HISTORY
It was a still and cloudy morning in Great Britain on November 11th 1918 as word blew in that the War to End all Wars was finally over.
Just a few hours previous, the diminished Central Powers had begrudgingly boarded a railway carriage in France to sign the Armistice de Compiegne with the Allies, agreeing to cease all hostilities from 11am that same day. Like a curious paradox, as the frontline weaponry fell silent, news of peace at last was greeted with gunfire back home. Yet there was no cheering on the Western Front. The world was exhausted, consumed by the four-year conflict which had stripped it of all meaning.
Over eight million lay dead, caught in the crossfire of the first truly global war. Those who remained would live on in the shadows of the stagnant, murky nightmare of the trenches. The world was different than it had been four years earlier, transformed.
The catalytic assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in June 1914, which triggered the start of the war just a handful of weeks later, had seen Europe’s peace and stability crumble as quickly and inevitably as clockwork.
All it would take for the world to be put right was a short, sharp, corrective shock, they said. Over by Christmas. Yes, peace had finally been returned, but it also sparked a societal change; the impact of which can still be felt today as we reach a century later.
The colossal loss of life caused by the war was catastrophic, drastically affecting families, culture and economics in every country involved. In the UK, 743,000 people were killed. Endless children were left fatherless, women resigned to widows, or worse - spinsters. Those who returned were not the same men who had left four years earlier.
Of the 4.9million British men who served, one in three returned wounded; over 1.6million survivors maimed in both body and mind. The children who were fortunate to see their fathers return failed to identify dear papa as he stepped off the train, with many facially scarred beyond recognition. Hospitals were set up purely for those with facial disfigurements.
Some men brought home
a new ailment in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder – or shell shock as it was known at the time- suffering from psychological and emotional trauma as a result of their experiences at the Front. Many a brave soldier experienced flashbacks, nightmares and guilt and became a shadow of their former self, living in fear of the cowardice smear made against those who couldn’t ‘pull themselves together.’
While the men who returned were slowly on the journey to recovery, the women who had propped up the country were resigned to taking a step back, their efforts somewhat overshadowed. As breadwinners vanished to the frontline, housewives were threatened with destitution and so, as the conflict went on, women headed in their droves in search of work to support their families fighting to survive.
Across Britain, tens of
thousands of women took on their husbands’ former trades, from chimney sweeps to railway workers and grave diggers.
Over 250,000 women worked
on the land; 200,000 joined government departments; 800,000 went into engineering; while 1.6million women flocked to factories to help make uniforms and ammunition to keep the boys stocked up To help the war efforts, hundreds of thousands of women enlisted in the forces in various roles, from nurses to entertainers.
But all was not lost once the men came home. Women served their country but they also served their own causes. Fashion was less restrictive and they could even venture into pubs to get a round in after a long shift. However, the biggest post- war change for women was the reformation of their rights which was led by the suffrage movement; a campaign which had gathered pace as the war went on. After the war, people, particularly women, refused to go back to the inequality of pre-1914 and so fought for new rights. Not just women, working class soldiers who had fought alongside the educated and the professional strived for democracy.
Life as we knew it was changing.
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aroundtownmagazine.co.uk
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