To End All Wars

by Adam Hochschild

  Although his own marriage was quite traditional, the breadth of Hardie's sense of justice made him, far more than most male radicals, an ardent backer of votes for women. For years he had been a regular visitor to the dinner table of Emmeline Pankhurst, who became his comrade in opposing the Boer War, and her crusade for suffrage resonated with all he had seen of the difficult lives of his own mother and the mothers and wives of other Scottish miners. He supported suffrage in Parliament, raised money for the WSPU, and repeatedly intervened on behalf of imprisoned suffragettes. After one of Christabel's arrests, he telegraphed, "Can I do anything?"

  Above all else, ever since he had seen the raw face of British jingoism whipped up over the conflict with the Boers, Hardie feared war—its frightening atavism, its destructiveness, the way it could make people forget the fight for social justice. His hope, always, was that organized working people would simply not let their nations go to war. Attending the 1904 congress of the Second International in Amsterdam, while the Russo-Japanese War was under way, he was profoundly moved when the Russian and Japanese delegates spied each other on the platform and rushed to embrace, to fervent applause. This, he felt, was a moment "worth having lived to see."

  At a later congress of the group, in Copenhagen, Hardie, supported by Jaurès, proposed that in the event of war, workers in all countries immediately declare a general strike. His anxiety only grew as he watched Parliament funnel money that might have gone for social welfare programs into the naval arms race with Germany, centered on the powerful new Dreadnought-class battleships, whose high-speed steam turbines and long-range 12-inch guns made previous warships obsolete. When an American journalist asked him what he thought would be the twentieth century's major danger, his one-word answer was "militarism."

  The British public knew Hardie as the leading voice of labor, and they knew the Pankhurst family as the defiant embodiment of the fight for women's suffrage. But there was another story they did not know. It began, as far as we can tell, one day in 1906 when Sylvia Pankhurst was sick, short of food and money, and moving into a new flat. She had only 25 shillings to her name, scarcely more than two weeks' rent, because she had chosen not to be on the WSPU payroll and so become dependent on her mother and older sister. "I sat among my boxes, ill and lonely," she wrote many years later, "when, all unexpected, Keir Hardie came knocking at my door. He took command of the situation. He lifted heavy things into position and when all was in order, took me out for a meal."

  Sylvia was 24, and Hardie about to turn 50. She had known him as a family friend ever since she was a small girl, and had long admired him. But now they were both at low moments in their lives, and they turned to each other.

  Hardie was a hero to thousands around the world, but his was not the happiest of households. He had married Lillie as a 22-year-old coal miner, but from the age of 35 on, he spent most of his time in London. While he frequently visited Scotland, where the children were in school, he rebuffed his wife's wish to join him permanently in the capital. Hardie felt undervalued by her, writing a friend that Lillie did not seem to know "what a terribly important body her man is in other folks' opinion." Around the same time, the friend cryptically recorded Hardie's being upset at Lillie's "strange behaviour to him," adding that Hardie "feels ... Mrs. Hardie's ways keenly." For her part, she may well have resented having to run a household and raise the children while her husband was away most of the time, becoming a world figure. In any event, others noticed that she was given to long, stony periods of silence.

  Where he found Lillie reticent and unappreciative, the far younger Sylvia Pankhurst was supportive, warm, and uninhibited. "We are for free sexual union contracted and terminated at will," she wrote later in life, a thought that would have horrified her more straitlaced mother. "We are for free love because love is free and no one can bind it." Until Hardie arrived that day to help her move, however, such ideas of hers were purely theoretical; he was almost certainly her first lover. In a poem she wrote for him, she spoke of how his love "woke the tender buds that slept before." She respected him not just for his politics but for the way he cooked and cleaned for himself in London, polished his own shoes, worked so hard, and wrote so constantly. They exchanged their favorite books, he read Robert Burns's love poetry aloud to her, and they wrote many letters. One poem she sent him ran:

  Last night when all was quiet you came to me.

