Stunned by the quiet

The Sentry by Harvey Dunn, National Archives P3752 

After 1,567 days, the Great War ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. And yet on the last morning of the war, over 2,700 men died on the Western Front.

As early as August of 1918, German General Ludendorff had told his staff that Germany could not win the war, and in late September, Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg agreed that they must seek an armistice.  The Kaiser was informed on September 30^th, and on October 4^th Germany contacted American president Woodrow Wilson, asking for terms based on his Fourteen Points.  Turkey agreed to peace terms on October 30^th, and Austria-Hungary sought an armistice on November 3^rd, but the German delegation didn’t meet to discuss an armistice with the French until late in the evening of November 7^th.  By now, rumors of peace were everywhere.

Armistice celebration in London

Many of the Allies’ generals were not in favor of a negotiated peace; their armies were finally making gains, and they wished to pursue the fight, pushing their advantage to force Germany’s unconditional surrender. In a railway carriage at Compiègne, the German delegation had very little room to negotiate and were forced to accept nearly all terms imposed by the Allies, including the provision that within 14 days, they would evacuate and return all occupied territory and cede their rights to Alsace-Lorraine. The Armistice was finally signed at 5:10 am on the morning of November 11^th and took effect less than six hours later. 

Along the Western Front, German troops celebrated the night of November 10^th, shooting off flares and rockets.  On the morning of November 11^th, a radio broadcast from the Eiffel Tower at 5:40 am announced the upcoming peace, and London received the news before 6:00 that morning.  

Although nearly everyone knew in advance that the war was over, even the most conservative estimates acknowledge that the casualties from both sides on the war’s last day reached nearly 11,000.  At least 2,738 men died on November 11^th trying to take German positions that had already been ceded to the Allies. As historian Joseph E. Persico explains,

Putting these losses into perspective, in the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy, nearly twenty-six years later, the total losses were reported at 10,000 for all sides. Thus the total Armistice Day casualties were nearly 10 percent higher than those on D-Day.  There was, however, a vast difference. The men storming the Normandy beaches were fighting for victory. Men dying on Armistice Day were fighting in a war already decided.”*

It is nearly impossible to imagine the anxiety of the men who had survived and knew the end was only hours away. German soldier Georg Bücher had fought on the Western Front since 1914.  He recalled,

It was all the harder for us since we knew the end could not be far off.  We ducked at the sound of every explosion—which we had never bothered to do before.  The old hands fought for the deepest, safest dug-outs and did not scruple to leave to the young recruits the hundred and one things which were risky….The thought of an attack was more terrifying to them than to the young soldiers who were still so inexperienced, so touchingly helpless, yet in spite of everything, so willing.**

American Lieutenant Harry Rennagel, writing to his family, remembered his unit’s astonishment at learning they were to attack on that last morning. When a shell exploded near him at 10:55 a.m., he was spared, but discovered five of his “best men” had been hit:

One fatally injured, hole near heart, two seriously injured and the other two badly hurt. We took care of the injured men and then I knelt beside the lad whose eyes had such a look of sorrow that my eyes filled with tears.

“What is it old man?” I asked.

“Lieutenant, I'm going fast. Don't say I'll get better, you know different and this is a pretty unhappy time for me. You know we all expected things to cease to-day, so I wrote my girl, we were to be married when I returned, and my folks that I was safe and well and about my plans, and now by some order I am not going home.”

A glance at my watch, 11.05. I looked away and when I looked back — he had gone for The Highest Reward. I can honestly tell you I cried and so did the rest.***

American General Robert Lee Bullard, commander of the Second Army, also remembered Armistice Day in his memoir:

I went early, with an aide, to near the front, to see the last of it, to hear the crack of the last guns in the greatest war of all ages. I stayed until 11:00 a.m., when, all being over, I returned to my headquarters, thoughtful and feeling lost.†

American Lieutenant Hilmar Baukhauge’s poem “November Eleventh” describes, from the perspective of the men in the trenches, the moment the guns stopped firing.

November Eleventh

We stood up and we didn’t say a word,
It felt just like when you have dropped your pack
After a hike, and straightened out your back
And seem just twice as light as any bird.

Soldiers on Armistice Day, 1918, AP photo

We stood up straight and, God! but it was good!
When you have crouched like that for months, to stand
Straight up and look right out toward No-Man’s-Land
And feel the way you never thought you could.

We saw the trenches on the other side
And Jerry, too, not making any fuss,
But prob’ly stupid-happy, just like us.
Nobody shot and no one tried to hide.

