To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

by Adam Hochschild

  All French and Haig now shared was a relentless optimism that, somehow, the war would end quickly. "The enemy ... can't go on after January," Haig wrote to his wife on August 10, 1915, "and I would not be surprised to see him give in by November." Which, of course, made the goal of supplanting French as commander all the more urgent. Otherwise, who would be honored for the victory? Meanwhile, French, sensing his stock falling, began planning a decisive blow at the Germans to prove his critics wrong.

  11. IN THE THICK OF IT

  JUST AS WARFARE on an industrial scale required the mass production of new weapons like poison gas, so this new kind of conflict required the mass production of public support. In earlier British wars this had not been a problem. Despite some opposition to the Boer War, dramatic victories had come along swiftly enough to keep people cheering and to keep jingoist poets and magazine illustrators busy. Not so this time. Nor was there good news to celebrate from Britain's allies: the badly bloodied army of France, like its British counterpart, was hunkered down in trenches; in its early invasion of eastern Germany, Russia's army had suffered the war's largest and most humiliating defeat; little Serbia was being overrun by the Central Powers; and Italy, which in the spring of 1915 had been cajoled onto the Allied side by the promise of chunks of Austro-Hungarian territory, soon became bogged down in its own costly trench-bound stalemate. And the joint Allied invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, involving troops from Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, and Newfoundland, was, ominously, proving anything but the triumph the generals had hoped for.

  From the beginning, key British officials had grasped that this war would require propaganda of unprecedented sophistication and scope—something all the more important in a country where, without conscription, attracting the necessary millions of army recruits depended on public enthusiasm. Until now, nations had not seen the need for government bureaus or departments devoted to stoking popular emotions. To supervise this novel and delicate task, the prime minister turned to Charles Masterman, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, an ancient title that had come to mean, in effect, cabinet minister without portfolio. And so, on a sunny September day only a month after Britain entered the war, Masterman secretly brought together, around a large blue conference table in an inconspicuous health insurance office, some two dozen of the nation's most prominent authors, including Thomas Hardy, James Barrie, John Galsworthy, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells. For the creators of figures as varied as Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes it was a rare experience to be asked to serve their country with their pens, and they all quickly agreed to do so. They spoke to colleagues, and within days 52 writers had signed an open letter calling on "all the English-speaking race" to fight for the "ideals of Western Europe against the rule of 'Blood and Iron.'" One of the few major authors not to sign was Bertrand Russell.

  Dissenters like him were rare. Far more common were those like the biographer, critic, and poet Sir Edmund Gosse. War, he wrote, "is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid [a popular antiseptic and deodorant] that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect." Many authors were enlisted by the new War Propaganda Bureau, which launched a flood of books, pamphlets, newspapers, posters, postcards, slide shows, and films for consumption in Britain and abroad—since the government wanted to win over public opinion in neutral nations, especially the powerful United States. The bureau was never identified as the source of this material, and Parliament had little idea what it was doing. Pamphlets and books bore the imprimatur of well-known publishing houses, and the government secretly agreed in advance to buy copies, which it then distributed for free.

  The initial focus of the campaign was German atrocities in occupied Belgium. The actual killings and destruction carried out by the Germans were by no means enough for the newborn propaganda mill. Instead, every thirdhand story or wisp of rumor was treated as the truth, and articles, books, and an influential official report spoke in shocked tones about German troops bayoneting babies, hacking off people's hands, and crucifying Belgian peasants by nailing them to the doors of their cottages. Cartoons, drawings or posters showed a giant German soldier with children speared on his bayonet, the Kaiser cavorting with a skeleton, and three pigs in spiked helmets laughing over a woman's body.

