The story of Armistice Day 1918 is generally recounted through the eyes of those who found little to enjoy in it. Emotionally wounded by the war and bereft over the loss of friends and lovers, figures like Vera Brittan recalled feeling distant, lonely, and separated from those flag-waving multitudes who gave themselves over to paroxysms of joy. In Peace at Last, Guy Cuthbertson looks instead at 11 November 1918—from midnight to midnight—to tell the story of that dramatic twenty-four hours from the perspective of those Bacchanalian crowds for whom the announcement of peace and victory triggered a celebratory abandon that few would ever experience so intensely again. With beautiful and detailed prose, Cuthbertson creates a work of narrative history reminiscent of Barbara Tuchman and nearly impossible to put down.

The vividness with which Cuthbertson recounts this day draws the reader along on the shoulders of the crowd. Despite the fact that Cuthbertson spends nearly three hundred pages telling the story of only one day, the nuance and color of that compelling description offers insights into a carnivalesque street culture, overpowering personal relief, and the ability of Britons to behave “out of character” on this most exceptional of days. Ringing bells, lighting clock towers, stripping black paper from lampposts, burning the Kaiser's effigy on hastily constructed bonfires (which lit up the skies from Welsh villages to Trafalgar Square, where one badly damaged the base of Nelson's column), people celebrated as they had never done before—at least not since Mafeking Night 1900—and with considerably more emotional investment. Cuthbertson paints a tableau of the dancing, kissing, and hugging crowds, throwing caution to the wind during the height of the Spanish flu. He writes of flappers wrapped in flags and buildings draped in bunting, of people wildly climbing on omnibuses, trams, and statues of Queen Victoria. It was a moment when respectable women ran outside without their hats on and Noel Coward, heading for the Savoy, sat in a friend's Rolls Royce caught in the melee, “like a ship stuck in polar ice” (190).

While we are all familiar with the jubilation of that day, Cuthbertson takes us inside the crowd, through towns and villages, into schools and churches, from Cardiff to Aberdeen to London, drawing on an immense array of sources ranging from newspapers and plays to advertisements for bunting. Carefully selecting vivid recollections, both personal and literary, Cuthbertson recreates the emotional intensity of that day, its visual impact, its sounds and smells, and the sense, among those who experienced it, that it was an uncanny moment never likely to happen again. Despite the best efforts of a few hoodlums, rowdy young men who did not understand that the joyful abandon of that day was an historical and psychic one-off, Armistice Day 1918 was irreplicable and those who missed it because of flu or other impediment were intensely aware of having missed the greatest moment of their lives. Cuthbertson quotes Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, whose heroine, Valentine Wannop, missed the blast of the maroons, announcing the end of war, because she was running through a tunnel to receive a phone call: “She had missed the sound for which the ears of a world had waited for years, for a generation. For an eternity. No sound . . . For the rest of her life she was never able to remember the greatest stab of joy that had ever been known by waiting millions. There would be no one but she who would not be able to remember that” (52). With the eye of a literary scholar, Cuthbertson uses such vivid passages to punctuate the social historical experiences recounted in chapters that parse the day. Moving from anticipation of peace to the sounding of the maroons, from an eerie railway carriage in the woods to quiet reception on the blood-soaked front, and from the explosions of camaraderie at home to the sputtering “after party,” that would destine all future November 11ths to be shrouded in solemnity, Cuthbertson recreates the arc of the day. In doing so, he offers some subtle but important historiographical insights.

Cuthbertson's work adds to a substantial body of scholarly literature that traces the way the so-called orthodox interpretation of the Great War, classically expounded by Paul Fussell, eclipsed equally prevalent memories of the war as a “job” that “had to be done” and as an experience men and women were proud to have been part of. To revisionist scholars, the Great War assumed its lugubrious reputation in the years after the war, rather than during the war itself. Poets such as Wilfred Owen notwithstanding, this scholarship encourages historians to move beyond the war poets and to examine the war years as they were lived and experienced, rather than as they came to be remembered in the somber decades following. Despite the fact that the orthodox interpretation enjoyed pride of place during the centennial, impossible to dislodge from public memory of the Great War, Cuthbertson subtly engages with this debate as he shows the metamorphosis of Armistice Day from that wonderful moment of unrestrained joy and revelry to the somber, establishment-driven ritual that now takes place at the cenotaph. By recounting the day, almost in real time, Cuthbertson uses “thick description” to offer a detailed snapshot of a day that many would recall and write about as one of the most vivid, joyous, and uncanny of their lives.