The person who first created the world of Avonlea, Lucy Maud Montgomery, keenly experienced the horrors of World War One from the parlour of her own home. For four years, her senses were filled to the brim with news from Europe. She poured over the newspapers and painstakingly recorded all its news in her journals.
Here is an excerpt from L.M. Montgomery’s journal, containing an honest reflection on her mood the day the Great War ended.
Monday, November 11, 1918
Park Corner, P.E.I.
“Today came the official announcement of the signing of the armistice! The Great War is over—the world’s agony has ended. What has been born? The next generation may be able to answer that. We can never know fully.
…It has been a hard, dreary fall enough. But the war is over! And that means so much that we have not yet grasped what it does mean. We don’t realize it. The sudden cessation seems uncanny—as if one had gone to sleep in one planet and wakened up in another.
I am sure no one could feel more profoundly thankful that the war is over than I—I am sure that no one, except the mothers and wives, could have felt it more keenly. And yet the truth is that everything seems flat and insipid now, after being fed for four years on fears and horrors, terrible reverses, amazing victories, all news now seems tame and uninteresting. I feel as if I had been living for years in the midst of hell; and then suddenly found myself lying on a quiet green meadow stretching levelly and peacefully to the horizon. One is thankful—and bored!
It is strange and blessed—and dull not to dread the coming of the mail every day—not to open the papers tremblingly and after a quaking glance at the headlines turn greedily to the ‘War Reviewed’ column. Somehow, there is a blank in life. I suppose it will gradually fill up.”
Montgomery eventually incorporated the First World War into the plot of her novel, Rilla of Ingleside, written in 1923.
To read more about L.M. Montgomery’s reflections on war, take a look at The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume II, 1910-1921.
