Haunted Peace a Stillness Heard Round the World

By Stefan Kanfer

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the shooting stopped. In London, King George V celebrated by opening a bottle of brandy $ undisturbed since Waterloo. In Paris, Marcel Proust praised "the miraculous and vertiginous Peace." In Washington, President Woodrow Wilson looked for "something much better and more lasting than the selfish competitive interests of powerful states."

But among the victors, not everyone was jubilant. Antiwarrior D.H. Lawrence snapped at a group of celebrators, "It makes me sick to see you rejoicing like a butterfly in the last rays of the sun before the winter . . . Europe is done for; England most of all." And Joseph Conrad, whose son had been shell- shocked in France, wrote, "I cannot confess to an easy mind . . . Great and blind forces are set catastrophically all over the world."

As the Great War ended, emotions and prophecies were tumultuously released. The job of tracing and cataloging them would require librarian, detective, scholar and interpreter. Stanley Weintraub, a Pennsylvania State University professor, is that committee. A Stillness Heard Round the World is a classic instance of information retrieval presented without bias or thesis. Unlike Paul Fussell, whose The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) brilliantly traced the outlines of World War I on contemporary art and life, Weintraub is content to play the role of time machine, flashing backward to gather the testimonies of eyewitnesses. They are unfailingly provocative.

As he waits for the sound of Big Ben, Minister of Munitions Winston Churchill finds his mind straying "back across the scarring years." A 16- year-old farm boy named Charles Lindbergh is free to buy a war-surplus "Flying Jenny." Wounded Ambulance Driver Ernest Hemingway, recalling a successful offensive in Italy, writes home: "Gee but it was great though to end it with such a victory!" Omar Bradley, a 25-year-old Army officer stuck at a post in Iowa, morosely hears the whistle blasts, certain that he is "professionally ruined." In the censorship section of the Liverpool post office, J.C. Silber listens to the "majestic tolling" of church bells and is "glad to get away from it all." Understandably: Silber is a German spy who will retain his cover long enough to return home. In Berlin, Albert Einstein writes to his mother, "Only now do I begin to feel at ease. The defeat has worked wonders."

Eighty miles to the north, at a military hospital, an old pastor counsels a corporal. The clergyman announces that Germany must throw itself on the mercy of the victorious Allies. "Everything went black before my eyes," Adolf Hitler is to remember. "That night I resolved that, if I recovered my sight, I would enter politics."

Such incidents are the equivalent of cinema's frozen frames, and they give Weintraub's chronicle the sense of a long documentary film, traversing forgotten years and miles. On the surface, all is anecdote and diversion. But there is a hollowness to the cheers and the martial music. Weintraub follows an English schoolgirl running happily down a hallway, only to find a teacher weeping in her classroom. She had been widowed by the war. A bitter German slogan is brought back from the front: "Wir siegen uns zu Tode" (We'll conquer until we're all dead). And Gertrude Stein addresses a wounded French soldier: "Well, here is peace." The poilu replies, "At least for 20 years." As the world knows, his timing was tragically correct, almost to the hour, the day and the year.