The Great Silence Read Online Free PDF

end of the war the even deadlier mustard gas was in common use, blistering both the body and the lungs that inhaled it, leaving just under 200,000 men guttering, choking, drowning, and prompting the poet Wilfred Owen in ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ to write his most devastating lines.
    The American portraitist John Singer Sargent had been out to the front line with the former Slade Professor Henry Tonks in order to research a commission from the British Government’s Ministry of Information for a planned Hall of Remembrance art scheme. Sargent came across a line of men who had just suffered a gas attack and began work immediately afterwards on a huge painting. A nurse explained what the effect of the gas might be on the men. ‘With mustard gas the effects did not become apparent for up to twelve hours. But then it began to rot the body, within and without. The skin blistered, the eyes became extremely painful, and nausea and vomiting began. Worse, the gas attacked the bronchial tubes, stripping off the mucous membrane. The pain was almost beyond endurance.’ Mr J. L. Bragg, a baker, ran an advertisement in the personal column of
The Times
, quoting a letter of endorsement:
Will you kindly send me by post some charcoal biscuits? I find these biscuits have been the greatest benefit to me, and have enabled me to eat more or less normally, which I have not been able to do since I left France in April this year with Gas poisoning.
    Mr Bragg promised the readers that on receipt of threepence he would provide sufferers with a sample of his magic biscuits.
     
    A suspicion lurked among soldiers of all ranks who returned home on a few days’ leave that those left behind at home had been livingin ignorance, whether voluntary or unconscious. There was some truth in this. The happily married Mrs Farr from Somerset had been surviving the war years in the simple unflinching conviction that at the end of it she would be reunited with her husband. One day the telegram boy arrived on his bicycle, painted blood-red for urgency, and handed her a brown envelope that Mrs Farr jammed down the front of her dress. She did not tell anyone of its arrival. The news contained inside the envelope, whether it was the speculative ‘missing in action’ or the definitive ‘killed in action’, was she knew instinctively, going to be too dreadful to see written down. Mantelpieces up and down the country contained photographs turned to the walls, often in frames surrounded by small blue-painted flowers spelling out beneath the picture the words ‘Forget me not’. Sometimes the edge of an unopened telegram peeped out from behind the frame. For as long as the envelope remained sealed, a flicker of hope edged out the truth.
     
    But as the war progressed hope was clung to with increasing desperation. Ever an evanescent commodity, it slipped through the fingers with an inevitability that grew daily. ‘You hope for the best, exhausting though that effort is, until the time comes when hope evades you and all the evidence is conspiring to tell you to behave differently and reality insists you stop hoping. For what is the point?’ asked the daughter of a soldier who had been reported missing in action, but whose death remained unconfirmed. Denial acted as the shock-absorber of grief, although sometimes a letter posted to the front arrived too late and was returned to the sender with the single brutal word ‘Killed’ stamped on the outside.
    Meanwhile the Government’s morale-boosting propaganda had contributed in large part to the ignorance at home of the true state of affairs abroad. Positive stories written by journalists who feared prosecution if they told the truth, including Philip Gibbs of the
Daily Telegraph
, were designed to put the best possible slant on the news. Soldiers who longed to describe the dreadful reality of warfare had their letters censored. Rumours were rife. The 18-year-old Barbara Cartland believed the stories that ‘Germans were