“Doors banged. Feet clattered down corridors. Everyone rose from the desk and cast aside pen and paper. All bounds were broken,” wrote Churchill describing the hour of Armistice in Whitehall in 1918.

“The tumult grew. It grew like a gale, but from all sides simultaneously. The street was now a seething mass of humanity. Flags appeared as if by magic.”

I was first read these words in the 1950s by a headmaster who had endured three years in the trenches, winning an MC to boot and the cessation of hostilities remained one of the most vivid moments of his life.

Britain was in a state of astonishing flux as the fighting in western Europe ground to a halt in 1918. Europe had plenty more fighting to come, from attempted revolution in Germany, to civil war in Russia, a conflict that cost more lives than the the war with Germany.

That there was an hour of celebration in Britain needs no apology – for at least it meant the industrial killing between massed armies in France, Belgium and Italy had been halted. But there was a deep sense of mourning too and a sense that the nation needed to reflect and digest the legacy of the Great War. Some, like DH Lawrence, John Maynard Keynes, and even the supreme commander of the western armies Ferdinand Foch, did not believe the fighting was over for good, and might soon resume.

A number of very good new books and publications, published for this year’s centenary, catch the mood of November 1918, the sense of relief, the sadness and apprehension about what was to come.

Peace at Last – Guy Cuthbertson

Most British newspapers proclaimed in banner headlines “Peace at Last”, the title of Guy Cuthbertson’s portrait of Armistice Day 1918. Cuthbertson is the author of a fine critical biography of the poet Wilfred Owen. This book is an excellent reading of local and national newspaper sources – a gold mine barely excavated by historians of the First World War and its immediate aftermath.

He focuses in exhaustive and highly illuminating detail on how schools were given the news, how local papers ran special print runs, the sudden production – noted by Churchill – of bunting and flags, and the ringing of bells in all combinations and sizes. Church bells had just started ringing in Shrewsbury when the telegram boy delivered the news to his mother that the poet Wilfred Owen had been killed five days before in the final assault across the Sambre-Oise canal in France.

By the autumn of 1918, a new wave of pestilence was well under way in Britain and Europe. British tank crews were already suffering, and dying, from the H1 N1 flu virus that summer. Altogether at least 50 million died of the so-called Spanish flu worldwide, more than a quarter of a million in Britain alone. Young men between the ages of 20 and 30 proved particularly susceptible, which led to the notion that it may have been incubated by men of all sides in the trenches. By the time of the last major assault of American forces, already one million strong, into Sedan and the Meuse valley, the gunners were dropping down unconscious from their horses as they dragged artillery and ammunition wagons to the front.

A World on Edge – The End of the Great War and the Dawn of a New Age – Daniel Schonpflug

A broader perspective on November 1918 is given by academic and journalist Daniel Schonpflug. By telling the stories of some 20 men and women, among them the young Ho Chi Minh washing dishes in London and Mahatma Gandhi, he illustrates the great shifts that were going on across Europe and across the rest of the world.

Women emerge from Schonpflug’s pages particularly vividly, such as the pacifist sculptor Kathe Kollwitz, and the journalist and activist Louise Weiss who survived revolution and pogrom to become the oldest MEP.

Most poignant is the schoolteacher Moina Michael, the inventor of the commemorative poppy fund for helping wounded soldiers and the bereaved. Reading John McCrae’s poem, “In Flanders fields the poppies blow,” she devised the scheme of making simple paper or cloth poppies for people to buy for remembrance, and to help the surviving victims. McCrae, a Canadian military doctor, was already dead by the time she started fund raising in New York. Later she persuaded Douglas Haig, the former BEF commander, to adopt it for his fund to help the injured and their families – and it is worn today each November in 52 nations.

A Short History of Europe – Simon Jenkins

The notion of a new ‘dawn’ after 1918 is a symptom of the dreadful mangling of history in popular media presentations of the end of the war. History of this sort cannot be neatly sliced and diced, cut into decisive battles, definitive treaties and acts of government by princes or polities.

This is the architectural flaw of Simon Jenkins’ high entertaining reflection on the war. For Jenkins, the history of Europe and its neighbourhood are a somewhat fictive game of snakes and ladders, neatly marked off by the treaties of Westphalia, Utrecht, Vienna and Versailles, the battles and campaigns marked by Lutzen and Magdeburg, Malplaquet and Gibraltar, Waterloo, the Chemin des Dames and Amiens. What of historic synchronicity, and the great longue durée?

I suppose, this being Brexit Britain we don’t do foreign historiography. In looking at 1918, though, it doesn’t do to be too parochially fixated on the UK – the waves of strikes, and mutinies were not unique to the defeated Central Powers of Germany and Austria and Hungary. The Navy, the biggest heavy industrial employer in Britain of the day, suffered numerous protests, strikes, the odd hoisting of the red flag – though not quite on the scale of the mutiny in Kiel. British troops of 6th Commando and the Yorkshire Regiment refused orders when they were sent to northern Russia.

1918 British Army guides to the Western Front

For understanding the complexities of the age of 1918 and the challenge they present to us now, two of the best publications of this season are not available to the public – and they should be. They are the two ‘British Army guides’ to the Western Front in 1918 and the ‘Forgotten Wars’ in other theatres. They were beautifully produced for a series of study days for young British and allied soldiers and point to how the allies had to learn from the strategic mistakes of the past.

But always, the last word on the hundredth eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month should go to the poets – not just Sassoon, Graves and Owen, but others home and abroad like Gurney, David Jones, Rozenberg, Akmatova, Montale and Ungaretti – a gentle genius who melded sorrow and despair with dreams of hope. “I am a poet/ a unanimous outcry/ I am a clot of dreams…