The runner was breathless when he finally caught up with the 157th US Infantry Brigade on the furthest reach of the Western Front. It was 10.44 in the morning and he carried with him the news that the ceasefire brokered overnight would begin at eleven o’clock. Further runners were urgently dispatched to inform the other companies; but with no clear instruction on how to proceed in the sixteen minutes that remained, the Brigade Commander of the 157th took the decision that there would be no let-up in fighting until eleven. Private Henry Gunther was pinned with his company beneath a cover of fog on the rise of Côté-de-Romagne. The war had divided the loyalties of many of those fighting, but for Gunther it had been more divisive than most. A German-American from East Baltimore, his neighbourhood were people from the old country; when war broke out he found himself the subject of racial abuse. He cared more about his job in the National Bank of Baltimore, and about Olga, the girl he wanted to marry, than he did about the war, but he was drafted into the infantry regiment dubbed ‘Baltimore’s Own’ for the Maryland men who served in it. A supply sergeant, he witnessed harrowing conditions at the front and wrote to a friend at home urging him to stay out of the conflict if he possibly could. An army censor reported his letter and Gunther was broken to the rank of private; his fiancée ended their engagement, and with it the last of his morale. In the final minutes of the war, he lay face down on the ground occupied by his unit, bayonet fixed to his rifle, preparing to advance. Shells exploded in the boggy ground around him, sending up founts of iron and mud. On the slope above him, two squadrons of German machine-gunners counted down the minutes; they knew the armistice was imminent and could not believe their eyes when Gunther’s company rose and began to approach through the fog. Had they not received the message of ceasefire? The Germans fired a round of warning shots overhead and the advancing troops dropped to find cover. Gunther alone rose to his feet and continued his advance. Perhaps he was driven to avenge his demotion, or perhaps to prove himself to Olga – perhaps he had lost all sense of having anything left to salvage; whatever it was that urged him on, he ignored the call of his sergeant to stay down. A German gunner waved him back, but he would not turn, and was fired upon. Gunther was killed by a bullet to the temple. Sixty seconds later, the war to end all wars ended.1

Henry Gunther was the last of ten million soldiers to fall in the Great War: a sad, senseless end, his hometown newspaper remembered.2 Six million civilians had also died, and the influenza that was to follow would kill tens of millions more. The world had never witnessed destruction on such a scale or such wastage of life, and with the signing of the armistice a search to comprehend the conflict would begin.

Up and down the length of the British Isles, towns and villages lay bereft of young men. The loss of ‘pals battalions’, where friends and neighbours were in service together, had wiped out the men of some communities almost entirely. Many who survived returned physically maimed and were unable to work; some wore masks to hide their terrible injuries, others were crippled by what was then known as shell shock. Those who were physically able came home to a landscape of rationing, recession and unemployment. Social patterns had changed in the workplace and at home; women had substituted for men in the factories and the fields. Labour disputes built towards the General Strike of 1926; in Ireland, the War of Independence was followed by a vicious civil war. As old empires crumbled across Europe, some gave way to modes of communism sweeping out of the east. New countries emerged within old borders, nation states replaced kingdoms. Terrorist bombings in the United States fuelled a ‘Red Scare’, leading to round-ups of subversives. The General Strike in Seattle of 1919 was denounced as a Bolshevik revolution, one of thousands of walkouts nationwide; race riots swept through the Midwest. The prohibition of alcoholic drinks polarised the national debate and financed organised crime, while agriculture began to collapse. The ‘roaring’ economy of the early 1920s would overheat on the road to the Great Depression. And the reparations inflicted on Germany by the victorious Allies, and the treaty that defined them, would cripple that country and dismay the world, laying the foundation for disaster. Civilisation and progress – watchwords of the pre-war era – seemed emptied of meaning, robbed of certainty or value.

T. S. Eliot had spent the months leading up to the armistice trying to enlist in the United States Army. A childhood hernia and tachycardia had made active duty impossible, though he felt sure that he had something to offer military intelligence and had pursued applications with the Navy and the Army. But on 11 November 1918, he had returned to his job at Lloyds Bank in London, his efforts to enlist, he said, having ‘turned to red tape in my hands’.3 As an American citizen (he would not become a British subject until 1927), the obligations upon him were not those of the Englishmen he had lived among since 1914. Then, he had felt unassimilated: ‘I don’t think that I should ever feel at home in England’;4 but as the war progressed, Eliot came to understand it through the eyes of those who fought in it, ‘as something very sordid and disagreeable which must be put through’.5

Ezra Pound had spent Armistice Day wandering through London, in order, he said, to observe the effect of the ceasefire upon the city’s people; but instead of gaining insight he caught a cold from loitering in the November rain.6 ‘I know that I am perched on the rotten shell of a crumbling empire,’ he had told an English audience in 1913, ‘but it isn’t my empire, and I’m not legally responsible, and anyway the Germans will probably run it as well as you do.’7 But as the conflict ground on and on, he had worried about Eliot persistently and went so far as petitioning the American embassy to spare his friend from service. ‘If it was a war for civilisation (not merely for democracy)’, he told the ambassador, ‘it was folly to shoot or have shot one of the six or seven Americans capable of contributing to civilisation or understanding the word.’8 The armistice that spared his friend from service might have afforded some relief, but instead it brought only friction and unease. He remarked to James Joyce that the returning troops were ‘competition’ with which he must now contend.9 London had been the ‘place of poesy’,10 but now he felt a growing disgust towards a country that had offered up so many of its young men for slaughter, as he would put it in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, for ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization’.11 He would repeatedly tap his Adam’s apple and announce that this was where the English ‘stopped short’: in their failure to speak out, to engage their minds.

‘Everyone’s individual lives are so swallowed up in the one great tragedy’, wrote Eliot, ‘that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimportant!’12 And yet with so many lost and disfigured, few lives were untouched, and Eliot’s and Pound’s were no exception.

Jean Verdenal was a medical student of twenty when he boarded in Paris with Eliot in 1910. The young men bonded over the verse of Jules Laforgue, and found in one another a brother-in-arts of a kind rare in English–American letters. Verdenal was killed on the battlefield at Gallipoli, attempting to dress the wounds of a fallen officer.13 Eliot would dedicate his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, ‘To Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915’, adding in time ‘mort aux Dardanelles’.14 And he would carry a grief that he was hesitant to unburden, one that would cast a shade across the initial years of his life in London. Only later would he admit to what he called a ‘sentimental’ sunset: ‘the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli’.15

Pound had lost an artistic ‘brother’ of his own. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was twenty-one when he met the American poet at an exhibition at the Albert Hall in 1913: ‘a well-made young wolf’, recalled Pound, as he attempted to pronounce from the catalogue what he called the appalling assemblage of consonants that comprised the sculptor’s name (‘Brzxjk——’, he slurred, ‘Burrzisskzk——’; ‘Jaersh-ka’, corrected the sculptor himself from behind the pedestal with a voice of ‘the gentlest fury’). Pound bought pieces at a sum that would have been ridiculous, he admitted, had Gaudier any market and he any income....