Some years ago Juliet Nicolson wrote an evocative and enjoyable study of the summer of 1911. She was far too intelligent to be taken in by the vision of unruffled and sunlit splendour propagated by those who wallow in nostalgia, but the picture that emerged was still one of self-confidence, complacency and a conviction that, for better or worse, nothing much was likely to change in the state of Britain. This earlier book is worth revisiting before reading The Great Silence: it helps one comprehend the effect on the national psyche of the cataclysmic horrors which afflicted Europe during and after the first world war.
This book is about grief — ‘an iceberg of a word’, writes Nicolson. Thirty per cent of the children who had been aged between 20 and 24 in 1911 were dead by the end of the war, seven years later. Some 2.5 million Britons had been killed or seriously wounded. Translate that into bereaved fathers and mothers, wives who had lost husbands or girlfriends lovers, children robbed of a father, and it seemed that hardly a family in the land had survived without bereavement. Peace meant that there was time to stop and think. ‘I fear that it will require more courage than anything that has gone before,’ wrote Cynthia Asquith. ‘It isn’t until one leaves off spinning round that one realises how giddy one is.’
But grief was soon tinged with anger. Lloyd George promised that the soldiers would come back to a land fit for heroes. Instead they found themselves in a land where unemployment seemed more the rule than the exception, where inflation raged while wages barely maintained their pre-war levels, where in Glasgow half the population was living two to a room and a further third was crammed into a room shared by three adults. Those men were in a funny temper, observed the King when he was mobbed by disabled soldiers at a parade in Hyde Park. The people at large were in a funny temper.
And the anger caused fear. Hate will be dammed up in men’s hearts and will show itself in all sorts of ways which will be worse than war, prophesied D. H. Lawrence. The spectre of revolution, already rampant in Russia, threatened to engulf Germany and spread all over Europe. England was ‘making its first advance towards the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ pronounced the Bishop of Durham gloomily. Every institution seemed at risk, every sacred shibboleth was put to question.
When it came to the point, of course, the proletariat had neither the will nor the power to do much about it. By 1920 it seemed that things were returning, if not to normal, then at least to something recognisably similar to the pre-war situation. True, the Duke of Devonshire was forced to sell Devonshire House and, even more telling, at the last ball at his palace on Piccadilly, guests were required to pay for their invitations, but the public schools, the luxurious hotels, the gentleman’s clubs, all flourished; the rich man was still in his — perhaps rather more dilapidated — castle; the poor man was at the gate.
Yet the structure of society had shifted irrevocably, the Liberal Party had disintegrated, Labour had become the official opposition. Even more significant: Jill had got out of her box in the course of the war and had no intention of being put back again. Women — or some women at least — had got the vote; in November 1918 Nancy Astor was elected Member for Plymouth; perhaps even more remarkable, given the encrusted resistance to change of the older universities, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain were allowed to matriculate at Oxford. The war had done fearful damage to the British people, but not all its legacies were malign.
Nicolson writes with such admirable pace and fluency that it would be easy to suppose that this book had been effortlessly scribbled down. It is, on the contrary, a triumph of balance and organisation; a study which comprehends the cultural and the intellectual, the political and the social, and weaves them all into a lively and convincing narrative. By the point at which she ends, the war has been relegated to the past. It had been the war to end wars. How would it be known to future generations? it was asked. ‘The European War’ did not encompass the involvement of the United States and the Empire. ‘The Great War’ was generally favoured. Most prescient, however, was the American professor who, in 1918, called his history of the subject The First World War.
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