Epilogue: Keep a Minute of Silence

The war did not end on one day, and so it cannot be remembered on one day either. Its many endings, spread across thirty years and across the clock faces of the whole world, ask something quiet of you: to remember each of them in its own hour, and the people of every side who waited for it.

You will remember the young travellers in the train compartment, passing sandwiches from hand to hand while the fields of the old front lines went by outside the window. They crossed a border that evening without noticing it. I have often thought that their not noticing was the last and gentlest of all the endings in this book.

Yet I do not want you to close the book with them alone. Before the train carries them out of sight, I would like you to walk back with me once more along the line of dates, as one walks back along a platform after the last carriage has gone.

We walk back along the line of dates once more.

We began under the olive trees on 3 September 1943, where a general in civilian clothes signed a short armistice in a tent. Five days later, on 8 September, it was announced to the world. In 1944 the smaller partners of the Axis stepped away one by one: on 23 August a coup in a royal palace, on 12 September an armistice in the capital of the eastern ally, on 19 September the armistice in the north, on 28 October another. Each one was a negotiation, and each one cost lives in the weeks before and after it.

In the spring of 1945 the endings came faster. On 29 April a surrender was signed in a palace in the south. On 4 May officers stood in a tent on a windy heath. At 2:41 in the morning of 7 May a general signed in a red brick schoolhouse, and near midnight on 8 May the same surrender was signed again. On 9 May the islands of the west were freed, and on 20 May the last uprising on a northern island fell quiet.

Then came the summer of the war in Asia. On 26 July the declaration was issued from a lakeside palace. On 6 and 9 August the new bombs fell on two cities, and on 9 August the eastern ally entered the war. At noon on 15 August a recorded voice spoke through crackling loudspeakers, and at four minutes past nine on 2 September a foreign minister with a cane signed on the deck of a battleship in the bay.

If you lay these dates in a row, you will see that they behave like the stations on a very long railway line. The train slows into each one, stops for a while, and moves on. No single station is the end of the journey.

Some of these stations were large and famous, with crowds and photographers on the platform. Others were small halts where only a few people got off, in the rain, with nobody to meet them. You will have noticed that I have tried to give the small halts as much care as the great stations, because the people who stepped down there were no less important to their families.

The longest endings were measured in years of waiting.

After the deck and the swords came the long years. The prisoners in the camps of the far north and east came home in trains and ships until the last days of December 1956. The treaties came in 1947, 1951, 1955 and 1956, each one closing a door that had stood half open since the fighting stopped. A sergeant came out of the jungle in January 1972, and a lieutenant listened to an order read from a sheet of paper in March 1974.

You will notice that these later endings are often forgotten. They have no famous photograph, no crowd in a square, no single hour on a clock face. They belong instead to kitchens, piers, transit camps and village stations, where one family at a time learned that its own war was over.

I think these are the endings that a history lover should hold most carefully. They remind you that every date in a book of history is also a date in the life of a mother or a child.

The people who signed were tired more often than proud.

When I look back over all these rooms, I am struck by how tired the people in them were. The general under the olive trees, the officers in the schoolhouse, the foreign minister on his cane, the two thin generals behind the supreme commander, the old men in the cathedral: hardly any of them looked like conquerors. They looked like travellers at the end of a night journey, with creased clothes and heavy eyes. The emperor read his words twice into a microphone near midnight, because the first reading was faint. The young diplomat on the deck counted the slow minutes and later asked himself whether his own side would have been as generous. The colonel who signed on the wrong line was surely as weary as everyone else on that deck. Even the supreme commander, whose voice was calm, closed the ceremony with a prayer rather than a boast. And the old officer in the forest clearing, who had become a bookseller, held a paper that trembled in his hands. You can read the whole chronicle of the endings as a chronicle of tired hands, putting down pens, swords and sheets of paper one after another.

You may have expected the end of a great war to be a moment of triumph. The records tell a different story. Even the winners often wrote of silence, of sadness, and of the friends who were not there to see it.

There is something in this that I find consoling. When people are too tired to feel proud, they are sometimes ready to be generous, and many of the best words of those years were spoken in exactly such hours.

