November 11, 1918. Silence descended on the front. That afternoon, Premier Georges Clemenceau entered the National Assembly at four o’clock to read the Armistice agreement, whose terms included the requirement that German troops evacuate France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Alsace-Lorraine within a fortnight or face imprisonment. A rapturous crowd in the courtyard of the Palais Bourbon greeted the old man. Tens of thousands mobbed Paris’s great squares, reveling as church bells tolled and artillery boomed. A multitude of Allied flags unfurled from windows all over the city, like glad rags draped over widow’s weeds. Students paraded from the Latin Quarter to the Arc de Triomphe, dragging a captured German cannon and hurling derision at the kaiser, who was an exile in Holland by then. Clemenceau had no sooner read the fifty-fifth and final article of the agreement than legislators adjourned with a hearty rendition of “La Marseillaise.”
In the trenches, reactions were often mixed. “News of the Armistice did not spark the enthusiasm one might have expected,” wrote Adam Frantz, chief medical officer of the French army’s Twenty-third Infantry Regiment. “Was it that four years of warfare had blunted all our feelings? Did men understand that success, however great, could never compensate for the atrocious losses we had suffered? Was it rather that in his unconscious wisdom the ordinary grunt realized that neither nations nor men would profit from the great, cruel lesson?”
Word of the Armistice was as baffling to those infantrymen as a sudden reprieve to lifers long removed from the outside world. “We did not cheer, but just stood, stunned and bewildered,” wrote Sergeant Walter Sweet of the Monmouthshire Regiment, who heard a fellow survivor say, “To think that I shall not have to toddle among machine guns again and never hear another shell burst. It is simply unimaginable.” What was to become of the soldiers in peacetime? “We have lived this life for so long. Now we shall have to start all over again.” Colonel Thomas Gowenlock, an intelligence officer in the American First Division, observed that many soldiers believed the Armistice to be a ruse, or a restorative halt in a hundred years’ war. There was no celebration on November 11. “As night came,” he later recalled,
the quietness, unearthly in its penetration, began to eat into their souls. The men sat around log fires, the first they had ever had at the front. They were trying to reassure themselves that there were no enemy batteries spying on them from the next hill and no German bombing planes approaching to blast them out of existence. They talked in low tones. They were nervous. After the long months of intense strain, of keying themselves up to the daily mortal danger, of thinking always in terms of war and the enemy, the abrupt release from it all was physical and psychological agony. Some suffered a total nervous collapse.… Some fell into an exhausted sleep. All were bewildered by the sudden meaninglessness of their existence as soldiers—and through their teeming memories paraded that swiftly moving cavalcade of Cantigny, Soissons, St. Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne and Sedan. What was to come next? They did not know—and hardly cared. Their minds were numbed by the shock of peace. The past consumed their whole consciousness. The present did not exist and the future was inconceivable.
Having been “demobbed” and shipped back to England, Private John McCauley of the Second Border Regiment found himself swallowed up in the maelstrom of cheering crowds and blaring bands. “Such courage and nerve as I possessed were stolen from me on the blood-drenched plains of France,” he wrote. “The trenches in Flanders helped make me a weakling. They sapped my courage, shattered my nerves and threw me back into a ‘civilised’ world broken in spirit and nerve. They might as well have taken my body, too.”
Or at least his tongue, for McCauley was not alone in feeling unable to communicate on any meaningful level with compatriots who had never visited that foreign country called the front, where combatants divorced from civilization—Germans, French, English, and Americans alike—shared a primitive language conjugating slaughter and mercy.16 When Lance Corporal Thomas Owen lay wounded in the rat-infested slime of a trench overrun by Germans, he was nursed by the enemy that had almost killed him. “I cannot say how far I walked. I passed a first-aid post in an old trench, but they waved me off despairingly. They had too many to see to. Stretcher bearers passed me, carrying a pole, with a blanket slung to it, and inside an agonized bundle of broken humanity—blood trickling and dripping from the pendulous blanket.” At another first-aid station he fell into the arms of a sad-eyed, black-bearded man who whispered, “Armes Kind” (poor child), removed his tunic, leather jerkin, and cardigan, and patched him up. “Truly the quality of mercy is not strained. I had none of his tongue, nor he of mine, but he gave me a drink of warm coffee from a flask, and his hands were as tender as a woman’s as he bandaged me.… A prisoner indeed; receiving succour from a man whose countrymen I had blazed at in hate but a while ago.”
Several months before the Armistice, nineteen-year-old Gustav Regler, the future novelist and comrade of Arthur Koestler’s, was carried off a field of corpses near the Chemin des Dames and woke up in Laon Cathedral, where the wounded lay side by side on pallets lining the vast nave. It soon became apparent that his physical wounds were more easily remedied than the psychological. Unable to talk, he was transported to a psychiatric hospital in Germany, whose director, a Dr. Schomberg, took it upon himself to speak for him. The mute later quoted his spokesman in a remarkable memoir entitled The Owl of Minerva: “I would like to send you home but you don’t want to go. If you did you’d be able to speak. You want to go back to the front because you think you’re a deserter. And you want to stay here because you know what the world looks like outside. You want to leave and not to leave. But you won’t admit this to yourself, and so your tongue is crippled, because you can’t say two such different things at the same time.” There was no way back to the front, Schomberg continued. “This is a place from which one goes to a new life or else into total darkness.… You don’t want to be a deserter? We are all deserters, all shams, more or less, throughout our lives. We lie to ourselves. Only one part of you despises war. I have read your diary. You will volunteer for other wars as senseless as this one. But so long as you remain here with me there is no war, and no laurels either. Only donkeys eat laurels.”
Young André Breton, who was to confer, in the Surrealist movement, poetic dignity on the images and nightmares of the shell-shocked soldiers he attended as a male nurse at a psychiatric center near the Chemin des Dames and as a medical student at Paris’s Val-de-Grâce hospital, mourned the loss of two voices in 1918. Only hours before the Armistice, Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet revered by the avant-garde, fell victim to the flu pandemic. Several months later, Breton received what proved to be letters of farewell from a beloved army friend named Jacques Vaché, for whose air of dandified invulnerability and murderous volleys of black humor he professed the greatest admiration. “Your letter finds me in a terrible slump,” Vaché wrote on November 14, 1918. “I am empty of ideas and ring hollow, more than ever no doubt the unconscious recorder of many things, all balled up.… I’ll leave the war quietly gaga, like one of those splendid village idiots, perhaps.… Dear friend, how am I to survive these last few months in uniform (I’ve been assured the war is over)? I’m really at my wits’ end. What is more, THEY are distrustful. THEY suspect something. Will THEY lobotomize me while they still have me in their grasp?” In January 1919, Vaché—whom Breton portrayed forever after, idolatrously, as a cross between Beau Brummel and Arthur Rimbaud—overdosed on opium in a Brussels hotel room.
There was no generic equivalent in French to the English “shell shock” or the German Kriegsneurose. The language did not legitimate a psychiatric disorder that exempted the traumatized soldier from a holy war, a war waged in defense of civilization.
16“We seemed, as we moved up the road, to have left behind us the last link of the chain which had connected us with civilisation. From now onward we were in a world apart, where men moved openly only by night, where the scream and bursting of shells, and the rifle fire, fitful and desultory, were the only interruptions to an unearthly silence—a desolate, scarred world, the playground of Death itself,” wrote Corporal George Foley, Sixth Somerset Light Infantry.