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

by Adam Hochschild

  While Haig planned for a great breakthrough, it became painfully clear that the Germans were doing exactly the same thing, and they struck first. Their target was the French army, whose sector of the front line was anchored by the fortress city of Verdun and its surrounding double ring of smaller forts. The assault on Verdun began in late February 1916 with the largest and longest artillery bombardment yet seen. No one knew the extent of German casualties, but 90,000 French soldiers were killed or wounded in the first six weeks. The ferocious combat raged on, murderously but indecisively, into the spring, the German troops deploying their flamethrowers when they could get close enough to French positions. Not for the last time in this war, gaining a tiny piece of ground became an obsession for the attacking commander.

  Anxious to see the Germans diverted from Verdun, the French high command urged its British allies to accelerate plans for a massive joint assault where the British and French sectors of the front met, near the River Somme, which meandered its slow and weed-filled way through a countryside of wheat and sugar beet fields. As ever more French troops were drawn into the bloody maw of Verdun, it became clear that the major work of the assault on the Somme would fall to the British army. July 1, 1916, was fixed as its date, and months of intensive preparations began.

  In London, a measure of elite status was whether you had access to the latest uncensored news from the battlefields of the Western Front. Coded telegrams flowed from Montreuil to the War Office, and longer dispatches were carried by couriers known as King's Messengers. On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, urgent telegrams about a surprise attack streamed in—but not from Haig's headquarters. Many of them landed on the desk of the shocked commander of the Home Forces, the new Viscount French, still angry over being kicked upstairs from his post at the front. At this worst of possible moments, the largest insurrection in a century had broken out in Ireland.

  Some 1,750 nationalists had taken up arms, determined, after long centuries of English rule, to take Ireland out of the United Kingdom once and for all. Men carrying rifles on their shoulders, but sometimes wearing suits and ties, marched up Dublin's O'Connell Street. As they approached the majestic General Post Office, the column's leader, James Connolly—a self-educated socialist, friend of Keir Hardie, and military veteran—gave the order, "Left turn ... charge!" Within a few minutes the rebels had occupied the building and decked it with a green flag sporting a gold harp and the words IRISH REPUBLIC. They soon came out on the front steps and announced, to a small scattering of surprised pedestrians, the establishment of a provisional government. "Irishmen and Irishwomen," their proclamation began. "In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom."

  The rebels quickly cut telephone lines and occupied railway stations and other key buildings. Preparing for the British army counterattack that was sure to come, they began building barricades, organizing blockades of cars across major streets, and digging trenches in St. Stephen's Green. At the domed Four Courts building they used heavy law books as the equivalent of sandbag fortifications.

  French immediately ordered two infantry brigades to Ireland and put other units on alert. After conferring with the prime minister, the King, and Kitchener, he dispatched yet more troops and a hard-line general to command them. The British soldiers surrounded rebel-held central Dublin, and the authorities declared martial law.

  The Easter Rising, as it was termed, proved a dramatic blow at England's imperial amour-propre, but fell far short of the rebels' dreams. The nationwide revolt they hoped to ignite never materialized: popular support for such an extreme move proved weak, dissension broke out among the leaders, and weapons promised by the Germans were intercepted by the British. The Rising was largely limited to Dublin, where British forces soon outnumbered the insurgents 20 to 1. As the badly armed rebels in their fedoras and cloth caps fought on, however, their doomed revolt gained an aura of sacrificial tragedy that would make it a landmark in Irish nationalist mythology—looming far larger, paradoxically, than if the Rising had been better planned and executed.

  As the British army closed in, a Royal Navy gunboat on the River Liffey shelled the rebels' temporary headquarters, which bore a big sign: WE SERVE NEITHER KING NOR KAISER, BUT IRELAND. Insurgents barricaded in shops and factories fought on stubbornly, evacuating their wounded, when they could, through back doors and holes smashed in walls. Hit by an incendiary artillery round, the General Post Office began to burn and soon became a blackened shell whose outer walls still bear the scars of bullets today. Flames soared into the sky day and night. Women accused of carrying ammunition to the rebels were seized and carted off screaming. The last headquarters of the Irish Republic's short-lived army was Hanlon's fish shop on Moore Street.

  According to the official count, the week of bitter street fighting left more than 400 dead and 2,500 wounded—among rebels, bystanders, and British troops—although some estimates put the figures higher. British military authorities court-martialed the leaders of the revolt, sentencing 15 to be shot. Some feared this would provoke a new round of uprisings, but French, in London, refused to overrule the general he had dispatched to Dublin. In dealing with the suffragettes, the British government had been careful not to create martyrs; French's failure to do the same would prove a pivotal mistake. The last of the condemned to be brought before the firing squad was James Connolly, so badly wounded that he had to be carried on a stretcher and then tied to a chair to be shot. People throughout Ireland were enraged, as were English supporters of Irish freedom like Sylvia Pankhurst.

  Her Woman's Dreadnought became a rare source of news about the Rising, for its correspondent, 18-year-old Patricia Lynch, scored a coup when she evaded a government news blackout and managed to slip into Dublin: on the way there she met a politically sympathetic army officer who got her through roadblocks by identifying her as his sister. The issue of the Dreadnought that carried her report, "Scenes from the Irish Rebellion," promptly sold out and had to be reprinted several times. "The hopeless bravery of it," Pankhurst wrote later of the Rising, "the coercion and the executions which followed, to me were a grief cutting deep as a personal sorrow."

