduced by Ford, travel in a well-appointed and smooth-running train, a perfect metaphor of pre-war stability, to the country house of the Duchemins where Tietjens will meet Valentine Wannop, another guest, who will challenge his powers of communication. Over breakfast, as the Revd Duchemin rants and Macmaster ingratiates himself with Mrs Duchemin, Valentine and Tietjens take the opportunity of ‘gazing at each other’ (PE, 86). Initially unable to get a word in edgeways in the general conversation at the table, Ford bases their ensuing relationship on the inability of speech to truly communicate. As Calderaro points out, Ford uses the ‘breakdown of language’ and the disjointedness of his own narrative structure as a symbolic recreation of ‘a fading world which had to establish new codes and new means of communication’.¹⁵ The stability of society is clearly going to shatter in the impending war, but even Tietjens’ own taciturnity is going to have to be broken down.

That taciturnity and struggle with language is nowhere more clearly seen, or rather heard, than in the episode in which Tietjens escorts Valentine to her home on the evening they spirit Gertie the suffragette away to a safe house in order to escape prosecution for her demonstration at the golf course. The two travel in a dog-cart along the country lanes around the Duchemins’ property. A heavy mist has developed and it stands thickly between the hedgerows, entirely obscuring the road and the ditches. Jumping from the cart to navigate a safe route, Valentine ‘completely disappeared into the silver’ and Tietjens is suddenly alone (PE, 124). She calls out from the murk asking him to ‘“make a noise from time to time”’ so that she can get her bearings (PE, 125). ‘“I wish you’d make some noise”’ (PE, 126). But Tietjens is tongue-tied; asked to say anything, his statistical instinct prevents him. Their journey thus far had been peppered with sporadic conversation – ‘about the safeness of the London girl [Gertie] from the police now; about the brickishness of the parson in taking her in’ – but mostly they had travelled in silence (PE, 130). ‘Not absolutely silent of course, but silentish!’ (PE, 130). After she had leapt from the dog-cart, Tietjens had wanted to call out but it would have ‘detracted from his stolidity’ (PE, 125). He believes that what he considers excessive talk she will find a contravention of their relations. ‘He had not known this young woman twenty-four hours, not to speak to, and already the convention existed between them that he must play stiff and cold, she warm and clinging’ (PE, 129). But Valentine needs sound to orientate herself in the dark and invisible world of the mist. Tietjens finally manages to make noise but not by conversing. He whistles, sings (feeling ‘like a fool’), recites German poetry and rattles the whip-stock, alarming the horse which shifts precariously (PE, 126). Whereas before, over breakfast, they satisfied themselves with passively gazing at one another, here, reliant wholly upon another sense, they struggle to form new and genuine connections. The relationship between the two is already cast in the convention of silence. In marked contrast to the gossiping and vindictive Mrs Duchemin and Sylvia, they seek the only remaining form of intimate communication. Silence becomes, according to Calderaro, a ‘favourable, positive solution’ to the noise and prattle of hurtful and dishonest speech.¹⁶ When Tietjens finds himself at the Front, or rather just behind it, Ford is abl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: ‘This grave day’ Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy
• 1 The parting of the ways: The Armistice, the silence and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End John Pegum
• 2 Alfred Döblin’s November 1918: The Alsatian prelude Klaus Hofmann
• 3 ‘A strange mood’: British popular fiction and post-war uncertainties George Simmers
• 4 Fighting the peace: Two women’s accounts of the post-war years Alison Hennegan
• 5 King Baby: Infant care into the peace Trudi Tate
• 6 ‘What a victory it might have been’: C. E. Montague and the First World War Andrew Frayn
• 7 The Bookman, the Times Literary Supplement and the Armistice Jane Potter
• 8 ‘Misunderstood … mainly because of my Jewishness’: Arthur Schnitzler after the First World War Max Haberich
• 9 Leaping over shadows: Ernst Krenek and post-war Vienna Peter Tregear
• 10 Silence recalled in sound: British classical music and the Armistice Kate Kennedy
• 11 Sacrifice defeated: The Armistice and depictions of victimhood in German women’s art, 1918–24 Claudia Siebrecht
• 12 ‘Remembering, we forget’: British art at the Armistice Michael Walsh
• 13 Indecisive victory? German and British soldiers at the Armistice Alexander Watson
• 14 Mixing memory and desire: British and German war memorials after 1918 Adrian Barlow
• Select bibliography
• Index