Paintings for our times: Nicholson’s Armistice Night, 1918
William Nicholson, Armistice Night, 1918
Image © Desmond Banks
Music to Complement the Painting:
Today we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War fought in Europe. VE Day (Victory in Europe), as it came to be called, was an understandably joyous occasion.
Millions of people rejoiced in the news that Germany had surrendered, relieved that the intense strain of total war was finally over. In towns and cities across the world, people marked the victory with street parties, dancing and singing.
But it was not the end of the conflict, nor was it an end to the impact the war had on people. The war against Japan did not end until August 1945, and the political, social and economic repercussions of the Second World War were felt long after Germany and Japan surrendered.
On a personal note, my father, Flight Lieutenant Leslie Stephenson, was a night fighter pilot throughout the war serving with 219 Squadron flying a de Havilland Mosquito out of Ford Aerodrome in West Sussex (now an open prison).
My own father’s contribution to the celebrations was this sparse note in his RAF pilot’s log-book… his RAF Wings, Distinguished Flying Cross and bar by its side.
When I think of the end of the Second World War in May 1945, my mind is also cast back to the Night the Guns Fell Silent on November 11th, 1918. Celebrations were equally joyful as they were to be twenty-eight years later but there is an interesting and subtle difference.
The word victory - prominent at the end of WWII - comes across as triumphal, celebratory and glorifying while the word armistice, more associated with WWI, has something of a solemn dignity about it: more reflective; less triumphant. This subtle difference is a useful starting point to talk about today’s painting.
Entitled Armistice Night, this work by Sir William Nicholson RA depicts a street scene on the night following the signing of the armistice treaty. Painted almost immediately after the event, what should be a portrayal of joyful celebration has a darker side… Are the lights in the sky party fireworks - or shell bursts? Are the people draped over the gun barrels drunken celebrants - or limp corpses?
That November evening in 1918 the evident communal joy was not necessarily shared by all. While Armistice Night was widely celebrated and with gay abandon, there were inevitable voices of anger and remorse. Typical of this was D.H. Lawrence and his famous outburst at a Bloomsbury party:
“The war isn’t over. It makes me sick to see you rejoicing like a butterfly in the last rays of sun before the winter. Whatever happens there can be no peace on earth.”
And while we are in Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf wrote of Armistice Night:
“Every wounded soldier was kissed by women; nobody had any notion where to go or what to do; it poured steadily; crowds drifted up and down the pavements waving flags and jumping into omnibuses. I felt more and more melancholy and hopeless of the human race. They make one doubt whether any decent life will ever be possible.”
In fact it is Lady Ottoline Morrell who takes this position to its logical conclusion. Emerging from a performance of the Ballets Russes at the Coliseum she encountered a one-legged ex-soldier in the Charing Cross Road. He was too drunk to walk with his crutches, and so his companions were simply dragging him along the ground. Lady Ottoline hurried across the road to intervene, but they told her to go away in no uncertain terms. Lady Ottoline later wrote in her diary:
“War’s contribution to this young man’s life had been to maim him in body and ruin him in soul.”
According to his biographer - and the companion of his later years - Marguerite Steen, William Nicholson’s Armistice Night was spent in the Café Royal in Piccadilly which is from where Nicholson made the sketch for today’s painting.
We are among the captured German guns that were lined up along the Mall. We can probably hear the drunken soldiers hanging off their barrels, and are certainly close enough for them to see us and address us with their jubilation. Yet Nicholson’s technique imposes itself between us and them, the thick brushstrokes and deftly articulate shapes render the figures vivid but indistinct. We can’t know the feelings of the soldier on crutches in the foreground, his facial expression isn’t revealed in the paint. Does Nicholson think he has been ruined in soul as well as maimed in body, as Lady Ottoline thought of the injured man who told her to ‘fuck off’ outside the Coliseum?
The only characters that are partly distinct are the two disabled men in the foreground, both on crutches and wearing suits. One of them has a small splash of military decoration. While the throng behind them in the middle distance are obviously revellers, the overall impression is one of dread… This is not a triumphal painting.
William Nicholson’s younger son, John Anthony had been killed in action just five weeks before on the 5th October. This was only to compound the grief that Nicholson must have been feeling at the loss of Mabel (née Pryde), his wife who had died of Spanish Flu only three months before. No wonder the painting is suffused with darkness: there was little for William Nicholson to celebrate that night in November one hundred and two years ago.
By way of a post-script, Nicholson’s older son, Ben went on to become a more famous artist than his father. You can see a couple of pieces in the C20th Gallery at the Fitzwilliam and several other works by him in the house at Kettles Yard… when it re-opens, of course.
Throughout the current pandemic crisis both press and politicians have been quick to conflate the hardship of war with hardship of our present situation. Adopting phrases such as the front line and a war we must win… even Her Majesty The Queen invokedWe’ll Meet Again, a wartime anthem, in her speech to rally the troops (there – you’ve got me at it now. I’ll be humming the tune of When This Lousy War is Over for the rest of the day!).
But all this current hyperbole is something of an artifice. With the loss of his son on the Western Front and the death of his wife in the Spanish Flu pandemic, for William Nicholson, the conflation of war and disease was all too real.
In conclusion, thank you to my father and his night-fighter comrades in 219 Squadron for their fearless defence of their country. In particular, those who never made it back for breakfast in the mess. The last killed in action note in my father’s log-book was Flight Officer Huynen, lost on 28th March 1945… He had been a close friend.
Here are two other references, each very moving in its own way:
First, the Imperial War Museum’s recreation from ‘sound ranging’ of the very last seconds of the First World War: the moment the guns fell silent.
And finally, the last moments of the final programme in the BBC comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth. Try and get through this without a tear in your eye!
