How Remembrance Day brought home our loss

During the early part of the First World War the Government announced that for the duration of the conflict no bodies would be brought back for burial at home. Although the decision might now seem heartless, the repatriation of so many men would have been impractical on such a scale. There was also a feeling that the fallen men might have chosen to remain with those who had shared their final, brave hours. Some were buried beneath the earth of the battlefield where they had been killed, while the bodies of others were taken to the enormous communal cemeteries set up by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

The colossal number of casualties, amounting to the deaths of more than three quarters of a million young British men, meant that barely an individual, a community, a town or a village remained untouched by the experience.

In 1914 Matilda Foord, a villager in Alfriston in Sussex, and her elderly husband William, embraced their two sons, Alfred and Herbert for the last time as they set off for the front. In 1916, halfway through the conflict, Matilda buried William in the village graveyard. By the end of the war the names of both sons had been added to William’s headstone — although one brother, Alfred, still lay in a cemetery at Mons while the other, Herbert, remained buried in the faraway grounds of a prisoner of war camp in Turkey. There was just enough room on the headstone for Matilda to include a poem:

No Loved One stood beside them
They gave no last farewell
Not a word of comfort could they have
From those who loved them well

Graveyards up and down the country revealed barely concealed private tragedies as wives and mothers in particular were often left in a financial and emotional vacuum. The absence of the rituals of death meant that there was no sense of the reality of loss. As a result the country remained uncertain how to show its grief, becoming paralysed by an inability to accept the finality of death.

The cycle of grief that revolves around bereavement is a psychological process familiar to any of us who have been through such an experience. Identified in 1969 by the Swiss-born psychiatrist Elizabeth K?bler Ross, the significant stages include shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Mourning involves a sequence of emotional change and the process of mourning hinges on how we reject, adapt and eventually embrace that change.

But 90 years ago this process had not been consciously recognised and the habit of not talking about distress was ingrained. A conspiracy of silence was considered preferable to the discussion of loss. Many who had returned from the war damaged in mind and body remained trapped in silence, the experiences they had undergone too dreadful to disinter from their minds. Telegrams containing the words “killed” or “missing in action” were brought by boys whose bicycles were red for urgency but the envelopes sometimes stayed hidden away, unopened. Denial, and diversions such as dancing, sex, drugs and drinking brought only ephemeral comfort.

Suffering was not confined to any part of the class divide. Like Matilda, Ettie Desborough, a rich socialite, also sent two sons to war. After her elder son, Julian, was wounded, Lady Desborough nursed him in a French hospital for two weeks before he eventually succumbed to a fatal infection. Two months later Julian’s brother Billy was killed outright in a military charge only one mile from where Julian had fallen. Billy was so catastrophically wounded that his body was never identified. The abrupt disappearance of Billy was, Ettie confided to a friend, far more difficult to bear then the “long, loving farewell to Julian”.

The November 1918 Armistice did not eliminate this sense of limbo. Although there was some initial celebration, champagne and fireworks quickly proved to be ineffectual assuagers of the sense of futility that accompanied the end of the war.

Memorial stones that provided the closest possible substitute for graves went up on village greens and throughout towns and cities all over the country. A temporary edifice made of wood, designed by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, was built in Whitehall, London, in July 1919 when the peace treaty was signed at Versailles. The memorial had been intended to remain there for a matter of days after the Peace Day celebratory procession had passed by. But the public affection for this monument had steadily grown, and the banks of flowers that were continually piled at its foot meant that no official dared suggest its removal and Lutyens was invited to design a permanent memorial in stone.

The first two-minute silence, known then as The Great Silence, was held 90 years ago, one year after the 1918 Armistice, on November 11, 1919. Lloyd George’s Government, conscious of the massive struggle to accept the magnitude of the preceding years, thought that this symbolic act of remembering would provide a unifying opportunity to honour the dead.

The King, a stickler for punctuality, had initially been sceptical of the idea, unable to trust an entire nation to synchronise their watches so precisely. His doubts were unfounded and at 11am the country became not only silent but motionless for two entire minutes. But for many the silence did not bring solace, reviving instead the pain of a memory that was just beginning to recede.

Only one year later did Britain seem to feel collectively that it could at last move forward. The simple, moving ceremony, held beneath the shadow of the newly unveiled permanent Cenotaph in Whitehall on November 11, 1920, was the suggestion of an army padre who had recognised the nation’s need for a symbolic focus.

The funeral service, held with all the ceremonial pomp that Britain could muster, was centred around one unidentified soldier who had been chosen only a few days earlier at random by General L. J. Wyatt, Commander of the British Troops. from four bodies, none of which bore any identifying tags. The bodies had been carefully retrieved from beneath four different muddy murderous battlefields of Europe and laid in a small chapel in the North of France. The final choice was made by the general with a gentle touch of a hand on one of the four flag-draped shapes .

So, on the second anniversary of the Armistice, at last a funeral was held. The coffin had arrived by train at Victoria station the evening before, the roof of its railway carriage painted white for the benefit of the huge crowds that lined the route on its journey from Dover to London.

As the gun carriage was pulled through the grey London streets towards Whitehall, on top of the coffin sat a glinting ceremonial sword presented by the King, alongside the soldier’s tin helmet and his webbing belt, objects that were immediately recognisable to everyone who had kissed a young man goodbye before he left to fight for his country. Despite the grandeur of the surroundings and the chief mourner being George V himself, the British people willed upon this soldier the identity of those hundreds of thousands of fathers, husbands, sons, friends and loved ones for whom no real mourning had up until that moment been possible.

As this young man was buried among kings in Westminster Abbey, the nation was confronted with this evidence of courage and sacrifice and people comforted each other with the assurance that never again would they or their children live through such an incomprehensible tragedy. This had been the war to end all wars.

This year for the very first time the Sunday Remembrance Day service was not attended by a veteran of the First World War, as those catastrophic years slip out of the reach of living memory. But there will be a special service tomorrow when the passing of the First World War generation is honoured in Westminster Abbey in the presence of the Queen. During that service the memories of the resilience of human nature and a determination to survive no matter what, demonstrated so definitively 90 years ago, will remain inspirational.

Juliet Nicolson is the author of The Great Silence 1918-1920, Living in the Shadow of the Great War (John Murray, £20)