Paris celebrates the Armistice 1918 |
On the morning
of the Armistice, twenty-five-year-old May Wedderburn Cannan was “doing her
bit” as a clerical worker in the British War Office located in Paris. As acting
head of the women’s espionage section in Paris (a branch of MI5), Cannan
recalls that day:
I was called into the Colonel's room ‘to
take some notes from the telephone’.... A voice, very clear, thank God, said
‘Ready?’ and began to dictate the Terms of the Armistice. They muttered a bit
crowding round me and I said fiercely ‘Oh, shut up, I can't hear’ and the skies
didn't fall.
I wrote in my private short-long-hand and half my mind was in a prayer that I should be able to read it back. I could feel my heart thumping and hear the silence in the room round me. When the voice stopped I said mechanically ‘understood’ and got up. I made four copies of what I had written and took them in and went back to my little office staff and told them. I can't remember much what we said: I can only remember being so cold, and crying, and trying not to let the others see.†
I wrote in my private short-long-hand and half my mind was in a prayer that I should be able to read it back. I could feel my heart thumping and hear the silence in the room round me. When the voice stopped I said mechanically ‘understood’ and got up. I made four copies of what I had written and took them in and went back to my little office staff and told them. I can't remember much what we said: I can only remember being so cold, and crying, and trying not to let the others see.†
Sometime soon
after, she captured the mood of that first Armistice day in a poem.
Paris, November
11, 1918
Down on the boulevards the crowds went by,
The shouting and the singing died away,
And in the quiet we rose to drink the toasts,
Our hearts uplifted to the hour, the Day:
The King – the Army – Navy – the Allies –
England – and Victory.
The shouting and the singing died away,
And in the quiet we rose to drink the toasts,
Our hearts uplifted to the hour, the Day:
The King – the Army – Navy – the Allies –
England – and Victory.
And then you turned to me and with low voice
(The tables were abuzz with revelry),
‘I have a toast for you and me,’ you said,
And whispered ‘Absent,’ and we drank
Our unforgotten Dead.
But I saw Love go lonely down the years,
And when I drank, the wine was salt with tears.
(The tables were abuzz with revelry),
‘I have a toast for you and me,’ you said,
And whispered ‘Absent,’ and we drank
Our unforgotten Dead.
But I saw Love go lonely down the years,
And when I drank, the wine was salt with tears.
--May
Wedderburn Cannan
As Paris celebrates, two women sit in a café.
Throughout the day, they have listened to the boisterous songs and shouts of the
crowds, until the deafening celebrations finally begin to die away. The hour is most likely late, but as the day winds to a close, the women rise from their seats to toast the momentous, world-changing
occasion. Raising their glasses, they
list seven abstractions, perhaps echoing the shouts they have heard throughout
the day. Acknowledgements and praise are offered to the King, the various
branches of the military, the countries of the Allies, their victory, and the
day of peace. Even though the surrounding tables are “still abuzz with revelry”
the two women stand apart, walled off from the boisterous mood of joy.
May Wedderburn Cannan |
The last two lines of the poem are italicized, perhaps to distance them from the celebrations that surround this private
scene of grief. Against the backdrop of Parisian gaiety, Love stands alone, gazing into a future of dark emptiness, and the wine has become a cup of
bitter passion, brimming with tears. This is a toast not only to the dead, but also
to lost futures, dreams never realized, marriages never consummated, children
never born, joys never shared.
“The Pension produced some champagne at dinner and we drank the loyal toast. And then across the table G. lifted her glass to me and said “Absent.” I did not know her story nor she mine, but I drank to my friends who were dead and to my friends who, wounded, imprisoned, battered, shaken, exhausted, were alive in a new, and a terrible world.”††
________________________________________________________
*Wilfred Owen, by Guy Cuthbertson. Yale
University Press, 2014.
**Other poems on the
subject include Margaret Sackville’s “Reconciliation,”
Marian Allen’s “Out
in a gale of fallen leaves,” Mary J. Henderson’s “The
Seed Merchant’s Son,” and Anna Gordon Keown’s “Reported
Missing.”
†From Cannan’s autobiography, Grey Ghosts
and Voices. Roundwood Press, 1976.
††From Cannan’s autobiography, Grey Ghosts
and Voices. Roundwood Press, 1976.
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