A brief period of rejoicing

Reflecting on the scenes of celebration, the ‘overpowering entrancements’, that he had witnessed in November 1918 on the first Armistice Day, Winston Churchill wrote that their memory was all too fleeting, and that the spirit of wild rejoicing that had erupted at the end of the first world war was in a sense irrecoverable.

Throughout Britain it had been a magical day, repeatedly described as ‘wonderful beyond words’. Yet the spontaneous outpouring of joy, intensified by sadness, the feelings of relief and brotherhood, together with the conviction of a better future, left no permanent legacy. Instead, across the century that now separates us from the end of the Great War, Armistice Day, and subsequently Remembrance Sunday, became associated with solemnity and silence, and respectful communion with the dead.

Guy Cuthbertson’s book aims to retrieve something of the excitement and pandemonium — as well as the sheer strangeness —of the British experience of the Armistice. Reading it is a bit like watching a day unfold in slow motion. It opens in a stationary railway carriage in the middle of a French forest at 5.12 a.m. GMT. Representatives of the Allies and Germany meet to sign a document bringing to an end 1,560 days of bloodshed, enshrining a victory for one side and a humiliating defeat for the other. Marshal Foch, resembling ‘an elderly ticket inspector on the Orient Express’, is the first to sign, on behalf of the French.

Meanwhile, in Birmingham, at eight o’clock, a white rainbow is visible, a perfect signal for the arrival of peace on what happens to be St Martin’s Day (commemorating the fourth-century soldier in the Roman army who refused to fight). A man on his way to buy his morning newspaper sees a flag tied to a child’s chair in a cottage doorway, as if waiting for the moment.