To finish off my little look at the different ways the Armistice in 1918 was greeted I have chosen this excerpt from the book “A Stillness Heard round the world by Stanley Weintraub.”
I think that this little anecdote somehow captures an under lying feeling amongst soldiers.
Whilst there was relief and joy that peace had come and that the war was over. There was also a sense of loss, in that the private world all soldiers shared was now gone forever and only ‘wreckage left behind.’
For all of us that never experienced the horror of the First World War there is no way we could ever imagine what it meant to those who went through it.
"Dan Walker was in a military hospital in the country, a collection of huts on the edge of the wood, when the matron, trailed by a doctor, entered to make an announcement to the ward. “The War is over,” she said. “This is not a rumour. This is official. An Armistice has been signed. The War is over!” Almost any announcement in the past had been greeted with practical joking and handicaps ignored – “Tippling each other out of bed, bashing at each other with pillows, pushing ourselves along the floor on our bottom, stumps waving….” But what Walker remembered most sixty-one years later was the “uncanny silence,” akin to the eerie quiet on the line when the shooting stopped.
“Our world, a bloody world, a world of suffering….at time’s close to the ultimate, also a world of laughter, excitement and comradeship beyond description. Our world, and now it was gone – ended – Napoo fini….Now we were just some of the wreckage left behind.”"
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