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Law’.
    At home morale was shored up by the belief in the value of sacrifice and the reflected pride it bestowed on those who survived. Edward Grey, the former Foreign Secretary, had said, ‘None of us who give our sons in this war are so much to be pitied as those who have no sons to give.’ For those who had died young, the lines of Laurence Binyon’s 1914 poem with its Shakespearian echoes continued to reverberate as the idealisation and myth-making of sacrifice was encouraged.
     
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
    Nearly ten million dead soldiers and sailors and airmen had died in the conflict, three quarters of a million from Britain. A further twelve and a half million had been wounded; nearly one and three quarter million of these were British. An estimated 160,000 women lost husbands and double that number of children emerged fatherless at the end of the war. An estimated 30 per cent of all men aged between 20 and 24 in 1911 were now dead. There were no figures for the fiancées, girlfriends, mothers, children, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends for whom life had changed for ever. On 11 November 1918 the colossal roar finally stopped. Those who had survived hoped the wound would begin to heal in silence. After the catastrophic death of Victorian certainties, silence was beginning to seem like the only possible articulation of the truth.

2
Shock
     
    Armistice Day, 11 November 1918
     
    Just after breakfast on a Monday morning in the middle of November, Maude Onions, the young woman from Liverpool who had become a signaller with the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, sat down at her stenograph, the shorthand machine she used in the little signal office at Boulogne. Her job was to relay messages to the front. That morning she tapped out the following words:
     
Hostilities will cease at 11.00 a.m. November 11th. Troops will stand fast at the line reached at that hour which will be reported to army headquarters. Defensive precautions will be maintained. There will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy. Further instructions follow.
    Three hours after she had sent the communication, Maude took ‘an involuntary glance’ at the clock in her office and saw that the moment the world had been waiting for had arrived. But nothing happened. There was silence. It was, observed Maude, ‘as though France had just heaved a vast sigh of relief.’
     
    Maude had arrived in Boulogne eighteen months earlier on a lovely June day in 1917. She was excited at the prospect of joining her country’s young men in teaching ‘the Hun a lesson’. Soon after her arrival, she had made friends with some of the men. Her skill at the piano was warmly welcomed as she tried to please them with song after song, the requests coming with ‘merciless rapidity’. She had asked a Scottish private in the packed canteen how long he thought the war would last and was surprised by his disillusioned response. ‘I don’t care,’ he had replied, ‘all I want is home and wife and kiddies and I don’t care who England belongs to.’
    Maude’s earlier mood of eager anticipation gave way to a sense of unease as she worried that ‘the seeming futility and endlessnessof the war was eating into the souls of men’. One of them, ‘a look of inexpressible weariness’ on his face, described to her a job worse than that of fighting: ‘I’ve been digging up dead bodies - digging them up for their identification discs so that we can send word home ... the fellow I was working with dug up his own brother and cried like a child.’ Maude found it impossible to look the man in the eyes as he spoke.
    Later that day, as Maude walked down towards the port the eerie atmosphere persisted. Then as the church clock struck three, ‘Every siren and hooter was let loose, every church bell clanged out - a deafening roar.’ But things were still not right. Even