If you had listened then I guess you’d heard
A sort of sigh from everybody there,
But all we did was stand and stare and stare,
Just stare and stand and never say a word.

            —Hilmar R. Baukhage

Bells rang, fireworks exploded, whistles blew, and crowds cheered the news of peace in cities, towns, and villages around the world.  Siegfried Sassoon, invalided out of the war, captures those celebrations of peace in his poem “Everyone Sang.” But in the trenches, it was the silence that deafened after years of exploding shells and rattling machine guns. American artillery officer Captain Bob Casey wrote,

The silence is oppressive. It weighs in on one’s eardrums. We have lived and had our being in din since we left the Forêt de la Reine. There seems to be something uncanny—unnatural in the all-enveloping lack of sound…. The air is full of half-forgotten sounds: the rustling of dead leaves, the organ tone of wind in the tree tops, whispers through the underbrush, lazy echoes of voices in the road…. it can’t be true…We cannot comprehend the stillness.††

His Bunkie by WJ Aylward
Smithsonian AF25661

Captain Harry Truman (the future U.S. president) said, “It was so quiet it made me feel as I’d suddenly been deprived of my ability to hear,”° while Connell Albertine of the 26^th Yankee Division remembered, “We ran out into No-Man’s Land and stood there, stunned by the quiet, a quietness we had never before experienced.”°°

Soldiers found it hard to celebrate the peace without remembering those who would never return home. British Lieutenant Patrick Campbell wrote,

I felt excited, and happy, but in an uncertain subdued way. I did not want to shout or to drink; there was nothing to drink anyway. I wanted to be with my friends, but none of those of my age were left in the brigade.°°°

It had been an indescribable war, and words were inadequate to describe its end. For many soldiers at the front, when the eleventh hour finally arrived, they could do nothing but stand and stare.

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* Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour. Random House, 2004, pp 378-379.

** Persico, Eleventh Month, p. 322.

*** Quoted in History of Buffalo and Erie County, 1914-1919.  Edited by Daniel J. Sweeney.

† Robert Lee Bullard, Personalities and reminiscences of war. Doubleday, 1925, p. 304.

†† Robert J. Casey, The Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears, J.H. Sears, 1927, pp. 329-330.

° Persico, Eleventh Month, p. 352.

°° Connell Albertine, Yankee Doughboy, Branden Press, 1968, p. 234.
°°° Quoted in John Toland’s No Man’s Land, Doubleday, 1980, p. 577.

Mothers of War

Mother with Dead Son, Käthe Kollwitz at Neue Wache

Just weeks after war was declared, German mother and artist Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary,  

A piece by Gabriele Reuter in the Tag on the tasks of women today. She spoke of the joy of sacrificing—a phrase that struck me hard.  Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon? …. Those who now have only small children … seem to me so fortunate. For us, whose sons are going, the vital thread is snapped.*

Kollwitz’s two sons, Hans and Peter, had joined the German army. Peter was killed on October 22, 1914.  Today, Kollwitz is best known for her sculpture Trauerndes Elternpaar (Grieving Parents), a memorial to her son and the sorrow of the war.

In Britain, one of the best-known letters of the war was titled “A Mother’s Answer to ‘A Common Soldier’” and signed simply, “A Little Mother.” Originally printed in August of 1916 in the Morning Post, the letter was reprinted as a pamphlet, and 75,000 copies were sold the first week.  Addressed to “Pacifists,” “the Bereaved,” and “the Trenches,” the letter is written by “a mother of an only child—a son who was early and eager to do his duty” and explains “what the mothers of the British race think of our fighting men.”  The “Little Mother” writes,

We women pass on the human ammunition of ‘only sons’ to fill up the gaps, so that when the ‘common soldier’ looks back before going ‘over the top’ he may see the women of the British race at his heels, reliable, dependent, uncomplaining…. Women are created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it.  Now we are giving it in a double sense.**

After the war, British trench poet Robert Graves referred to the letter in his memoir, Goodbye to All That, dismissing it as “newspaper language,” while Jean Bethke Elshtain in Women and War (1987) excoriates the letter for expressing “bloodcurdling patriotism coated in vapid and lifeless pieties.”° At the time, however, the letter was enormously popular, and advertisements for the pamphlet said that the Queen “was deeply touched at the ‘Little Mother’s’ beautiful letter.”

