Should there be another offensive at all? Of course! Haig had no doubts, believing that the Germans' "breaking point may be reached this year," as he told his generals, his confidence fueled by a new stream of reports from his relentlessly optimistic intelligence chief, General Charteris. Germany was riddled with strikes and unrest, Charteris assured him, troop morale was falling, the army was on its last legs. To be sure that both his boss and the British cabinet would share this impression, before Haig and Lloyd George paid visits to a compound of German POWs, Charteris ordered all able-bodied prisoners removed, so that only the wounded or sickly-looking remained.
The small Belgian city of Ypres was by now the most ravaged in Western Europe. It lay at the center of a bulge of British-held territory that for several years had been shelled by the Germans from three sides. Its famous Cloth Hall was a jagged shell; its brick and stone buildings and cobblestone streets were in ruins. Tens of thousands of troops from all corners of the British Empire found shelter where they could, often in cellars. The entire salient was honeycombed with narrow-gauge trolley tracks on which carts of bullets, shells, food, and bandages made their way to the front. It was from this battered wasteland that Haig planned to launch his next big assault.
The War Cabinet was uneasy. The Russian army, which the new Provisional Government could barely manage to supply with food, was so depleted, British planners calculated, that Germany could afford to move up to 30 divisions to the west. When Haig predicted success for his offensive, Milner wrote, in an acid memo to his colleagues, "The argument seems to be that, since we can't overcome the unreinforced Germans, ergo we can reasonably hope to overcome them when [they are] strengthened by 30 divisions. Really lunatic." Lloyd George was equally dubious, but Haig was so well entrenched politically that the prime minister was never really able to assert control over the army high command. He would rail at the generals in his memoirs, published long after the war: "Their brains were cluttered with useless lumber, packed in every niche and corner."
In the end, no matter how lunatic Haig's strategy, the War Cabinet could offer no realistic alternative. In mid-June the field marshal laid out his plans in London. "He spread on a table or desk a large map," Lloyd George remembered, "and made a dramatic use of both his hands to demonstrate how he proposed to sweep up the enemy—first the right hand brushing along the surface irresistibly, and then came the left, his outer finger ultimately touching the German frontier with the nail across." Vanished was last year's talk about attrition as success; Haig was once again dreaming of a breakthrough. After smashing open the German line, the long-waiting cavalry would stream through the gap, and British troops would swing to the left to seize the medieval Belgian city of Bruges. When cabinet members visited the front, Haig's officers took them up a specially built observation tower that looked out over the land he expected to capture.
Given the number of men being moved into position, there would be no surprise. "Everybody in my hotel knows the date of the offensive down to the lift boy," observed the chief of the Imperial General Staff on a visit to Paris. As the launch date grew near, Haig seemed to interpret everything around him in military terms of obedience and duty. When Lady Haig told him that she was expecting their third child, he wrote back, without any trace of jest or irony, "How proud you must feel that you are doing your duty at this time by having a baby and thereby setting a good example to all other females!" Convinced that the forthcoming battle would cement his place in history, he suggested to his wife that she write his biography.
In England, where German bombing raids and the sense that a great battle was in the offing kept chauvinist fervor boiling, many people with German names found it politic to change them—including the royal family. Because Queen Victoria had married a German prince, the British monarchy was officially the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. On July 17, 1917, two weeks before Haig's new offensive, a proclamation from Buckingham Palace announced that henceforth the family would be known as the House of Windsor.
When he heard the news, Kaiser Wilhelm II is said to have remarked that he was going to the theater to see a performance of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
As 1917 wore on, antiwar rallies drew larger crowds. Charlotte Despard and several other women formed a new organization, the Women's Peace Crusade. "I should like the words 'alien' and 'foreigner' to be banished from the language," she said in one speech. "We are all members of the same family." Despard traveled the country speaking and visiting the families of COs to keep their spirits up. One hundred thousand readers bought copies of a peace pamphlet she wrote.
Christabel Pankhurst was horrified. "I consider the Pacifists a disease ... a very deadly disease," she declared in Britannia this summer, "which you will find has afflicted every dead nation of the past." The spectacle of British labor unions daring to strike in wartime laid bare her authoritarianism: "Could you listen to an orchestra in which each person played according to his own ideas or the ideas of a committee instead of answering to the beat of the conductor?" she thundered in a speech. "Well, it is just the same in industry. There must be authority, control, discipline."
Where Pankhurst could only bluster about control, Milner made sure action was taken. Every working-class gathering should be monitored, he wrote in August to the home secretary, who was in charge of police and prisons, lest it "turn into a pacifist and revolutionary meeting." Within the next several months, the police staged some 30 raids on pacifist and socialist groups, seizing files, printing equipment, and crates of pamphlets, and sabotaging those printing presses they left behind. The government opened the mail of antiwar dissidents and quietly made sure that prowar publications and the printers of officially approved propaganda received almost all of the tightening supply of newsprint.