  A star of the literary war effort was the novelist John Buchan, who had gained a wide public following since his days in Milner's South African Kindergarten. For Thomas Nelson, an Edinburgh publisher, he put his agile pen to work writing a series of short books that constituted an instant history of the war as it was unfolding. They downplayed British reverses, emphasized acts of heroism, evoked famous battlefield triumphs of times past, scoffed at pacifists, predicted early victory, and overestimated German losses. The first installment of Nelson's History of the War appeared in February 1915; within four years, with some assistance, Buchan would produce 24 best-selling volumes totaling well over a million words—by far the most widely read books about the war written while it was in progress. Like the best propagandists, he was not just a manipulator but a believer, for his sunny personality allowed him to imagine the upside of absolutely anything. The inevitable British victory, he claimed, would produce a more democratic society, and so "this war may rank as one of the happiest events in our his tory."

  Rudyard Kipling also lent his skills to the war effort, and gave speeches at recruiting rallies and elsewhere. His unbounded rage at Germany overwhelmed even his fiction, as in "Swept and Garnished," a story about a well-to-do Berlin matron whose elegant home is disturbed by the ghosts of murdered Belgian children. Nonfiction flowed from his hand as well, including a series of pamphlets singing the praises of the infantry, the artillery, the navy, and other troops. And no soldiers sparked Kipling's enthusiasm more than those arriving on the Western Front from his beloved India. Like colonialists everywhere, he prided himself on knowing what the natives were thinking, which was, he assured readers, that "it is a war of our Raj—'everybody's war,' as they say in the bazaars." Nothing in his work, of course, even hinted at the degree of official anxiety over the growth of Indian nationalism. All armies censor mail coming from soldiers at the front, but the British had a special postal unit of Urdu-speakers censoring mail going to Indian soldiers, to screen out letters or pamphlets supporting independence.

  Kipling had only scorn for anyone who shirked the glorious task of war. "What will be the position," he asked, "in years to come of the young man who has deliberately elected to outcast himself from this all-embracing brotherhood?" No such shame lay in wait for his son, whose battalion shipped off to the front in August 1915. John Kipling went to war, his mother wrote, looking "very straight and smart and brave and young," and sporting a small, newly grown mustache. Because John was only 17, his father had to give the army consent for his son to be sent overseas. "This is the life," John exuberantly told his parents after a destroyer had escorted his troopship across the Channel. More letters followed, one of them exulting over food given the officers: "Bread, sardines, jam Whisky & water, A-1!"

  Were John's parents as cheerful as Kipling's endless stream of rousing articles and stories suggests? The novelist Rider Haggard did not think so: "Neither of them look so well as they did.... Their boy ... is an officer in the Irish Guards and one can see that they are terrified lest he should be sent to the front and killed, as has happened to nearly all the young men they know."

  From 20 miles behind the lines, John reported that the Irish Guards were billeted "in a splendid little village," himself in the house of the mayor, "a topping old fellow who can't speak a word of English, but the kindest chap you ever met," with a pretty daughter. He seemed amazed to find himself, now just turned 18, censoring his men's mail and sitting as a judge in a court-martial. Then, schoolboy fashion, it was back to talk of packages from home: "The cigarettes, tobacco, chocolate, clean shirts socks etc were most acceptable." He was lucky to have an experienced commanding officer, John wrote: "What
he doesn't know about the game isn't worth knowing."

  Back home, volunteers still crowded recruiting offices but the euphoria of the war's opening weeks had dissipated, and a hard-edged social pressure to enlist was in the air. A London theater put on a play called The Man Who Stayed at Home. Women stood on street corners handing out white feathers, an ancient symbol of cowardice, to young men not in uniform; Fenner Brockway, editor of the Labour Leader, the newspaper Keir Hardie had started, who would soon go to jail for his antiwar convictions, joked that he had been given so many he could make a fan. Recruiting posters, too, appealed to shame: one showed two children asking a frowning, guilty-looking father in civilian clothes, "Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?" (Hardie's friend Bob Smillie, leader of the Scottish mineworkers, said his reply would be: "I tried to stop the bloody thing, my child.")

  Ferocity about the war could be heard everywhere. "Kill Germans! Kill them!" raged one clergyman in a 1915 sermon. "...Not for the sake of killing, but to save the world.... Kill the good as well as the bad.... Kill the young men as well as the old.... Kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant [a story then circulating].... I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr." The speaker was Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican bishop of London.

