So it ended, with a kind of stupefaction in the minds of the soldiers.
It was an enormous relief, followed by a kind of lassitude of body and
spirit. Ended at last! Incredible! At the front on the day of armistice
there was no wild exultation, except in a few messes here and there
behind the lines. The men who had fought through it, or through enough
of it to have been soaked in its dirt, were too tired to cheer or sing
or shout because peace had come. Peace! What did that mean? Civilian
life again? Impossible to readjust one’s mind to that. Impossible to
go home and pick up the old threads of life as though this Thing had
not happened. They were different men. Their minds had been seared by
dreadful experience. Now that peace had come after that long strain
something snapped in them.
Many of them had a curiously dead feeling at first. They thought back
to all the things they had seen and done and suffered, and remembered
the old comrades who had fallen on the way. Perhaps they were the
lucky ones, those who lay dead, especially those who had died before
disillusion and spiritual revolt against this infernal business. A war
for civilisation?... Civilisation had been outraged by its universal
crime. A war against militarism? Militarism had been enthroned in
England and France. Liberty, free speech, truth itself, had been
smashed by military orders and discipline over the bodies and souls of
men. A war against the “Huns?” Poor old Fritz! Poor bloody old Fritz!
Not such a bad sort after all, man for man and mass for mass. They had
put up a wonderful fight. The glory of victory? Well, it had left the
world in a mess of ruin, and the best had died. What would come out
of this victory? What reward for the men who had fought, or for any
nation? The profiteers had done very well out of war. The Generals
had rows of ribbons on their breasts. Youth had perished; the finest
and noblest. Civilisation had been saved? To Hell with a civilisation
which had allowed this kind of thing! No, when peace came, there were
millions of men who did not rejoice much, because they were sick and
tired and all enthusiasm was dead within them. They were like convicts
after long years of hard labour standing at the prison gates open to
them with liberty and life beyond. What’s the good of life to men
whose spirit has been sapped, or of liberty to men deprived of it so
long they were almost afraid of it? Strange, conflicting emotions,
hardly to be analysed, tore at men’s hearts on the night of armistice.
Shipwrecked men do not cheer when the storm abates and the bodies of
their dead comrades float behind them. Nor did our men along the front
where it was very quiet that day after a bugle here and there sounded
the “Cease fire!” and the guns were silenced at last. Peace!... Good
God!