With some exceptions, however, the authorities did not jail people speaking out against the war or ban meetings. Seldom, points out the historian Brock Millman, "did the government prohibit, where it could discourage, or discourage where it was safe or politic to ignore." When some officials were considering prosecuting George Bernard Shaw for an antiwar article he had written, the home secretary successfully argued against it: "Shaw will make the most [of it] both here and in America.... But the very fact that we allow such matter to emanate from England would be proof of the lightness of our censorship and an indication of ... strength."
And strength, in the end, was what the prowar forces had. Despite the heady resolutions at Leeds, efforts to organize workers' and soldiers' soviets came to naught. When Bertrand Russell led a meeting to form a soviet in London, Basil Thomson asked the jingoistic Daily Express to print the address. Several hundred hostile demonstrators, singing "Rule Britannia," stormed into the Congregational church where the "soviet" was meeting. The crowd broke down a door, shattered windows, ripped out the church's gas and water pipes, and left several delegates injured. It was only when someone told the police that Russell was the brother of an earl that they rushed to protect him from women waving boards studded with rusty nails. "The mob is a terrible thing when it wants blood," Russell wrote that day. Despard had no better luck with the workers' and soldiers' soviet she tried to convene at Newcastle. The only visible soldiers were rowdy off-duty ones who broke up the gathering with their fists.
Critics could point out, of course, that Despard and Russell were quite far from being either workers or soldiers. But the real cause of their failure was that Britain was a democracy, however imperfect a one. Unlike Russia, there was little pent-up popular hunger for revolution, and the government waging the war had been elected. The radical Leeds conference made the headlines, but a more accurate gauge of British working-class feeling was to be found at a meeting in Manchester this same year where delegates representing nearly two million union members voted by a margin of more than five to one that Britain should carry on the war until Germany was fully defeated.
Some of those prowar trade unionists flexed their muscles in a small but telling confrontation at the Sc
ottish port of Aberdeen at the beginning of the summer of 1917. The Leeds conference had picked representatives to go to Russia as a show of solidarity, but when the delegates boarded a ship for the journey, they found an unexpected complication. On hand were two leaders of the right-leaning National Sailors' and Firemen's Union—one, its president, was a stalwart of Milner's British Workers' League—who informed them that the ship's crew would not sail unless they disembarked. With several thousand of its members dead from German U-boat attacks, the union was not in the antiwar camp. After a brief standoff, the delegates were escorted down the gangplank.
On the dock, however, these same union leaders warmly welcomed two passengers also heading for Russia: Jessie Kenney, a longtime suffragette, and Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst had asked Lloyd George for permission to "explain to the Russian people the opinions as to the war and the conditions of peace held by us as patriotic British women," and the prime minister enthusiastically agreed. The Russian army might be faltering, but it was still tying down hundreds of thousands of German troops who would otherwise be in France and Belgium. Pankhurst, he hoped, could buck up the spirits of war-minded Russians and woo some of those tempted by revolution, for she had indisputable credentials as a rebel and troublemaker and was well known in Russia, where her autobiography had been translated and widely read.
When Pankhurst arrived in Petrograd, the moderate Provisional Government was still in precarious control, but the Bolsheviks, bolstered by the arrival of their leaders from Switzerland after the trip in the sealed train, were gaining strength. Red flags flew everywhere, and even the staff of the deluxe hotel where she was staying, the Astoria, went on strike while she was there. "I came to Petrograd with a prayer from the English nation to the Russian nation," she told local journalists between speeches to patriotic women's groups, "that you may continue the war on which depends the fate of civilisation and freedom."
One Russian especially caught her attention—and was quickly given star treatment in Christabel's newspaper back in England: 25-year-old Maria Bochkareva. The Tsar had given her special permission to enlist in the army, where Bochkareva had fought in a combat unit, bayoneted a German soldier to death, and been wounded several times. She smoked, drank, and swore, punched back at anyone who harassed her, and in a language where many words change with the speaker's gender, used the male forms. One observer described her as "a big peasant woman, strong as a horse, rough of manner, eating with her fingers by choice, unlettered, but of much native intelligence."
A staunch proponent of fighting the Germans, Bochkareva had recently formed a "Women's Battalion of Death." Its recruits shaved their heads, slept on bare boards during training, endured the same corporal punishment as male Russian soldiers, and sported a skull-and-crossbones insignia. She enforced strict discipline and succeeded in inspiring the battalion to overrun some German trenches, a rare act in this year of Russian military collapse. For Russians determined to stay in the war she was—like Emmeline Pankhurst in England—an unexpected poster girl, for her patriotism trumped her role as a militantly assertive woman. To right-wingers in a country riven by class conflict, she was that always treasured rarity: a working-class hero who was on their side.
As Bochkareva led her troops on parade in Petrograd's St. Isaac's Square, supporters threw flowers, an army band played, and a Russian Orthodox bishop blessed the skull-and-crossbones flag. The battalion marched in review, cheering robustly, past Pankhurst, who was dressed in an immaculate white linen suit, black bonnet, and gloves. "The creation of the Women's Battalion of Death is the greatest page written in the history of women," she told the unit's soldiers, "since the time of Joan of Arc."