While there are cultural differences, nearly all countries used iconic images of motherhood to recruit soldiers and marshal support for the war. In the flesh, women were more diverse: some were pacifists and protested the war (as evidenced in the American popular song, “I Didn’t Raise my Boy to Be a Soldier”); others joined the labor force, assuming jobs left vacant by men at the front.  Mothers filled the gaps in uniform supply, knitting socks, hats, and mittens for their boys at the front. No matter what their views of the war, millions mourned the death of sons who never returned home.

The French tried to boost military morale by matching isolated soldiers with marraines, godmothers who would send letters and gifts.  The scheme was very popular with women old and young, until suspicions arose that the program encouraged immoral romantic relationships.°°

In the article “Mothers, Marraines, and Prostitutes: Morale and Morality in First World War France” Susan R. Grayzel explains,

Women, seen both as a guarantee of and as a potential threat to conventional morality and the social order, were recognized to be the key to keeping up morale. The quality of their morality and maternity would either lead the nation to victory against Germany or to ignominious defeat….At the heart of the wartime construction of the ‘patriote’ was the mother, preferably of many sons.”°°°

In September of 1914, Le Petit Journal published “Pour les Mères de France,” comparing the sacrifice of soldiers at the front with that made by French mothers:

Since their sons left, the sun does not shine, the flowers have lost their scent, the day is without joy…. Mothers of France, for your sacrifice there is no reward except that of the duty accomplished. Under your humble bodices beats the very heart of your son’s country.†

By the war’s end, 1,393,000 soldiers had died for France, an estimated 20% of men under 50 years of age.†† Author Lucie Delarue-Mardrus witnessed the death of countless mothers’ sons as she worked in a French hospital during the First World War.  In her memoir published in 1938, she recalled, “The absurdity of this war, of all wars, seemed to me like that of a vandal who furiously smashes piles of china plates, then dreamily steps back to gaze at the debris with consternation.”^§ What did the war mean to the mothers of France?  Delarue-Mardrus provides a disturbing answer in her poem “Regiments.”

Regiments

Everywoman's World, August 1917

            All those boys who have left,

These soldiers reared to abominate war,

            Were little babies once, held

Snug and swaddled in a mother’s arms.

           

            All a-swagger in steel helmets,

They march towards the crack of flung lightning,

            And leave behind that other hell,

The sorry female hell of tears and silence.

            Mothers, in your inmost being, deep

Flesh of your flesh, you carried your children;

            For you, victory and defeat

Are one: you hold your children’s death a crime.

            But I just watch these lads march away,

And think in stupefaction of their birth;

            And deep inside myself I say:

‘All these men’s heads have torn women with pain.’

                        —Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, trans. Ian Higgins

“Boys” – that is how the poem first names the soldiers who depart for battle. Despite their swagger as they march to the front, the poilus remain as children in the eyes of the mothers who watch them leave. The infants who were carried safe in their mothers’ wombs, the babies who were once snug and swaddled in their mothers’ arms, now march toward machine gun fire and bursting artillery shells protected only by steel helmets and bravado. 

The poem asserts that in both the birth and the death of their sons, mothers must suffer and accept pain that tears them apart. For these women, victory and defeat are indistinguishable; the death of a child reduces any abstract cause to meaningless irrelevancy. 

French war memorial at Peronne by Paul Auban 

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*Kathe Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, edited by Hans Kollwitz and translated by Richard Winston, Northwestern University Press, 1989, p. 62.  Entry dated 27 August, 1914.

** The letter can be read in full at this link. 

° Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War, University of Chicago, 1987, p. 193.

°° Susan R. Grayzel, “Mothers, Marraines, and Prostitutes: Morale and Morality in First World War France,” The International History Review, February 1997, pp. 70 – 75. 

°°° Grayzel, “Mothers, Marraines, and Prostitutes,” p. 67.

†André Lichtenger, “Pour Les Mères de France,” Le Petit Journal, 20 Sept. 1914.

††Veuves et orphelins de la Première Guerre mondiale.”  Chemins de Mémoire, www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/fr/veuves-et-orphelins-de-la-premiere-guerre-mondiale, Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.

§ Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Mes Memoires, Gallimard, 1938, p. 196 (my translation).

Recalling the Troops

 

Laferchou et les autres by Sebastien Roche

The Great War followed soldiers home. British war poets Siegfreid Sassoon and Wilfred Owen met in 1917 while both were patients at Craiglockhart undergoing therapy for shell shock.  Sassoon’s poem “Survivors” describes the mental sufferings of soldiers who could not forget the war:

French victim of shell shock reacts to officer's cap

These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.