  In Parliament, Hardie kept up a stream of critical questions, though he had never really recovered from his stroke. Several times he collapsed from exhaustion, and physician MPs had to come to his aid. At home in Scotland he tried a favorite cure of the day, hydrotherapy, but being dipped in cold baths did little to revive him. He kept on writing and speaking against the catastrophe that was steadily eviscerating his life's work. How, he asked, could Britain say it was fighti ng for freedom when it was allied with tsarist Russia?

  Despite weakening physically, he went to Norwich for a conference of his Independent Labour Party. The streets were filled with soldiers and the city was blacked out at night. Suddenly permission to use the meeting halls the party had booked was denied. Dissenting churches stepped forward, and local Unitarians and the breakaway Primitive Methodists offered their buildings instead. On the last evening, Fenner Brockway remembered, "The little hall was crowded to suffocation and the lights were dimmed. Hardie's bushy white hair and his white beard shone out in the darkness with almost phosphorescent radiance. His head was held high, defiantly; his voice was strong and deep.... His voice nearly broke when he spoke of the tragedy of Socialists murdering each other."

  Resolutions passed at the conference had no effect, for most other left-wing and labor groups in Britain backed the war—as did many ILP members. One former comrade who turned against Hardie was the Scottish suffragette Flora Drummond, though before the war she had named her son Keir Hardie Drummond. Ruptures with old friends and his worsening health were too much for him. He would, Hardie announced, no longer attend parliamentary debates and was returning to Scotland. "Ten million Socialist and Labour voters in Europe," he lamented, "without a trace or vestige of power to prevent war!"

  Still unable to use his hand, he dictated a letter to Sylvia Pankhurst, saying that he was clearing out his London lodgings. There was a painting of hers, he said, that he could not bring himself to part with, but he wanted to return her letters to him. "They are well worth preserving...," he wrote, seeming to look ahead to his own death. "You could use your discretion as to which are most worthy of being kept and published, and which should be destroyed. I have not now the capacity for dealing with such a matter."

  They saw each other one last time, at Hardie's tiny London flat. She found his voice "low and muffled.... We were tongue-tied as never before, I struggling dumbly, desperately, to maintain my slender self-control.... Keir in his agony, mysterious, unkenned, seemed to loom over us like some great tragic ruin." As Sylvia tried to keep back tears, Hardie said to her, "You have been very brave." In the end, she did not destroy the letters; both of them, it seems, wanted posterity to know of their love.

  Sylvia's mother and sister, meanwhile, had become a kind of private War Propaganda Bureau of their own, incessantly beating the drum for battle and demanding that the government put women to work in the jobs of men who had left to join the army. An article of Christabel's on the subject caught the King's eye, and his secretary wrote to David Lloyd George, now the country's first-ever minister of munitions: "His Majesty feels strongly that we ought to do more to enlist women-workers.... The King was wondering whether it would be possible or advisable for you to make use of Mrs. Pankhurst." Lloyd George quickly arranged to meet her at the house of a mutual friend. Each had a very clear agenda: Lloyd George wanted more munitions workers and a club to use against labor unions; Emmeline wanted equal wages for women (she would win this for piecework but not for hourly wages) and, ultimately, the vote. But for the moment they would work together.

  Once again Emmeline found herself grandly leading a mass procession of women and marching bands through London to demonstrate before a government ministry. Despite wind and rain, some 60,000 people turned out. This time, however, the British treasury was providing more than £4,000 to cover the cost. Two miles of women in raincoats carried signs such as SHELLS MADE BY A WIFE MAY SAVE A HUSBAND'S LIFE. Costumed women represented different Allied nations; conquered Belgium marched barefoot, carrying a half-shredded flag. Along the route were tables where women could sign up for war-related work. Only a year earlier Emmeline Pankhurst had been in prison for inciting the blowing up of Lloyd George's house, but now both were smiling as they appeared together before the cheering crowd. For months afterward, newspapers celebrated the odd new couple. As one headline put it: "The Ablest Woman, the Ablest Man in England, Once They Were Enemies, War Has Made Them Friends."

