Meanwhile, socialists and pacifists everywhere rejoiced at the Bolshevik coup. For the first time, a major power had a regime committed to overthrowing capitalism—and to swiftly withdrawing from the war that for more than three years had been killing off Europe's young men by the millions. "Glorious News from Russia!" read the headline in lion tamer John S. Clarke's Socialist. "May they open the door," Sylvia Pankhurst wrote in her Workers' Dreadnought, "which leads to freedom for the people of all lands!"
No group in Britain received the news of the latest phase of the Russian Revolution with greater joy than the war resisters in prison. Serving his hard-labor sentence at Walton Gaol in Liverpool, the 29-year-old Fenner Brockway was an editor still. Despite the rule of silence, he passed on news of the momentous events in Petrograd to his fellow prisoners in the Walton Leader, one of at least nine clandestine CO prison newspapers. It was written with pencil lead that Brockway and other convicts had smuggled into prison attached to the bottoms of their feet with adhesive tape; each issue was published on forty squares of brown toilet paper. The subscription price was extra sheets of toilet paper from each prisoner's supply. Twice a week, until guards finally discovered it after a year, a new issue of the paper—only one copy, of course, could be "published"—was left in a toilet cubicle the CO prisoners shared. Thanks to information from an imprisoned army deserter, the Walton Leader published one of the few uncensored accounts in Britain of the slaughter at Passchendaele. By contrast, the coup in Russia, Brockway wrote later, made the COs imagine "our prison doors being opened by comrade workers and soldiers."
One event that might bring that great day a step closer, British peace activists hoped, was Siegfried Sassoon's imminent court-martial. But they waited in vain, for the last thing the government wanted was an upper-class war hero turned public martyr. "A breach of discipline has been committed," said a War Office spokesman about Sassoon's defiant open letter, "but no disciplinary action has been taken, since Second Lieutenant Sassoon has been reported by the medical board as not being responsible for his action, as he was suffering from nervous breakdown."
Far from being thrown in jail, Sassoon was ordered to wait in a hotel in Liverpool. While there, he angrily threw his Military Cross ribbon into the River Mersey—but with no audience, the gesture went unreported. Instead of the public stage he had hoped for, Sassoon was sent off to the comfortable surroundings of a rehabilitation hospital for shell-shocked officers in Scotland. His protest soon dropped out of the newspapers. His time in the hospital produced no dividend for the peace movement, but an enormous one for English literature. A fellow patient was the 24-year-old aspiring writer Wilfred Owen, recovering from wounds and shell shock, to whom the older Sassoon offered crucial encouragement. Owen became the greatest poet of the war.
The War Office had been extremely shrewd. After three months in the hospital whose services he did not need, Sassoon found himself increasingly restless. Finally he accepted a promotion to first lieutenant and returned to the front. He did so not because he had abandoned his former views, but because, as he put it in his diary when he was back with his regiment in France, "I am only here to look after some men." It was a haunting reminder of the fierce power of group loyalty over that of political conviction—and all the more so because it came from someone who had not in the slightest changed, nor ever in his life would change, his belief that his country's supposed war aims were fraudulent.
Late 1917 was a time of great nervousness for British ruling circles. The Times ran a series of articles on "The Ferment of Revolution," and government control of the press tightened, as a new regulation subjected all books and pamphlets about the war—or the prospects of peace—to censorship. More than 4,000 censors were at work monitoring both the press and the mail. For the first time, police suppressed two issues of the Workers' Dreadnought. Rumors flew that German money was somehow financing antiwar organizing, and Basil Thomson was asked to step up his surveillance operations. Knowing that stoking official paranoia would help him gain more influence, he half insinuated, in a report to the War Cabinet, that one of the leading antiwar voices, the intrepid investigative journalist E. D. Morel, might have German backing: "The probabilities are certainly strong that Mr Morel did not work out of pure altruism.... As his activities have certainly been in the German interest ... the public cannot be blamed for believing that Mr Morel has been financed by Germany in the past and may possibly be expecting financial reward for his peace activities in the future." In his diary, however, Thomson wrote the opposite, admitting that "I feel certain that there is no German money" going to the peace movement.
The government had long been wanting, as one Foreign Office official put it, to silence Morel and get him "safely lodged in gaol." Milner, in particular, pressed for action. "In no country but this," he complained in a note to Lloyd George, "would it be possible for him to carry on." Being beyond military age, Morel could not be prosecuted for refusing the draft, so in the end he was charged with violating an obscure regulation against sending pacifist materials out of the country and was sentenced to six months at hard labor.
He served his time at London's Pentonville Prison. In Morel's cellblock there were no other war opponents; in the cell next to him was a man who had raped a child; on the other side was someone who had stolen three bottles of whiskey. Even behind bars British attitudes toward class prevailed, and another prisoner, speaking to Morel in a whisper because of the rule of silence, called him "sir." Morel was able to exchange quick smiles with conscientious objectors from other parts of the prison only in chapel on Sundays. While a pastor preached on the righteousness of the war and officials announced battlefield "victories," warders sat on raised seats at the end of each row to ensure that prisoners did not talk.