  I felt in the darkness by my side

  Waiting to feel your kisses on my mouth,

  The clasping of your arms, and your dear lips

  Pressing on me till my breath came short...

  What he wrote to her was only somewhat more restrained:

  Sweet,

  All the night I have been working and thinking about you and hoping that all was going well with you.

  In one letter, written in 1911 when she was on a lecture tour of the United States, he spoke of how she would continue his work—an acknowledgment of their age difference but also, in a way that must have thrilled her, of their equality: "I like to think of you going over the same ground, speaking in the same halls, & meeting the same people as I have. I can think of myself as ... smoothing the pathway for the coming of my little sweetheart. May it ever be so."

  "They did not hide their attraction," recalled a friend of Hardie's. "...I remember her sitting on his knee with her arms around his neck." As he worked long hours in the evening, Sylvia drew or painted portraits of him, and soon two of her paintings would be hung in his room. That their bond was intense is clear, but it may have felt precarious as well, as love affairs between people of very different ages often do. Theirs, also, was love on the run between two busy activists, and her frequent arrests brought other complications.

  Hundreds of jailed suffragettes were now trying to provoke the government by launching hunger strikes in prison. In response, the authorities ordered that they be force-fed. Hardie denounced force-feeding in Parliament and more than 100 doctors signed a protest, all to no avail. He desperately tried to persuade Sylvia to stop going on hunger strikes. As an agitator, he understood the tactic, but as her lover, he was horrified. "He told me," Sylvia later wrote, "that the thought of forcible feeding was making him ill." Weren't there enough martyrs to the cause already, he asked. "Of what use to make one more?"

  Sylvia wanted to be a martyr for the cause, however, and repeatedly pushed her body to the limit. And there could be no question of her breaking ranks with her hunger-striking mother or WSPU comrades. On one occasion, she was so weak on being released from jail that she had to be carried on a stretcher to a suffrage rally, where she managed to say only a few words before being taken home by ambulance. Once she smuggled a desperate message out to the mother whose love and esteem she craved: "I am fighting, fighting, fighting. I have four, five and six wardresses every day as well as the two doctors. I am fed by stomach tube twice a day. They prise open my mouth with a steel gag, pressing it in where there is a gap in my teeth. I resist all the time. My gums are always bleeding.... My shoulders are bruised with struggling whilst they hold the tube into my throat."

  Nothing Sylvia did or said, however, could change the emotional balance in the Pankhurst family. As long as she could remember, she had felt in the shadow of her famous mother and the favored elder sister with the china-doll good looks, whose face had even been sculpted for the famous Tussaud waxworks. Given that history, Keir Hardie's love and respect must have felt doubly affirming, and given her desire to be in the public eye, it must have been heady to find that several issues she had suggested were raised by Hardie in the House of Commons.

  Both of them had strong reasons to keep their love concealed. Hardie was, after all, a married man, with powerful right-wing enemies who would have been delighted to see him enmeshed in public scandal over an affair with a woman half his age. To make things more thorny for them both, it was soon after Hardie took up with Sylvia that the Pankhursts left his Independent Labour Party, vociferously spurning all alliances with male
MPs. Sylvia remained one of the WSPU's most outspoken campaigners, so for the Pankhursts any disclosure of the affair would have proved politically as well as personally embarrassing, guaranteed fodder for anti-suffrage cartoonists. Emmeline, who carefully balanced her militance by always presenting herself as a well-dressed, respectable widow, was particularly dismayed. Once when Sylvia was on a hunger strike in prison, she smuggled out to Emmeline a letter for Hardie that her mother did not deliver. Sylvia never forgave her.

  Although the war Hardie feared did not yet seem imminent, suspicion of Germany pervaded popular culture. In 1906, a novel called The Invasion of 1910 was serialized in the Daily Mail; the newspaper advertised it by sending men in spiked Prussian helmets, wearing sandwich boards, through the London streets. The book was a sensation and helped launch a whole fantasy literature of invasion. Another novel depicted the imperial German black-eagle banner flying over Buckingham Palace, the British King exiled to Delhi, and signs declaring it verboten to walk on the grass in Hyde Park. A play about an invasion by "the Emperor of the North" opened in London in 1909 and was still running 18 months later. So many invasion novels flooded the bookstores that the humorist P. G. Wodehouse satirized them with one of his own, The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England, featuring an attack by the Swiss navy and the Chinese seizure of the Welsh port of Lllgxtplll.

