What happened in November 1918 when the “incessant thunder” of four years and four months of war came to an end? Juliet Nicolson’s book is about “the pause that ­followed the cataclysm”. Her absorbing account of “the interval between the falling silent of the guns and the roaring of the 1920s” is dominated by the continuing presence of the dead in the minds of the living; 750,000 British soldiers, sailors and airmen had died, and the memories of their “half-smoked lives”, in the description of one young woman mourning the loss of her male friends, hung over everything.

For the men who had survived the fighting, different problems presented themselves. How could they communicate to those back home any sense of what it had been like to experience what one called ‘‘hell with the lid off’’? Some who had stayed in Britain wished to learn more of what their loved ones had endured. Tourism to the deserted trenches began almost as soon as the roar of the guns ceased. There were frequent casualties among visitors in the first few months of 1919 as unexploded bombs claimed peacetime victims.

Many preferred to draw a veil over the suffering of the previous four years, but it was impossible to ignore. Those physically damaged by the fighting were in evidence everywhere. They were what one woman callously called ‘‘the Debris of War’’ when cautioning her young son not to look at gas-blinded soldiers on the front at Westgate-on-Sea in Kent. Some men were so severely mutilated that they were obliged to wear masks to hide themselves from the public gaze.

Unsurprisingly, many of them resented their new status as ­Phantom-of-the-Opera-style social outcasts. One survivor, equipped with a temporary leather mask, devised his own private game when travelling by train. Weary of being stared at, he would whip off his disguise and count how many exited the railway carriage in terror when confronted by his maimed features. Others were lucky enough to enter the care of Harold Gillies, the pioneering plastic surgeon. With a team of artists and sculptors that included Henry Tonks, the professor of drawing at the Slade School of Fine Art, and the widow of Scott of the ­Antarctic, he painstakingly rebuilt the broken ­gargoyles he encountered in his hospital at Sidcup into new faces.

The psychological damage was even more difficult to repair. Both individuals and the nation as a whole needed some healing rite of passage. They found it in the idea of an obscure Australian journalist living in London named Edward Honey. Ignoring calls for flag displays, gun salutes and public ­singing of the national anthem, the government chose to adopt Honey’s suggestion of a two-minute nationwide silence to mark the first anniversary of the armistice. Today, when deaths have to be marked at football matches by a minute’s clapping because a crowd can’t be trusted to keep quiet for that long, it is difficult for us to imagine how effective this silence was. The rail network juddered to a standstill. Trading on the stockmarket ceased. From one end of the country to another, at exactly 11am, all movement stopped for two minutes. On the following Armistice Day in 1920, the burial of the Unknown Soldier, “invested with the millions of identities that the bereaved willed upon him”, became the cathartic focus for the nation’s ­continuing grief.

The two years immediately after the armistice, the awkward interim between the close of the war to end all wars and the dawn of the jazz age, have often been ignored by historians. By scouring the diaries, memoirs and personal recollections of those who lived through them, Nicolson has created a compelling impressionistic portrait of a country struggling to make sense of the sacrifices that had been made. Filled with anecdote and human detail, The Great Silence becomes a moving study of Britons finding ways, individually and collectively, to recover from the terrible wounds the war had inflicted.

The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson
J Murray £20 pp302

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