The Great Silence

This account of British life in the wake of World War I is “social history at its very best . . . insightful and utterly absorbing” ( Minneapolis Star-Tribune ). As the euphoria of Armistice Day in 1918 quickly subsided, there was no denying the carnage that the Great War had left in its wake. Grief and shock overwhelmed the psyche of the British people—but from their despair, new life would slowly emerge. For veterans with faces demolished in the trenches, surgeon Harold Gillies brings hope wit