A Certain Slant of Light

Nicholas Best’s The Greatest Day in History: How, On the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, The First World War Finally Came to an End is a symphony. Moving chronologically through the last week of the war (a chapter a day, with four full chapters for Armistice Day itself), Best draws on dozens of accounts to create a kaleidoscopic view of the chaotic end of World War I on all sides.

The kaiser’s staff contemplating a glorious last charge, so the kaiser could be shot gloriously in battle rather than abdicating. Woodrow Wilson watching the election results that hand the Senate to the opposition. Englishwoman Flora Sandes, who served as a sergeant in the Serbian army (you can bet I’m going to read her memoir), separated from her regiment by a bout of the flu and now running a backwater hospital. An English-born aristocrat married to a German, hiding out from the revolution convulsing the streets of Berlin. Soldiers from England, America, Canada, Scotland, Australia, reacting to the end of the war with delirious joy, numb acceptance, fury at the insensitivity of joy after so much sorrow; and sorrow that the excitement of war will all be over tomorrow.

The quiet of the countryside, after years of shelling so loud that it could be heard across the English Channel. Now the shelling is over, and the day is so quiet that you can hear the leaves rustle.

This style of close-up, chronological order history can give such a good feeling of what it was like to be there for an event: the little things that stick out, the strangeness of hearing the rustling leaves, the cities lit up after years of blackouts. And it also highlights the contingency of history, the swiftness with which things change: the kaiser’s glorious last charge that never happened. The German politician, swept away by the enthusiasm of the revolutionary crowd, who announced the kaiser’s abdication before it happened, thus forcing the kaiser’s hand.

I particularly appreciated the wealth of information about the German side of things, as I’ve struggled to find books about the German experience of World War I. (Oddly, there seem to be plenty of books about the German experience of World War II.)

It’s striking just how many people, even on Armistice Day, saw the seeds for more war in the terms of the peace: either the harshness of those terms, or the fact that they had been imposed without a clear Allied military victory. Perhaps if the Allies had marched down Unter der Linden in Berlin, they could have gotten away with the harshness. But the combination of harshness without undeniable military victory was fatal.

A lagniappe: a piece of poetry George S. Patton wrote on Armistice Day, when he was stuck behind the lines recovering from a wound in his side.

We can but hope that ere we drown
‘Neath treacle floods of grace,
The tuneless horns of mighty Mars
Once more shall rouse the Race.
When such times come, Oh! God of War
Grant that we pass midst strife,
Knowing once more the whitehot joy
Of taking human life.