The Great Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

extracting fat from human corpses which were tied together and sent from France in cattle-trucks’.
    An impression of amateurishness, even larkiness at home disturbed the sceptical soldier. Girls from munitions factories spent their wages on gramophones and tickets to dance halls and cinemas, while smug young women from the aristocracy considered themselves heroic in adopting flattering nurse’s uniform though wholly unqualified for the task. Country girls working on the land paraded around in ‘some kind of fancy dress with buttons and shoulder straps, breeches and puttees’ as Philip Gibbs scathingly described the land army outfits, while at the same time there were men working the land who were morally opposed to killing, and had remained in England, struggling with their consciences, often restless and troubled by the decision they had made.
    Censorship operated on newspapers, especially on Lord North-cliffe’s
Daily Mail
, while sections of the Home Front tried to continue with their lives in much same way they always had, the upper classes in particular clinging to the old existence. Octogenarian Lord Fitzhardinge remained at his twelfth-century, ‘pink mammoth’ turreted, silver-roofed Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, continuing to hunt four days a week across the water meadows that led to the Severn. To the delight of Violet Keppel his young house guest, daughter of EdwardVII’s long-standing mistress Alice Keppel, his huntsmen dressed ‘in saffron yellow’, while his Lordship wore a Persian cat called Omar wrapped around his neck like some exotic serpent.
    Lady Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland and a leading society beauty, felt that many of those left at home were ‘frenziedly dancing a tarantella’ in order to prevent the increasingly fatal news damaging an increasingly fragile national morale. Footmen still served at the grand tables and were still, Diana Manners noticed, ‘blinded by powder’ used for whitening the hair: the excess floated towards the soup bowl as the servant bent forward to ladle out the vichyssoise. In 1916 a sexy, teasing song and dance routine called ‘Tanko’, designed to poke fun at the new armadillo-like war machine, the tank, was causing hilarity at the Palace Theatre in London. Siegfried Sassoon was enraged by the irresponsible descriptions in the press of these ‘waddling toads’ and by the amused public response. Watching a London theatre audience laughing while men were dying inspired his poem ‘Blighters’ in response to the inappropriate mockery.
I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
     
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, Sweet Home’
     
And there’d be no more jokes in music-halls
     
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.
     
    How were soldiers to find a way to describe to their isolated, sometimes disbelieving families what happened out there? Although the sound of gunfire was occasionally audible on this side of the Channel, there was an inevitable remoteness about the battlefield. Comfort for those in love but separated might be found in pulling a ragged silk stocking belonging to a sweetheart over the head before hoping for sleep. The soldier’s way of life in war remained unrecognisable to anyone who had not experienced it. One soldier, Alfred Finnigan, called it ‘hell with the lid off’. How were these men to convincingly describe the rats as large as otters who gorged themselves on the human flesh that lay rotting all around them, or the stomach-churning death-reek whose smell could not be shifted even by the scent of the strongest Turkish cigarette? The rats had developed a reaction to the meat of dead men. Eating it would make their faces swell and whiten visibly at the top of their greasy, grey bodies. Luminous in the darkness of the bottom of a muddy trench, these ghostly creatures would move swiftly towards sleeping men, waking them with a start as they dragged their tails across the men’s faces in the