As did people all over the world Tasmanians greeted the armistice that silenced the guns on the Western Front with relief and thanksgiving. For some there was the sweet taste of victory and vindication of personal belligerence; for the many families with young men still overseas it brought benign relief from abiding anxiety. The community celebrated in what had become by 1918 routine ways, with church services to thank the almighty for the confirmation of Allied righteousness and civic meetings at which public men repeated what had become much-eroded rhetoric. Audiences sang the national anthem and ‘Rule Britannia’, expressing yet again Tasmania's loyalty to the king. Returned men were feted and children were given a holiday to help reinforce the magnitude of the moment. But all was not well with the world. Russia and Eastern Europe were in turmoil. Chaos threatened in all the lands trapped in the wreckage of the ancient empires of Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanoff and the Ottomans. US President Woodrow Wilson talked of a league of nations; his preeminence intimated that the British empire itself was about to be eclipsed. The dramatic events in Ireland were followed more closely in Tasmania than those in any other part of the world and widened even farther the divisions first opened up by the rebellion of 1916 and the following referenda about conscription. To the many empire loyalists the Irish nationalists were traitors who deserved execution. To families of Irish extraction they were patriots seeking no more than the rights of small nations that had been proclaimed over and over again in wartime rhetoric or the self-determination promised to the world by Woodrow Wilson.