The dead of every side are counted in the same long silence.

No one knows exactly how many people died in the Second World War. The figures most often given are between seventy and eighty-five million, soldiers and civilians together, of every nation that took part and of many that did not choose to. More of them were civilians than soldiers. They died in battles, in bombing, in camps, in hunger and in flight. Behind each of those deaths stood a family that waited for a letter, and then for a name on a list, and then for nothing at all except the right to grieve. Many of the graves have names, and many have none. Some lie in great cemeteries with straight rows of stones, where volunteers cut the grass each summer. Others lie in forests, in fields that have long since been ploughed again, or under the sea, where no stone can be set and no candle can be lit. When you keep a minute of silence, you keep it for these as well, the ones whose place no one knows. I find it helps to remember that the silence itself needs no address. It reaches the unmarked places as surely as the marked ones.

I will not describe how they died. You know enough from the dates in this book, and I would rather you held the number in silence than in pictures. If you try to imagine seventy million people, you cannot. If you try to imagine one, you can, and that is where remembrance begins.

Every side lost its sons, its daughters and its old people. The soldiers of the army from the east who fell in the last weeks of August, the young officers in the dark palace, the sailors of the western Allies lost at sea, the farmers of the island empire burned out of their homes, the forced labourers who never reached their villages again: all of them belong in the same silence.

A minute of silence does not ask which side a name belonged to.

The nations kept their remembrance on different days of the year.

Because the war ended on so many days, each nation came to remember it on a day of its own. In the lands of the western Allies on the continent and their neighbours, 8 May became the day of remembrance. In the lands of the eastern ally, where the second signing near midnight already fell on 9 May by their clocks, the day was kept on 9 May. In the cities of the western ally, 2 September or the middle of August was named as the day of victory in Asia. In the island empire, from 1963 onward, a national memorial ceremony was held on 15 August, and at noon, the hour of the recorded voice, people across the country bowed their heads in silence.

You may find it strange at first that the same war is mourned on so many days. I have come to think of it as a kind of grace. Somewhere in the world, through much of the year, someone is keeping a silence for the people of that war.

If you travel, you might keep each of these days in the place where you happen to be. It costs only a minute, and it joins your own small silence to the silence of people you will never meet.

A memorial at dusk taught me how to keep a minute of silence.

Some time ago I walked one evening to a memorial in a small park on the edge of a town. It was a plain stone wall, low enough to touch, with names cut into it in long columns. The light was going, and the lamps along the path had just come on, one after another, with a soft clicking sound. A gardener was rolling his barrow toward the gate, and the birds were settling in the trees.

An old woman stood at the wall with a small candle in a glass jar. She lit it carefully, shielding the flame from the wind with her hand, and set it on the ledge below one column of names. Then she simply stood there, quite still, with her hands folded. She did not read the names aloud. She did not look at her watch. I stood a little way off and waited with her, and after what must have been a minute or two she nodded once to the wall, as if saying goodnight, and walked slowly away.

I stayed until the candle was the brightest light along the wall. I did not know whose name she had come for, and I did not need to know.

I went back once more to the station platform where this book began.

A few weeks after that evening I found myself again on the railway platform where I had first watched an old man reading the dates on a small memorial stone. It was late autumn once more, and the local train was late, as it had been before. The bench beside the stone had weathered a little since its fresh coat of paint. The stone itself had not changed at all.

I stood in front of it and read the dates from the top, beginning with the month of the olive trees in 1943. This time I knew what each date had meant in other rooms and on other shores. I knew which armistices had been signed in those weeks, which towns had rung their bells, and which families had waited at piers. The small stone no longer seemed small to me. It seemed like one carriage of a very long train, joined to all the others.

When my train came in, I let it stand at the platform for a moment before I climbed aboard. You may do the same one day, in front of a stone of your own, and find that the dates have become people.

Since the evening at the memorial, whenever I keep a minute of silence, I think of the old woman's hand around the flame. You may find that such a picture helps you, too, when a minute feels too long or too short.

Lay the dates along a strip and let one minute pass.

