[Editor: This article, by G. J. Hill, was published in Architecture (Sydney, NSW), 1 December 1930.]
Armistice
(To our soldier architects)
G. J. Hill, M.I.A.
“Eight, nine, ten, eleven.” … As the strokes ended, the hush that had commenced at the first chime was suddenly everywhere, an almost palpable thing. Trams, cars, carts were still; the hundreds of people in Martin Place stood wordless.
Time moved backward twelve years for me, and I was in a French village. Already at breakfast time we had heard that to-day was to be the end of hostilities, had “got the good oil” just as orders were to be issued for an advance.
That Army breakfast on November 11 was the best meal of our lives! Then presently, at 11 o’clock, the civilians knew; and everything was noise and joyful bustle. The church bell pealed wildly; old men and dames, thin young women, and little shouting children rushed up and down the one twisting cobbled street.
As I sat in my quarters scribbling a report, someone’s shadow fell across my paper. It was raining — the softest, kindest rain of the whole campaign — and I was going to drag my chair along to catch the light. But a woman hurried over and threw both arms round my neck before I could move. What a woman, too! She was as yellow, wrinkled and wholesome as a pippin, and, in spite of her rags, as scrupulously clean. A flower-white coif stood out round her shrivelled, tiny face and brushed my chin as she kissed my forehead. Tears were running quietly down her cheeks; and she said: “Mon fils fut tué… Dieu te bénisse, mon fils!” — My son was killed; God bless you, my son!”
The two minutes’ silence ended. The traffic went roaring on, and the people scattered.
I thought, as I walked away, that as it had been here in Sydney, so it would be all the world over. No matter how great the dissensions between nation and nation, or class and class, in spite of suspicion, jealousy, misunderstandings of all kinds, for two minutes at least, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, all the white men on this globe, for all time to come, will be as brothers.
Source:
Architecture [Journal of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects] (Sydney, NSW), 1 December 1930, p. 582
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