Memories of day the war ceased

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. Peter Rhodes tells how the guns fell silent after “the war to end wars”.

Private John Smith heard the Great War was over and, as he frankly told his loved ones later: “I couldn’t have cared less.”

The “war to end wars” was the biggest conflict the world had seen and the young soldier had been part of it from the outset four years earlier.

He had seen the British Army almost broken by the great German offensive across France in March 1918. He had been part of a British force rushed south to help the French stem the German tide and drive it back. He knew the war was almost won.

And then, just 22 days before peace came, his luck ran out.

He was sorting the mail for the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in a shed near the French town of St Python when a shell smashed through the roof spilling its oily, brown-yellow load of mustard gas.

John Smith and his pal in the sorting office did not feel too bad at first. John decided to go to the first-aid post, and lived. His comrade stayed behind, and died.

Mustard gas burns the skin and strips the lining of the lungs. By the time November 11 came, Private Smith was in a hospital, gasping for breath and blind.

He could hear the nurses celebrating the Armistice. But at 23 his life must have seemed over. No wonder he could not share in the rejoicing.

He lived. His sight was saved. A few years later he wrote in his diary that he had come through the Great War “none the worse for my experiences.” In fact, his lungs were terminally damaged. It would take 40 years for him to die.

Private John Smith was my grandfather. I dimly remember him as a little, dark, bad-tempered man, bedridden in a downstairs room with a big old radio playing loudly. He seemed very lined and very old. He was barely 60.

Such was life if you happened to be part of the doomed generation who endured the First World War. If you were male, fit and born in the closing years of the 19th century, hell was waiting. And yet that extraordinary generation went through hell and back with barely a word of complaint.

On the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, their children who remember the great victory celebrations are passing into history.

A few, now aged at least 95, can dimly remember the first Armistice Day.

Ellen Brookes, who turned 100 last month, was a 10-year old living in Beet Street, Blackheath. Now living at Camelot Care Home in Dudley, she recalls:

“There were street parties in all the streets when the news came. My father, John Thomas Webster, was in the war and he took a bullet, but he made a recovery from the injury. My mother was so relieved when the war was over because he could come home. I remember the poppies too and I still wear one now.”

Little Ellen was one of 10 children. She and her brother Harry, now 94, are the only ones still alive.

Lydia Richards, aged 101, who lives at The Gables retirement home in Oldbury lived in Mill Street in West Bromwich in 1918 and remembers the Zeppelins flying overhead as her family hid in the cellar. She recalls the joy of Armistice Day:

“When the war ended I remember marching round the playground at Cronehills School in West Bromwich waving flags and singing.”

Edith Banks, who turned 100 just last month, is a resident at Meadow House in Stroud Avenue, Willenhall. She recalls: “I can remember there were celebrations everywhere. People were laughing but there were also tears because of the people who had been lost.”

Clarice Onions of Whitmore Reans died last year aged 99 but not before passing on her vivid recollections of November 11, 1918. She remembered Armistice Day well:

“All the neighbours came out and we had a street party. They were a good lot in our street. No-one had any money or much to eat but we had a few bits and dabs of food and were quite thankful for that.”

And she recalled how the world’s dreams of a better life after the terrible bloodletting of 1914-18 turned to ashes:

“After the war some people talked of going abroad for a new life but there was no money to go anywhere. They told us it was the war to end wars and there would be homes fit for heroes. But we were still as poor as church mice.”

Decades of cynicism have blinded us to the real sense of victory felt 90 years ago, says Stephen Badsey, Reader of Conflict Studies at the University of Wolverhampton.

While it was easy to talk of the Tommies of 1914-18 as “lions led by donkeys,” he says, the truth is more complex.

“We knew this generation. We talked to them, we have their letters and photographs. But their attitudes and their approach to life is out of reach.

“Of course the war had its critics. But the vast majority of people saw the war as a positive thing, as a job that had to be done. It was always about liberating Belgium and parts of France.”

Despite the appalling losses, says Mr Badsey, this sense of victory lasted until the Depression of the 1930s. In the same decade the rise of fascism in Europe called into question the values for which the First World War had been fought. The post war culture of the 1950s and the Swinging Sixties poured yet more scorn on the 1914-18 conflict.

“It is only in the past 10 years or so,” he says, “that we have gone back, looked again at the evidence and tried to understand that generation.”

And perhaps the best verdict on the Great War comes from a warrior of a generation which volunteered without question, in the belief, shared by millions around the world, that the British Empire was worth defending. The old soldier said:

“The generals did their job. We did ours. We won.”

The Black Country wasted no time in celebrating the Armistice, marking the end of a war which had raged since August 1914. The Express & Star reported on November 11, 1918, how civic and church leaders marched to Market Place, Wolverhampton to give thanks.

The Rev J D Brown told the crowd: “We must take the victory as a wonderful manifestation of the Providence of God.”

Others were not so sure. On the Western Front, British troops had fought a dazzling series of battles driving the Germans back towards their own borders.

As an old gunner of the Great War once told me: “We didn’t understand why there was a ceasefire. We had them on the run and we wanted to chase them all the way back to Berlin.”

The American army commander General John Pershing shared that view. He believed it was essential that Germans should know that their army had been defeated.

But Mr Badsey points put that the British commander Douglas Haig, later condemned as “Butcher Haig,” believed there was no point in further deaths. He said his citizen army had completed its task and should not fight on.

It was a decision which has divided historians ever since.

After the Armistice was signed, German forces withdrew in good order and returned to Germany still bearing their arms. Within a few years the myth took root that Germany had not been defeated in battle but betrayed by an international conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks.

By 1922, a wartime corporal in the German Army was preaching this poison in Munich. His name was Adolf Hitler. Only four years after the end of the First World War, the seeds of the Second World War were sown.