Free The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson

semblance of normality. But the mask itself, immobile, expressionless, resounded with a metallic ping should it encounter any hard object and had become a thing of revulsion.
    Maude Onions found herself in a town ten miles from her stenographers’ base near Boulogne. She had been visiting the wounded. A truck driver stopped and asked her if she wanted a lift back to Wimereux. He cautioned her however that she might not like it, as there was a fellow passenger in the back of the truck. The ‘passenger’ had glimpsed his own face in a mirror and seeing it to be ‘battered out of recognition’ decided what he must do next. The driver told Maude that he ‘did away with his identity disc first and himself afterwards’.
    Trying to cheer up her driver as she sat up in front with him, the corpse with his shattered face lying in the back, Maude attemptedto make conversation. ‘So it’s over at last,’ she said. But the driver could not agree. ‘I’d change places with him gladly,’ he assured her, with a jerk of the head towards the corpse in the back. ‘The war – for me — is only just beginning.’
    Maude’s chauffeur had heard that his wife had been sleeping with another man and the prospect of home as a place of refuge and warmth had been destroyed. The end of the war was, for this soldier at least, the end of the happiness he had known and the start of a life of uncertainty.

3
Denial
     
    Christmas 1918
     
    As women prepared for the homecoming of their men, shiny lipstick and new teeth found their way into even the poorest homes. No matter what the expense, a ‘mouthful of flashing pots’ was the goal of many waiting for the return of their husbands. The poet T. S. Eliot lived above a pub and heard the discussions.
     
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
     
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
     
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
     
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set.
     
    In the first months after the war the act of survival itself had been a cause for celebration and the peacetime silence brought with it a relief that people had long dreamt of. At the pre-Christmas general election on 14 December, when the wartime Coalition Government was seeking a return to office, Lloyd George had promised that serving men would be returning to ‘a Land fit for Heroes’. But the long anticipated reunions often met with bitter disappointment. Wives, mothers, fiancées, sisters, friends were reunited with men who had been changed irrevocably, both physically and mentally, by the horror and brutality they had been subjected to. These men neither looked nor sounded like heroes. Marriages conducted in haste during the war had often taken place in the fear that there would never be another chance. The prolonged absence of a husband gave time for reflection and often led both husband and wife to think again about their speedy commitment to one another.
    The divorce rate began to rise so rapidly that in the twelve months after the war ended the courts processed three times as many divorcesas they had in the year before the war began. Judges began to complain of ‘congestion’ in the system.
    Gladys Cooper was considered the most beautiful woman on the London stage. Her audiences cared little about the content of the play. Nor indeed, to the actress’s frustration, were they too bothered about the calibre of her acting. They were simply happy to sit in their seats and stare at her beautiful face. She and her husband Herbert Buckmaster had written to each other almost every day for three and half years during his absence at the front. They had promised each other that they would ‘make up for all this hell of being parted when the war is over’. But on Buck’s return he realised his wife ‘had been accustomed to do without me and to manage her own life’. Gladys’s earnings had shot up from £20 a week at the beginning of the war to £200 at its