  Meanwhile, preparations for possible war ratcheted up dramatically: between 1908 and 1913, total arms expenses by the six largest countries of Europe rose by 50 percent. Almost all the great powers were now spending between 5 and 6 percent of their national incomes on their armed forces, even though the usual motives for conflict were relatively few. For example, no major European country, at least in public, claimed a piece of another's territory.

  The best counterweight to war, Keir Hardie and millions of other men and women believed, was the socialist movement. The Second International's membership came from more than 30 nations; its first co-presidents had been a Frenchman and a German; all conflicts between countries seemed forgotten by those who rallied under its red flag. Workers thronged streets across Europe to march under that banner every May Day. German generals might bluster, but the German socialists, the Social Democrats, despite a long history of harassment by the authorities, were the biggest party in the national legislature. The Social Democrats were envied by leftists everywhere for their more than 90 newspapers, their large staff of professional organizers, and their welfare programs that almost seemed the embryo of a socialist state within a capitalist one. Hardie attended one congress of the German party and was impressed by how many of the delegates were women—who kept a constant peace demonstration going outside the meeting hall for the duration of the congress. The German government was clearly afraid of the party, for it banned Social Democratic literature from army barracks, and party members from the officer corps. In almost every other European country, socialists were also increasing their share of the vote. Even in the resolutely anti-socialist United States, Hardie's friend Eugene V. Debs, campaigning on his Red Special train with red banners flying, won more than 400,000 votes for president in 1908, and more than doubled the total, to 900,000, in 1912.

  An advance in one country was greeted with delight in all the others; a setback in one was pain shared: when the Tsar's Cossacks shot down workers marching in St. Petersburg, for example, British trade unionists meeting in Liverpool quickly raised £1,000 for their families. And even when disagreements broke out among socialists, there was still friendship and respect. At one congress of the Second International, the fiery Polish-German Rosa Luxemburg vigorously criticized a statement by Jean Jaurès. When Jaurès rose to answer, he asked who would translate his reply into German. "I will, if you like, Citizen Jaurès," said Luxemburg. Between such trusting comrades, could there ever be war?

  Of course, a skeptic might have claimed that the proletarian desire for peace was only a mere dream in the eyes of middle-class intellectuals. But Hardie believed in it fervently, and he was working class—in fact, one of only two major leaders in the Second International who could claim that distinction. The other, the German August Bebel, was far less sanguine about the peaceful instincts of his fellow workers. "Look at those fellows," he once remarked while watching a military parade. "Eighty per cent of them are Berliners and Social Democrats but if there was trouble they would shoot me down at a word of command from above."

  6. ON THE EVE

  AT EVERY POINT on their journey, the new King and Queen were greeted with thunderous cheers. As their ship sailed from Portsmouth, it was flanked by 15 vessels of the Royal Navy's Home Fleet—mighty ships with names to match: Indefatigable, Invincible, Indomitable, Superb. Several days' travel brought the royal liner and its escorts to Cape Trafalgar on the Spanish coast, the scene of Britain's epochal triumph of naval arms in the Napoleonic era—proof again that in warfare, daring and discipline would always carry the day—and then, after night fell, to the colony of Gibraltar. The town beneath the great rock that controlled the entrance to the Mediterranean was lit up in welcome. In the morning, sailors on ten ships of the Atlantic Fleet gave the royal couple—the King in his white admiral's uniform—three lusty cheers as they sailed onward. At Port Said the Khedive of Egypt, wearing the star and ribbon of the Order of the Bath, came to pay tribute. As the monarchs' ship steamed through the Suez Canal, relays of troopers from the Egyptian Camel Corps cantered along the banks as an escort. At Suez, fireworks filled the sky. At Aden, more British warships fired off a 121-gun salute. King George V and Queen Mary, crowned in Westminster Abbey only a few months before, were on their way to be formally installed as Emperor and Empress of India. Their voyage, in November 1911, marked the first time a British sovereign had left Europe since Richard the Lion-hearted had set off to capture Jerusalem in the Third Crusade.