Morel sewed canvas mailbags in a dust-filled room and wove rope into hammocks and mats for the navy. Sometimes he had to carry 100-pound slabs of jute to the workshop. The U-boat toll on Britain's food imports led to a cutback in prison rations, which, for hard-labor convicts, were minimal to begin with. With coal in short supply, little was diverted to heat prisons. Supper at Pentonville, eaten alone in one's cell, was, Morel wrote, "a piece of bread, half-a-pint of coldish porridge at the bottom of a tin which earlier in the day may have contained red-herrings and still bears traces of them, and a pint of hot, greasy cocoa which one learns to regard as a veritable nectar of the gods, especially in cold weather." At night you could expect only "the cold of a cold cell—like nothing on earth. Nothing seems proof against it."
Morel was a powerfully built man of 44, but prison broke his health. "I saw E. D. Morel yesterday for the first time since he came out," Bertrand Russell wrote to a friend the following year, "and was impressed by the seriousness of a six months sentence.... He collapsed completely, physically and mentally, largely as the result of insufficient food. He says one only gets three quarters of an hour for reading in the whole day—the rest of the time is spent on prison work."
Although the food and working conditions were no better for COs, they at least were imprisoned together and could furtively communicate. (The underground newspaper that circulated in Winchester Prison was called the Whisperer.) "My first experience of the prison technique for overcoming the silence rule was in chapel," Fenner Brockway wrote. "We were singing one of the chants. Instead of the words of the Prayer Book, I heard these:—
"Welcome, Fenner boy,
When did you get here?
How did you like the skilly [gruel] this morn?
Lord have mercy upon us!"
The key during chapel, Brockway learned, was to sing or chant a message to the person next to you without turning your head or giving any sign of recognition that could draw the guards' attention. Prisoners smuggled books to each other in the mailbags they sewed, and even played chess; at one point more than half the COs in Maidstone Prison took part in a chess tournament. When a move might be whispered to your opponent only once a day, games could last a month or more. But punishm
ent for infractions was severe: Brockway was put on bread and water for six days when the authorities discovered his toilet-paper newspaper. (He had by then managed to publish more than 100 issues, including a special memorial number on the second anniversary of the death of his mentor, Keir Hardie.) In one prison he was in, there were periodic executions of common criminals. "The place was deadly silent, each man listening for the opening of the door of the condemned cell, for the sound of the steps to the gallows, and then for the striking of the fatal hour on neighbouring clocks and the sound of the tolling bell which told that it was all over."
Also behind bars this grim autumn were Alice Wheeldon and her daughter and son-in-law. Alice was doing her hard-labor sentence in the Aylesbury Gaol, where the peephole on every cell door was at the center of a painted eye, complete with lash, brow, and pupil, eternally staring at the prisoner. The prospect of ten years in such conditions made her furious; she swore at the guards and disobeyed orders not to talk to other prisoners. She was also indignant at being strip-searched, and at the way Winnie's prison work assignment, as well as her own, was changed from the garden to the laundry, to avoid what officials called "undesirable association" with other prisoners. She called the prison governor, a guard dutifully noted, a "flaming vampire." Several times she went on hunger strikes, as did Winnie and Alf Mason; Alice knocked a cup out of a doctor's hand and broke it when he tried to feed her. But beneath the anger and defiance was despair: warders heard her weeping at night.
On December 21, 1917, she embarked on yet another hunger strike. Weakening, she was moved to the prison hospital four days later. "Christmas morning," a matron heard her say, "how the devil must laugh." Prison staff had been told from the beginning to watch her behavior closely, and a stream of messages from them flowed to the Home Office. "She says," reported one jailer, "she is determined to get out of prison 'in a box or otherwise.'"
Of course all correspondence was monitored. But only 80 years later, when these letters were finally opened for public view, could the desperate voice of Winnie Mason be heard, frantic that her mother was doomed to die in the hands of the state.
Having failed to talk Alice out of her hunger strike, Winnie grew alarmed when the authorities moved her steadily fading mother to another prison. At Aylesbury they had at least had some chance to "associate" with each other. "Oh Mam I don't know what to write to you," Winnie scrawled, "—when I think of all the opportunities Ive had of giving you a kiss or saying something to you & I've restrained myself rather than imperil our chance of association.... This last fortnight's been like a year every day ... Ive been sending you thought waves every minute of the time. I knew you were ill ... I simply cant bear to think of what you are going through.... You were always a fighter but this fight isn't worth your death.... I cant write it hardly.... Live for us all again.
"Oh Mam," Winnie's letter pleaded, "—please don't die."
Could the radicalism of people like the Wheeldons spread to the troops? Haig was concerned and had intelligence officers and mail censors keep him abreast of the soldiers' mood. "Sometimes advanced socialistic and even anarchical views are expressed" by the men, he noted. He also worried that British troops would be infected with subversive ideas by, of all people, Australians. Their army was far more egalitarian than Britain's, soldiers' pay was higher, and many officers had served in the ranks before being commissioned, since the country lacked a class of landowners who had been officers for generations. ("Look smart," one Australian officer is said to have told his men before an inspection by British commanders. "...And look here, for the love of Heaven, don't call me Alf.") British and Australian soldiers already served in separate units, but Haig ordered them kept apart in hospitals and base camps as well. "They were giving so much trouble when along with our men," he wrote, "and put such revolutionary ideas into their heads."