They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud

Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

What the British referred to as shell shock (the term originated in World War I), the French named variously as obusite (from the word for artillery shell), commotional syndrome, war neurosis, or battle hypnosis. Some French physicians simply labeled the condition hysteria, a term with a long history that “also served to humiliate soldiers.”* French soldiers suffering from the trauma of the war faced an additional challenge: 

Marcel Sauvage

Mental illness was still too closely tied to degenerates and drunks. While an amputee could easily be touted as a hero, a chronically confused soldier was not a model veteran…. The mentally alienated veterans sequestered in asylums were considered les morts vivants—‘the living dead.’ They were survivors of the war, but they were as good as dead to their families who saw them rarely and could no longer count on them for financial or emotional support….Even those who escaped institutionalization were seen to inhabit a realm that was somewhere short of truly living.**    

Marcel Sauvage was nearly nineteen when the war interrupted his medical studies in Paris. Serving as a stretcher bearer at the Somme, Sauvage was seriously injured and gassed while recovering the wounded.  A French newspaper commended his courage, describing him as a “stretcher bearer of absolute devotion” (brancardier d’un dévouement absolu).†  Sauvage’s war poems were written between 1916 and 1920; his poem “Recall-Up” (Rappel) depicts memories that tortured many of the veterans of the First World War.  The  poem’s title carries a double meaning, suggesting the act of remembering as well as that of summoning the troops (in French, battre le rappel). 

Recall-Up

Suppose, all at once,

Blood were to bead

From mahoganies

And walls and hangings

In your drawing-rooms?

Suppose, in the night, all at once

The lamps bled,

Lights like wounds?
Or your rugs swelled and

Exploded, like bellies of dead horses?

Suppose the violins

Took up

The tears of the men,

The last refrain of the men

With exploded skulls across every plain on the globe?

Suppose your diamonds, your bright diamonds,

Now were only eyes

Madness-filled

All round you, in the night,

All at once?

What would you tell of life

To a skeleton, suddenly there,

Stock-still, bone-bare,

Its only mark

A Military Cross?

            --Marcel Sauvage, translated by Ian Higgins††

The poem begins by inviting readers to imagine or dream—“Suppose”— but the visions that follow lead on a journey into madness. Spreading out from the trenches, the war has polluted the very sanctity of home. Blood wells up from drawing room furniture and drips from curtains and walls; lamps bleed “like wounds,” and rugs bloat like the carcasses of dead horses until they explode under the internal pressure. Domestic objects of comfort and beauty are transformed into hallucinations of horror, and even the glitter of diamonds shifts to reveal glowing eyes of madness that stare out from the dark. 

Sound is also distorted, as the music of violins sobs with the last refrain of men dying horribly, their skulls exploded by machine gun fire, shrapnel, and shell. In the poem’s final chilling image, we stand before the skeleton of a dead French soldier who stands bone-bare, wearing only his medal of bravery, the Croix de Guerre.  What can we tell him of life, we who have inhabited the haunted minds of les morts vivants—‘the living dead’?  

In 1929, Sauvage published Le Premier Homme Que J’ai Tué (The First Man I Killed).  The book recalls how at the age of twenty, a young soldier thrusts his bayonet into the body of a German soldier and watches him die.  For many of the soldiers of the Great War, the battles continued to rage long after the Armistice was declared and the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Theirs was a war that never truly ended.

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*Gregory M. Thomas, Treating the Trauma of the Great War: Soldiers, Civilians, and Psychiatry in France 1914-1940, Louisiana State University Press, 2009, pp. 20-21.

** Thomas, Treating the Trauma, pp. 125-126.

†Bulletin des Ecrivains de 1914-1915-1916-1917, June 1917, p. 2. 

††Many thanks to Ian Higgins for generously discussing his translation of the poem and for granting permission to include it on this blog. 

Picnic

The Sunken Road by Frederick Varley © Beaverbrook Collection of War Art
Canadian War Museum, 19710261-0771

“There are two chief reasons why a soldier feels fear: first, that he will not get home to see his loved ones again; but, most of all, picturing himself in the same position as some of the dead men we saw.  They lay there face up, usually in the rain, their eyes open, their faces pale and chalk-like, their gold teeth showing. That is in the beginning. After that, they are usually too horrible to think about.  We buried them as fast as we could—Germans, French and Americans alike. Get them out of sight, but not out of memory.  I can remember hundreds and hundreds of dead men.  I would know them now if I were to meet them in a hereafter.  I could tell them where they were lying and how they were killed—whether with shell fire, gas, machine gun or bayonet.”      