Here is the last exercise of this book, and it is a quiet one. Take a long strip of paper, the kind you might cut from the edge of a roll of wrapping paper. Near the left end write 3 September 1943, and near the right end write 11 March 1974. Between them, spaced as evenly as you can by the years, write the other dates you remember from these pages: 8 September, 23 August, 4 May, 7 May, 8 May, 15 August, 2 September, 26 December 1956, and any others that have stayed with you.

Lay the strip along a table. You will see that most of the dates crowd together near the left, in a short space of two years, and that the long right-hand part of the strip is almost empty. That empty stretch is where the waiting lived. It is the years of the piers, the transit camps and the card files.

Now find a clock or watch with a second hand. When the hand reaches twelve, put your finger on the first date and keep silent until the hand comes round to twelve again. Do not try to think of anything in particular. Let the minute pass as it will, the way you let a train go by at a level crossing, standing still until the last carriage has gone and the barrier lifts.

I have done this exercise many times. Each time a different date seems to hold my finger. Once it was the noon of 15 August, and once it was a cold December day on a wooden pier, when a ship came in with the last large group of prisoners and some mothers found no son on the gangway.

Bells and silences carried the endings from town to town.

You may have noticed how often bells have rung in these pages. They rang in liberated towns in 1944 after years of silence. They rang on the evening of 14 August 1945 in the cities of the western Allies, and over the cathedral town in July 1962 when two old men came out into the sunlight. At the transit camp in the small village, a single bell rang each time a train of returning prisoners arrived.

Silences have marked the endings just as often. There was the silence of the schoolyards at noon on 15 August, the silence on the deck while the delegation waited, and the silence in the forest clearing while an old officer read from his sheet of paper. A bell and a silence are not opposites. A bell calls people together, and the silence afterwards is what they share.

On a slow country train once, at dusk, we stood at a small halt while the bell of a village chapel struck the hour. The passengers in my carriage stopped talking for a moment, without any reason, and looked out at the fields. Then the engine pulled away and the conversation came back. I have never forgotten how naturally that short silence came to people who did not know one another.

An ending becomes a foundation only when someone keeps building.

The endings in this book did not stand still. The Charter came into force on 24 October 1945, the declaration of human rights was adopted on 10 December 1948, and the conventions for the wounded and the prisoners were signed on 12 August 1949. A declaration was read in a clock room on 9 May 1950, and two old enemies signed a treaty of friendship on 22 January 1963. Each of these was a foundation laid on the ground that an ending had cleared.

But you know, as I do, that a foundation is not a house. Someone must keep building on it, year after year, with patience and with ordinary work. The young volunteers cutting the grass in the cemeteries were builders of this kind. So were the clerks matching cards in the search offices, and the announcer reading the names of the missing on the radio every evening.

I think this is perhaps the most hopeful lesson of the many endings. Peace is not only signed at a table. It is also kept, by people whose names are never printed.

The history lover carries the dates as a kind of prayer.

You and I love history. We like the exact hour of a signing, the colour of a tablecloth, the number of pens on a table. I have tried in these pages to give you such details, because they make the past real. But I hope you will forgive me for saying that the details are not the end of the matter.

When you next read a date such as 7 May or 2 September, I would ask you to let it be more than a fact. Let it be a small door, through which you remember the people who waited for it in kitchens and at piers, on every side of the war. A date held in this way becomes a kind of prayer, even for those who do not pray.

Whatever conflicts may come in the years after ours, the people who end them will sit, as these people did, in tents and schoolhouses and on the decks of ships. I hope they will be as tired, as careful and as generous as the best of those you have met in this book.

The lamps were lit one by one along the path.

On the evening at the memorial, when the old woman had gone, I walked back along the path toward the gate. The lamps were all lit now, and each one made a small circle of light on the gravel. Behind me the candle still burned on the ledge of the wall.

I stopped at the gate and turned round once. The park was empty, and the names on the wall were no longer readable in the dark. But the candle was still there, very small and very steady, and in the stillness I kept one more minute of silence for all of them, the soldiers and the civilians, the prisoners and the mothers, the dead of every side.