  The war not only brought poison gas to the Western Front, it brought another previously unimaginable weapon to London itself. When fighting each other in the past, Europeans had generally observed the distinction between soldiers and civilians. Indeed, part of the traditional ideal of a soldier's gallantry was that he should respect even the enemy's women and children. Now, however, with war ever more dependent on the strength of an entire economy, the morale of civilians became a key target.

  The first, shocking sign Londoners had that the old rules no longer applied came on May 31, 1915, when incendiary bombs began raining down on the city from the night sky. They were dropped from a zeppelin—a giant airship nearly two football fields long, held aloft by huge bags of hydrogen within its steel frame and floating too high for most British fighter planes to reach. By the end of the war, German raids over England—by more zeppelins and soon by airplanes as well—would kill about 1,400 people and wound some 3,400. Although these numbers pale before the aerial bombardments of later wars, the very idea that explosives could be dropped through the clouds onto homes, farms, streets, and schools hundreds of miles from the nearest battlefield seemed to represent an unprecedented level of savagery. "Barbarous weapons," the Times called the bombs (although few people in Europe had thought it barbarous—or so much as noticed—when before the war France and Spain had bombed rebellious Moroccan villages from the air). No one was emotionally prepared for it, not even soldiers back from the front. An officer on leave in London who took a woman to the theater found himself back at war when a bomb landed nearby, shaking roof plaster onto the audience. "It's no business to happen here, you know," he exclaimed, unnerved. "It's no business to happen here."

  One night Bertrand Russell heard a "shout of bestial triumph in the street. I leapt out of bed and saw a Zeppelin falling in flames. The thought of brave men dying in agony was what caused the triumph in the street." Such moments of war hysteria made him feel "the agonizing pain of realizing that that is what men are." In poorer parts of London, crowds rioted after air raids and smashed the windows of merchants of German or Austrian origin, or whose names simply sounded Germanic. German bakers, rumor had it, were putting poison in their bread. The press only
fanned the flames of xenophobia. Newspaper headlines screamed about "The Enemy in Our Midst." One article warned, "If your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport."

  In the East End, Sylvia Pankhurst watched in horror as a mob hustled a baker through the street, his clothes still white with flour but his mouth dripping blood. Another crowd tore off a woman's blouse and beat her unconscious. In vain, Sylvia pleaded with the police to intervene. One night she heard banging on her door. "A man in his shirt sleeves, white and haggard, fell in, a small man with one leg deformed, so that he limped badly. He blurted a plea to telephone, and as I took him upstairs, told me he was from the baker's shop a few doors away, and born in London, though his old parents had come from Germany half a century before."

  She went out into the street intending to speak to the crowd, but faltered before the scene of frenzied looting of the baker's home. "The air was filled by ... the noise of knocking and splintering wood. Men were lowering a piano through the window.... [A] woman ran by, dragging a polished table. She rammed it against the pavement in her haste—a leg of the table was smashed, the top was split. Discarding the broken trophy she ran back to secure another."

  A locomotive of the London and North Western Railway named Dachshund was quickly rechristened Bulldog. A flurry of tabloid press articles pointed out that Alfred Milner had been born in Germany. One store bought ads to explain that the eau de cologne it sold did not come from Cologne. The hysteria spread into scholarship of centuries past: the editors of the Cambridge Medieval History announced that they would drop all German contributors from their volumes.

  Civil liberties eroded. The Defence of the Realm Act, rushed through Parliament with no debate at the start of the war, was continually expanded until it blanketed daily life, from limiting pub hours to allowing censorship of information "likely to cause disaffection or alarm." People could be arrested, have their homes searched and documents seized, all without a warrant. Moreover, a civilian charged with violating certain parts of the act could be tried by military court-martial. In mid- 1915, police raided the offices of Hardie's Independent Labour Party, searched its files, and charged the organization with publishing seditious matter. Though the government failed to win a conviction, it did manage to bar the press and public from the trial.