On 11 November 1918, jubilant crowds across Britain celebrated the end of the war. But many new struggles were just beginning. What was the legacy of the first world war?
When the armistice came, “at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month”, Cambridge undergrads made for Bertrand Russell’s rooms on Trinity Street and smashed them up. He had said the war was wrong. They said it had been right, and anyway we won it.
Enormous crowds rejoiced in London far into the night and went waving and shrieking to Buckingham Palace. Others did not feel like rejoicing. Young Vera Brittain had been nursing the wounded in France. Her fiance, her two closest male friends and her beloved only brother had all been killed. Now she walked away from the crowds alone. Later she wrote: “Already this was a different world … a world in which people would be lighthearted and forgetful, in which themselves and their careers and their amusements would blot out political ideals and great national issues.”
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