  The pageantry of the six-week visit surpassed anything the British Raj in India had ever seen. There were trumpet fanfares, a Punjabi war dance, a Scottish sword dance, and a championship polo match; in Calcutta, crowds of Indians broke through a line of soldiers to seize clumps of earth the King's feet had stepped on and press them to their foreheads. Gone—at least from British press coverage—was all memory of the long history of Indian uprisings against the colonial regime, some of them fairly recent. In the foothills of the Himalayas, a maharaja assembled 645 elephants to take His Majesty and a large party of guests and gamekeepers on a tiger hunt. In Bombay, the normally reticent King George was so overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcoming crowd that his voice broke and for a few moments he was unable to speak.

  The climax came at a grand ceremony in Delhi, the Durbar, in which George V and Mary were proclaimed Emperor and Empress. Dust filled the air as 100,000 people assembled in the open, while on raised crimson-and-gold thrones under a canopy the imperial couple took their seats. He wore a robe of purple velvet and a crown glittering with diamonds; more diamonds sparkled in her coronet, and her white satin dress was bordered with gold. Escorting them to their thrones were men of the Life Guards and Indian Lancers, Scottish Archers and Gurkha Rifles, and 12 British and 12 Indian trumpeters on white horses. Sixteen hundred military bandsmen played triumphal music. Fourteen bemedaled Indian attendants in scarlet, with white turbans, carried maces; four more bore fans of yak tails and peacock feathers, to whisk away any insect arrogant enough to approach. Swords, helmets, and bugles glinted in the sunlight; the air was filled with fluttering pennants and smoke from the booming artillery. For a full hour, British officials and Indian nobility came forward to bow in homage, then respectfully back away: the viceroy; the chief justice and judges of the High Court; the governors and lieutenant governors of the provinces; the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Begum of Bhopal, the Nawab of Rampur, the Khan of Kalat, and too many maharajas to count.

  Only one curious episode marred the proceedings. An Indian nobleman, the Gaekwar of Baroda, was thought not to have shown the proper respect. "When he came up to do homage," huffed the London Times, "he walked up jauntily
swinging a stick in his hand—in itself a gross breach of etiquette—and as he passed before their Majesties he saluted in the most perfunctory manner. Very few people believe that his discourtesy was not deliberate." In vain, later, did the distraught Gaekwar repeatedly protest that he was simply nervous and confused. Wild rumors began to fly: he was even said to admire the United States for breaking free of Britain. London crowds hissed when they saw him in a newsreel. Keir Hardie, however, eagerly seized on the event: "His fellow-rulers had been taught to grovel low before the Throne, as becomes all who go near such a symbol of imbecility," he wrote. "But he ... kept erect, and then, horror of all horrors, when leaving the dais, he actually turned his back upon the King." Hardie looked forward to the day when more citizens of India would refuse "to add to her abasement by kissing the foot of the oppressor."

  The British officials who proudly attended the Durbar, of course, considered themselves anything but oppressors. Prominent among them, sitting in the front row, was Sir Douglas Haig. An assignment in India as military chief of staff had come to an end, but he had strategically delayed his departure until after the royal visit. He filled his diary with satisfied comments on his soldiers' role performing for the monarchs. "A perfect parade. Men stand like rocks.... I have never seen troops march past better, or Cavalry gallop in better order." As much a royal favorite as ever, he was honored with an additional knighthood and sailed for home as Knight Commander of the Indian Empire. Like John French before him, his next post would be commanding the 1st Army Corps at Aldershot, now a force slated to be immediately sent to the Continent in the event of hostilities.