“The Armistice” by May Wedderburn Cannan

(In an Office, in Paris)

The news came through over the telephone:
All the terms had been signed: the War was won:
And all the fighting and the agony,
And all the labour of the years were done.
One girl clicked sudden at her typewriter
And whispered, ‘Jerry’s safe’, and sat and stared:
One said, ‘It’s over, over, it’s the end:
The War is over: ended’: and a third,
‘I can’t remember life without the war’.
And one came in and said, ‘Look here, they say
We can all go at five to celebrate,
As long as two stay on, just for to-day’. 

It was quite quiet in the big empty room
Among the typewriters and little piles
Of index cards: one said, ‘We’d better just
Finish the day’s reports and do the files’.
And said, (it’s awf’lly like Recessional,
Now when the tumult has all died away’.
The other said, ‘Thank God we saw it through ;
I wonder what they’ll do at home to-day’.
And said, ‘ You know it will be quiet to-night
Up at the Front: first time in all these years,
And no one will be killed there any more’,
And stopped, to hide her tears.
She said, ‘I’ve told you; he was killed in June.’
The other said, ‘My dear, I know; I know . . .
It’s over for me too . . . My Man was killed,
Wounded . . . and died … at Ypres . . . three years ago . . .
And he ‘s my Man, and I want him,’ she said,
And knew that peace could not give back her Dead.

Comment by Ira Maine, Poetry Editor
The poet, May Wedderburn Cannan (1893-1973) was the daughter of Charles Cannan, Dean of Trinity college, Oxford.  Her father’s friends included Arthur Quiller-Couch who, in 1900, produced ‘The Oxford Book of English Verse’ which was to remain the standard until the 1970’s.  John Dover Wilson, the remarkable Shakespearean scholar was also part of this group, so May Wedderburn Cannan grew up and revelled in an extraordinarily rarified intellectual atmosphere.

The poet spent time at a canteen in France preparing and serving food to soldiers, worked for her father in England, and finally spent the last few months of the war working for MI5 at their Paris office.

During this time the poet had fallen hopelessly in love with Quiller-Couch’s son, Bevil.  Bevil survived the war, won the Military Cross, and was equally in love with her.  So much so that, when the Armistice was signed he came to Paris and proposed.  The poet was delighted to accept.  Bevil then returned to his unit in Germany.  Sadly, the young Quiller-Couch did not survive the Influenza pandemic which swept across Europe following the war.  Within a month or two of the war’s end Bevil died of pneumonia in Germany.  The poet was devastated, inconsolable.

Just listen to the loss in the voices of her female colleagues.  The women are at first stunned to realize that the war is over.  Then slowly they begin to realize that all that’s left to them now is time, plenty of time now, the rest of their lives now, to mourn their losses and to count their dead.  This is heartbreaking stuff and handled superbly well by the poet.  There is no recrimination here, no hatred, no thirst for revenge.  There is only loss, empty, inconsolable loss.  I defy anyone to read the last half-dozen lines and not be moved by them.