                        — Robert C. Hoffman, US 28^th Division, American Expeditionary Force*

John Allan Wyeth has been credited as “the finest American soldier-poet of World War I.”** His poems tell their stories in a matter-of-fact, neutral tone, as if seen from the vantage point of a neutral observer or documentary film-maker.  In “Picnic: Harbonnières to Bayonvillers,” Wyeth narrates the account of two Americans soldiers riding through the scene of an earlier battle. The poem sketches an unforgettable image of what it was like to work and live amongst the dead.  

Picnic:  Harbonnières to Bayonvillers

A house marked Ortskommandantur—a great

sign Kaiserplatz on a corner of the church,

and German street names all around the square.

Troop columns split to let our sidecar through.

“Drive like hell and get back on the main road—it’s getting late.”

“Yessir.”

                        The roadway seemed to reel and lurch

through clay wastes rimmed and pitted everywhere.

“You hungry? – Have some of this, there’s enough for two.”

We drove through Bayonvillers—and as we ate

men long since dead reached out and left a smirch

and taste in our throats like gas and rotten jam.

“Want any more?”

                        “Yes sir, if you got enough there.”

“Those fellows smell pretty strong.”

                                    “I’ll say they do,

but I’m too hungry sir to care a damn.”

                        —John Allan Wyeth

Field Marshal Haig, Oct. 1918, AEF Signal Corps 28254 

The Battle of Amiens began on August 8, 1918.  By the close of the day, the Germans had lost an estimated 30,000 men (12,000 of whom had surrendered); German Commander-in-Chief Erich Ludendorff described it as “the black day of the German Army.” By the end of the battle, German casualties totaled 75,000, but the Allied losses were also staggeringly high: 44,000 men had been lost.  As the Allied troops pushed forward in the heat of summer, they moved through a charnel house of corpses.

The poem’s title “Harbonnières to Bayonvillers” names two small villages, approximately 3 miles apart, that were both taken by the Allies on August 8^th.  Eyewitness accounts describe a landscape littered with bodies and wreckage left in the wake of the attack. It’s an ironic setting for a picnic. The title is also ironic as picnic is an American slang term used since the 1870s to refer to something as “easy or straightforward… a pushover.”

Nothing about the scene described is ordinary or straightforward, however.  The roadways “reel and lurch” like a drunkard; bomb craters scar the land, and the dead seem to reach out in a macabre gesture of supplication.

Morning at Passchendaele, Frank Hurley 1917 

But while the scene is surreal, the men’s response to it is casual and laconic.  Amidst the gagging smell of decay that leaves a taste like “gas and rotten jam,” they share a meal. These men are not unwittingly callous – they are aware of the eerily unnatural situation; they comment on the dead that surround them, call them “fellows,” and note the repugnant stench of rotting bodies.  But the horror is not enough to dispel their hunger. They are alive with work to do, and “in this stripped-to-the-bare-essentials world, food, water, clothing, shelter, warmth, and sleep become the all-encompassing obsession.”†

In his memoir I Remember the Last War, AEF Sergeant Bob Hoffman writes,

Der Krieg no 13: Mealtime in the Trenches by Otto Dix

Did you ever smell a dead mouse? This will give you about as much idea of what a group of long dead soldiers smell like as will one grain of sand give you an idea of Atlantic City’s beaches…. It was hard to touch these dead men at first.  My people at home, hearing of what I was passing through, expected me to come back hard, brutal, callous, careless.  But I didn’t even want to take a dead mouse out of a trap when I was home. Yet over there I buried seventy-eight men one morning…. They were shot up in a great variety of ways, and it was not pleasant, but I managed to eat my quota of bread and meat when it came up with no opportunity to wash my hands.”††

Wyeth’s poem distills an important lesson of the Great War: learning to live with death was often the key to survival.

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*Bob Hoffman, I Remember the Last War, Strength & Health, 1940, pp. 163-164.

**Dana Gioa, “The Obscurity of John Allan Wyeth.” Dana Gioa, danagioia.com/essays/reviews-and-authors-notes/the-obscurity-of-john-allan-wyeth/. Accessed 18 Oct. 2017.

† Richard S. Faulkner, Pershing’s Crusaders: The American Soldier in World War I. University of Kansas, 2017, p. 100.

†† Hoffman, I Remember, pp. 162, 165-166.