"Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise which only slowly deepens in its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst."
— D.H. Lawrence
. . .
Juliet Nicolson's last book looked at "The Perfect Summer:" England in 1911 just before WWI. Her latest work, "The Great Silence," looks at life in Britain in the first years immediately after the war when most of the country seemed to be coping with life by not talking about the war or mentioning those who didn't come home.
The war officially ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. She focuses on the moment of silence that has been observed annually since 11/11/1919 (noting only Americans were too busy to stop and remember) and the unveiling of the Cenotaph memorial along with the interment of the Unknown Solider on 11/11/1920. It's the period between the "falling silent of the guns and the roaring of the 1920."
But what makes this such a fascinating read is that Nicolson weaves together hundreds of stories and statistics into a complex tapestry whose strands never become tangled. The cast includes everyone from the Royal family to Vera Brittain, from the doctor who virtually invented plastic surgery to Nellie Melba, from T.E. Lawrence to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
What is noteworthy is that there are so many women in NIcolson's tale — war widows, the first woman MP, university graduates, war workers and domestics — all make numerous appearances. Nicolson is one of the few writing about the war who recognizes that it affected and involved women as deeply as men. Women, as a whole, were one of the few groups for whom the war actually changed things for the better — ultimately bringing them the vote and wide job opportunities.
Soldiers at Roehampton Hospital in London, which was a center for prosthetic limbs. Over 41,000 men lost at least one limb during the war. The amount of compensation by the British government depended on which limb was lost. Nicolson includes a significant amount of information about post-war medicine in the book. Photo from "The Great Silence."
