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You laughing, waving in your pinstripe double-breasted suit, me with my head in my hands
On the morning of November 11th I was called into the Colonel's room "to take some notes from the telephone." They were all there and got up and made room for me at the table. I think they must have thought that I knew shorthand which I didn't. A voice, very clear, thank God, said "Ready?" and began to dictate the Terms of the Armistice. They muttered a bit crowding round me and I said fiercely "Oh shut up I can't hear!" and the skies didn't fall.
I wrote in my own private short-long-hand and half my mind was in a prayer that I should be able to read it back. I could hear my heart thumping and hear the silence in the room around me. When the voice stopped I said mechanically "understood" and got up.
I made four copies of what I had written and took them in and went back to my little office staff and told them. I can't remember much what we said: I can only remember being so cold, and crying, and trying not to let the others see.
That night it was all over Paris. There were sounds of cheering and rejoicing down the Boulevards as I walked home. What I thought of was "Recessional." The Pension produced some champagne at dinner and we drank the loyal toast. And then across the table G. lifted her glass to me and said "Absent". I did not know her story nor she mine, but I drank to my friends who were dead and to my friends who, wounded, imprisoned, battered, shaken, exhausted, were alive in a new, and a terrible world.
—May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices (1976)
I wrote in my own private short-long-hand and half my mind was in a prayer that I should be able to read it back. I could hear my heart thumping and hear the silence in the room around me. When the voice stopped I said mechanically "understood" and got up.
I made four copies of what I had written and took them in and went back to my little office staff and told them. I can't remember much what we said: I can only remember being so cold, and crying, and trying not to let the others see.
That night it was all over Paris. There were sounds of cheering and rejoicing down the Boulevards as I walked home. What I thought of was "Recessional." The Pension produced some champagne at dinner and we drank the loyal toast. And then across the table G. lifted her glass to me and said "Absent". I did not know her story nor she mine, but I drank to my friends who were dead and to my friends who, wounded, imprisoned, battered, shaken, exhausted, were alive in a new, and a terrible world.
—May Wedderburn Cannan, Grey Ghosts and Voices (1976)
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You're welcome. I read it originally appended to her poem "The Armistice," which is a good poem, but the prose sticks with me.
I've not read first-hand accounts of how people in Germany or Austria or Turkey responded to the news the war was over; most people were surely relieved, too, but in those nations, the war was followed by revolutions.
Austria is how the Taaffes lost the last of their titles! Which I would never have been in line for anyway, but still.
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And World War I took them both out! The latter were lost to the UK's Titles Deprivation Act 1917 and the establishment of Austria as a republic in 1919 put paid to the former. I found out both of these facts in grad school. I still think it's funny.
("Taaffe" apparently can mean "quiet" in Celtic)
I've never heard that! The name is Welsh originally; I've always heard it associated with a river or a valley. Encountering the Taffy-was-a-Welshman jingle as a child was also a nasty shock, although I believe that’s supposed to come from Dafydd.
Sonya Gräfin von Taaffe!
My father's father actually styled himself in descent from the Austrian Taaffes, which meant that my brother and I believed it until my father's youngest brother got into genealogy in midlife and determined that we're just descended from some Irish Taaffes that went to California in the nineteenth century. We may be related to the silent actress Alice Terry, as her pronunciation of her original last name matches the one used by my father's family and by absolutely none of the people we met in Ireland or any of the native Welsh-speakers I've been able to check with. I still feel sort of proprietary about Eduard Graf von Taaffe, the Austrian Minister-President. He turns up in just about any history of Vienna and popularly features as the villain in retellings of the Mayerling Affair.