Haig enthusiasts were fewer now. The newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, too, had lost patience with him. Following the chain of command, Lloyd George asked the secretary for war, Lord Derby, to fire Haig; the influential Derby, a Haig loyalist who had protected the field marshal's back on other occasions, refused, on threat of resignation, and the prime minister backed down. The problem was that earlier efforts of Northcliffe's own newspapers plus John Buchan's skillful propaganda apparatus had helped put Haig on a pedestal from which it was politically impossible to remove him. Lloyd George, Milner, and their colleagues feared the reaction from the army and the public if they tried.
Should it be possible to replace Haig, they favored the apple-cheeked, potbellied Sir Herbert Plumer, several inches shorter than his fellow generals but a cut above them in intelligence, perhaps the best British general of the war. Compared with other commanders, he was known for using careful planning and shrewdly positioned artillery and underground mines to capture ground without extravagantly spending soldiers' lives. He was definitely not one of those who gauged success by the number of his own casualties. But the senior generals against whom Plumer could be measured were not exactly a brilliant array, and, comments one military historian, "during the war the main point in his favour was often that he was not someone else."
All that Haig's enemies at home were able to do was to leak damaging information about a few of his subordinates to the newspapers—with the prime minister himself accused of doing some of the leaking. Although it was only small potatoes, with these tactics they were able to claim the head of Haig's intelligence chief General Charteris, who was kicked upstairs to a face-saving new position. Always well informed by his London supporters, Haig knew that his own job was safe and confidently soldiered on. And not only did his critics lack the political clout to put another general in his place, they had no better ideas for how to win the war. Even today, with all the power of hindsight, it is hard to see what military strategy could have led to a swift Allied victory. The very nature of trench warfare doomed it to continue until one side or the other was so exhausted, bloodied, and depleted that it could simply fight no more. For all his blind spots, Haig understood this in a way that politicians hoping for a shortcut to victory did not.
The public began to sense that this would be a war of attrition, and the mood in England turned bleaker than at any moment since Napoleon had threatened to invade more than a century before. Hundreds of thousands of people were wearing black armbands. Flower-strewn homemade shrines to men who had died appeared on the streets. Efforts by Buchan's propaganda staff to buck up morale by repeating the great success of the films on the Somme and the tank fell flat: new documentaries drew only small audiences.
Word of the enormous bloodletting at Passchendaele came back to England with the legions of wounded soldiers, a macabre counterpoint to the parade of triumphal headlines. Some of the survivors were in wheelchairs or hobbled along with crutches or on wooden legs. Here and there groups of them took to the cricket field as an "arms and legs side," with the other team agreeing to bowl gently. One spectator wrote of watching such a match at Piltdown, near the south coast, where the artillery barrages were often audible: "All the time the big guns were roaring in Flanders so we could hear the War & see the sad results of it."
Air raids increased and ever more deaths occurred in the munitions factories where millions of women now worked. Artillery shell plants were particularly prone to explosions: 26 women died in one in 1916; 134 workers would be killed in one in Nottingham in 1918. And women who loaded explosives into shells found the chemicals turned their skin yellow—they called themselves canaries—contamination that proved not only disfiguring but sometimes led to early death.
The war sapped daily life in countless ways. With enormous quantities of coal and 370 locomotives diverted to France, some 400 smaller British railway stations closed. Buses, trolleys, and trains were always overcrowded. As another unusually cold winter set in, coal rationing was imposed in London, and people lined up with everything from baskets to baby carriages to buy it. With paper scarce, newspapers shrank and raised their prices. Bac
on, butter, margarine, matches, and tea were in short supply and long food lines appeared, filled with women, children, and the elderly. Wheat husks and potatoes were used as filler in bread, and throwing rice at weddings was made a criminal offense. By late 1917, one city after another began rationing food. Here and there workers staged one-day strikes to protest the shortages. In November, COs in prison saw their bread ration cut in half, to 11 ounces a day.
Could the war ever be won? Flashes of cynicism and helplessness could be heard even among the country's elite. "We're telling lies," the newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere (who had already lost one son to the war and would soon lose another) said in a spontaneous outburst to a journalist in November 1917. "We daren't tell the public the truth, that we're losing more officers than the Germans, and that it's impossible to get through on the Western Front. You've seen the correspondents ... they don't speak the truth and we know they don't."
Officers continued to die at a higher rate than enlisted men, junior officers especially. Although after the first six months of the war they ceased to carry swords, British infantry officers were still easily identified by German snipers from their Sam Browne belts of polished leather and swagger sticks or pistols. It was also young officers who flew the rickety fighter aircraft that were lost to crashes as well as German fire. By 1917, a British fighter pilot arriving at the front had an average life expectancy of less than three months.
To End All Wars Page 36