The Missing of the Somme Read Online Free Page A

Portland stone.
    In the meantime the temporary structure remained in place for the first anniversary of Armistice Day when the two minutes’ silence was first introduced.
    Since the Second World War, when it was decided to commemorate the memory of the dead of both wars on the Sunday closest to the eleventh of November, the effect of the silence has been muted. On
the normally busy weekdays between the wars – especially in 1919 and 1920 – the effect of ‘the great awful silence’ was overwhelming, shattering.
    In 1919, at eleven a.m., not only in Britain but throughout the Empire, all activity ceased. Traffic came to a standstill. In workshops and factories and at the Stock Exchange no one moved. In
London not a single telephone call was made. Trains scheduled to leave at eleven delayed their departures by two minutes; those already in motion stopped. In Nottingham Assize Court a demobbed
soldier was being tried for murder. At eleven o’clock the whole court, including the prisoner, stood silently for two minutes. Later in the day the soldier was sentenced to death.
    On 12 November 1919 the
Manchester Guardian
reported the previous day’s silence:
    The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect. The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed
     dray-horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition . . . Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their
     heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of ‘attention’. An elderly woman, not faraway, wiped her
     eyes and the man beside her looked white and stern. Everyone stood very still . . . The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense
     of audibility. It was . . . a silence which was almost pain . . . And the spirit of memory brooded over it all.
    The following year the silence and the unveiling of the permanent Cenotaph were complemented by another even more emotive component of the ceremony of Remembrance: the burial of the Unknown
Warrior.
    Eight unmarked graves were exhumed from the most important battlefields of the war. Blindfolded, a senior officer selected one coffin at random. 4 In an
elaborate series of symbol-packed rituals ‘the man who had been nothing and who was now to beeverything’ was carried through France with full battle honours and
transported across the Channel in the destroyer
Verdun
(so that this battle and the soldiers of France also found a place in the proceedings). On the morning of the 11th the flag-draped
coffin was taken by gun carriage to Whitehall, where, at eleven o’clock, the permanent Cenotaph was unveiled.
    The weather played its part. The sun shone through a haze of cloud. There was no wind. Flags, at half mast, hung in folds. No wind disturbed the silence which descended once again. Big Ben
struck eleven. The last stroke dissolved over London, spreading a silence through the nation. ‘In silence, broken only by a nearby sob,’ reported
The Times
, ‘the great
multitude bowed its head . . .’ People held their breath lest they should be heard in the stillness. The quiet, which had seemed already to have reached its limit, grew deeper and even
deeper. A woman’s shriek ‘rose and fell and rose again’ until the silence ‘bore down once more’.
    O God, our help in ages past.
    The silence stretched on until, ‘suddenly, acute, shattering, the very voice of pain itself – but pain triumphant – rose the clear notes of the bugles in The Last
Post’.
    From the Cenotaph the carriage bearing the Unknown Warrior made its way to Westminster Abbey. Inside, the same intensity of emotion was reinforced by numerical arrangement: a thousand bereaved
widows and mothers; a hundred nurses wounded or blinded in the war; a guard of honour made up ofa