Word came from the suburban palace where they were under house arrest that the Tsar and Tsarina would like to meet the famous visiting women's suffrage leader. The message was surprising, for the imperial couple had never been known as fans of suffrage for anyone, male or female. Pankhurst had to decline, since Britain was anxious for her not to hold any meetings that might unnecessarily antagonize the Provisional Government.
The summer of 1917 was a chaotic one. Russian troops were killing their officers or replacing them with soldiers' soviets, and by the hundreds of thousands they kept on leaving the front; history had never before seen an army dissolve on such a scale. There were more strikes and stormy meetings as the Provisional Government tried to corral the Bolsheviks and other radical sects into continuing the war. Pankhurst ignored suggestions that she and Jessie Kenney wear less stylish clothes, so as not to attract attention as members of the bourgeoisie, and also turned down an offer of bodyguards from a group of sympathetic army officers. From her hotel window in Petrograd she watched radical soldiers on parade, shouting "Down with capitalism!" and "Stop the war!" After Bolsheviks barged into the hotel itself and arrested 40 officers, she yielded to advice that it was best to leave for England, and quickly. By then it was obvious: a Bolshevik takeover was on the way.
And that was exactly what her daughter Sylvia fervently hoped for. She changed her newspaper's name from Woman's Dreadnought to Workers' Dreadnought as she awaited the class war that would end the war of nations. Testing the limits of censorship, she openly began to urge British troops to lay down their weapons, and published critical letters from soldiers at the front. In midsummer, while her mother was still in Russia, Sylvia scored an editorial coup. Her newspaper was the first to publish a statement unlike any the war had yet seen—an eloquent avowal from a front-line officer, and a highly decorated one at that, declaring his intention to stop fighting:
I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a War of defence, has now become a War of aggression and conquest.
The letter writer, Second Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon, had just published a much-praised book of war poems. Nicknamed Mad Jack, he had been awarded the Military Cross in France for carrying a wounded soldier to safety under heavy fire. Later, he was recommended for the Victoria Cross, though he did not receive it, for single-handedly capturing a German trench. Not only did Sassoon have impeccable military credentials, but he came from an eminent family: his cousin Sir Philip Sassoon, a baronet and a member of Parliament, was Haig's private secretary.
Sent back to England after being shot through the throat, and convalescing in a London hospital, he read a volume of Bertrand Russell's collected writings against the war, Justice in Wartime, and was inspired to act. Russell, whom he met, encouraged him to speak out, helped him draft his statement, and passed it on to a sympathetic ME Two days after Sylvia Pankhurst published it, Sassoon's letter of defiance was read aloud in the House of Commons. Basil Thomson's agents raided the offices of both the Workers' Dreadnought and the No-Conscription Fellowship, where they seized 100 copies of the letter. Sassoon expected that he would be sent before a court-martial, where he could denounce the war in a forum that would gain wide attention. For peace activists, this promised an unparalleled opportunity to reach the public: a high-profile trial of a decorated officer who had seen his men die.
Surprisingly, in between haranguing antiwar crowds on Glasgow Green and attempting to start soviets, Charlotte Despard still treasured her infrequent meetings with her brother. "He is, I think, dearer to me than anyone else," she wrote, and every time they met was "a day to be written in red letters." John French's diary for 1917 records a drop-in visit to the Despard Arms, her teetotal pub for soldiers, perhaps the only one of her manifold activities uncontroversial enough for him, as commander in chief of the Home Forces, to be seen visiting. As always, money flowed through French's hands too easily, so Charlotte once again gave him a loan. The two shared a loss this year when one of their sisters, a volunteer nurse on the Balkan front, was killed by a piece of shrapnel.
The field marshal w
as still frustrated, as he later put it to a friend, that "I was driven out of France ... at the instigation of Haig.... Nothing that can ever happen to me could compensate for the loss of 1916 and 1917 and half of 1918 in the field." Instead, he had to content himself with traveling up and down Britain inspecting troops, training bases, coastal defenses, and antiaircraft batteries, pinning medals on chests and visiting wounded soldiers in their bright blue hospital garb. Gradually he managed to insinuate himself as a confidential military adviser to Lloyd George—a position that allowed him to spread any anti-Haig gossip that came his way. This he did so energetically that the King summoned him to Buckingham Palace for a dressing-down. When French made a visit to the Western Front, Haig refused to receive him, and when the secretary for war invited both men to dinner in London, French refused to come. To his mistress, Winifred Bennett, he wrote plaintively, "I do so want to hear the guns again!"
There were plenty of guns to be heard, more than 3,000 of them firing off more than four million shells, as Haig's artillery began the customary bombardment before the battle that today is usually known by the name of the tiny village that was one of its first objectives, Passchendaele. At each major British attack on the Western Front, some new element had fed the perennial hope of a breakthrough. At Loos it was the unprecedented size of the attacking force and the first British use of poison gas. At the Somme it was the weeklong artillery bombardment that was supposed to pulverize the German trenches. At Passchendaele? No new strategy or weapon of any sort distinguished this attack. In the end, what separated Passchendaele from the great paroxysms of bloodshed that preceded it was one gruesome fact no one had planned for: in addition to falling victim to German fire, thousands of British soldiers, nowhere near the sea, drowned.
To End All Wars Page 34