  With some blocks in Dublin as reduced to rubble as war-ravaged towns in France and Belgium, the Easter Rising was a sharp blow to all who hoped that the shared ordeal of war would strengthen the bonds holding together the British Empire. No one valued that dream more than Milner. Despite his prodigious administrative talents, he was not close to Asquith, and so the prime minister had given him only minor assignments. Milner chafed impatiently as admirers inside the government and the military told him how wartime bureaucrats were making a mess of things that he could have set right. ("I shall never be quite happy until I see you War Minister," wrote one general.) His one solace was his love for Violet Cecil.

  She, however, was still consumed by grief. Like many bereaved women then, she tried to console herself by compiling a collection of letters from her son's final weeks, copying them by hand into an album, along with a list of the villages where he had spent each night during his short time in France and a hand-drawn map of the forest where he died. One by one she watched other families she knew receive the same terrible news about sons, husbands, or brothers.

  An advisory committee Milner served on recommended that all possible land be farmed—to make Britain less dependent on imported food that had to cross an ocean patrolled by German U-boats. And so, adding to her own sense of a world turned upside down, Violet dutifully ordered her flower gardens at Great Wigsell converted to grow fruit and vegetables, and sheep were set to graze on the lawns. With farmhands called away to the front, the only laborers available were German POWs. "This place is polluted by German prisoners who are ploughing," she wrote to her husband. "I hate to see them in the field ... George used to ride in." Servants, too, were hard to find, for young women flocked to jobs now open to them in munitions
factories, just as Emmeline Pankhurst had wanted. Violet lost her maid, and for a time had to cook and sew for herself.

  Meanwhile, at venerable Hatfield House, the seat of Edward Cecil's family, fields and the private golf course were filled with trenches and a man-made swamp to create a maneuvering ground for an experimental weapon under development, the tank. The King himself came one day to watch the enormous machines grind their way across ancestral Cecil land. Most of the great house itself, with its library of 10,000 leather-bound books, marble floors, gold leaf ceilings, and flags captured at Waterloo, had, like many similar homes, been transformed into a convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers, with remaining family members confined to one corner.

  The same month as the Easter Rising, Sylvia Pankhurst and her supporters organized an antiwar rally in Trafalgar Square, to which she marched with a working-class group from the East End. Never strong on modesty, she wrote later, "I knew the dear London crowd loved me.... In their jolly kindness some shouted: 'Good old Sylvia!'" At the square itself, though, far less love was in sight. The demonstrators were set upon by right-wing thugs and soldiers wearing the broad-brimmed hats of the notoriously rowdy Australian and New Zealand troops. They tore the marchers' banners to pieces and jeered so loudly that the speakers could not be heard. Other hecklers hurled red and yellow dye. Sylvia tried to speak over the uproar, but her voice was drowned out. Finally two policemen made her leave the platform before the violence got out of hand. From across the Atlantic, where she was in the midst of a North American speaking tour, her mother cabled Christabel: "Strongly repudiate and condemn Sylvia's foolish and unpatriotic conduct.... Make this public."

  Sylvia's voice was not alone. A socialist named William Holliday had been sentenced the previous year to three months of hard labor for publicly insisting, "Freedom's battle has not to be fought on the blood-drenched soil of France but nearer home—our enemy is within the gates." Acquitted on appeal, he was arrested again on a pretext and died in prison. Others dared to speak out: the first men refusing the draft, a few trade unionists, a handful of MPs, and some intellectuals, of whom the most prominent—each would later spend months in prison for his opinions—were Bertrand Russell and the distinguished journalist Edmund Dene Morel.

  A burly man of imposing dynamism, Morel, for more than a decade before 1914, had been the moving spirit of the century's first great international human rights campaign, against the forced labor system King Leopold II of Belgium had used to draw profits from the Congo, a system Morel had done more than anyone else to expose. He was Britain's most skilled practitioner of what today we would call investigative journalism. After the war began, Morel became a founder of the Union of Democratic Control, a coalition that drew together a number of liberal, socialist, and labor figures and groups who felt that Britain's participation in the war was a huge mistake, possible only because foreign policy was made outside of open, parliamentary control. By the war's end, organizations affiliated with the UDC, most of them local or regional labor union groups, would have a combined membership of more than 650,000. The UDC called for ending the war through a negotiated peace, based on several principles, one of which was that no territory should change hands in a peace settlement without a plebiscite of those who lived there.

  Morel poured out an unceasing stream of books, articles, and pamphlets arguing that the war was not due to German aggression alone, but also to various secret treaties and agreements—including the understanding Britain had had with France—and to an uncontrolled arms race. For years before the war, he wrote, the leaders of every major country in Europe had been telling their people "that while they themselves were extremely anxious to keep the peace, the fellows next door were a quarrelsome lot, and that the only way to keep them quiet was to arm to the teeth." Writing in 1916, three years before the postwar Treaty of Versailles would virtually guarantee the rise of Nazism, he already grasped that the most dangerous outcome of the conflict would be the total victory of either side—"a war which enables one side to impose its unfettered will upon the other ... a war closing amid universal exhaustion, followed by a sullen peace." Although Morel had won wide respect for his Congo muckraking, newspapers now fiercely attacked him as a German agent, and before long he would find his writings censored, his mailbox filled with hate letters, and the police raiding his home to carry away private papers from his study.

  Conscription spurred the country's antiwar movement into new life. In 1916, for example, some 200,000 Britons signed a petition calling for a negotiated peace. Except for Russia when it erupted in revolution the following year, none of the other major powers would develop an antiwar movement as large and vocal. Nor, of course, did any of them have the deeply embedded tradition of civil liberties that allowed one to flourish in Britain. Before the end of the war, more than 20,000 men of military age would refuse to enter the British armed forces. Some accepted alternative labor as conscientious objectors, but—usually because they refused that option on principle or because they were denied CO status—more than 6,000 resisters spent time in prison. Today it is easy enough to look back and see the manifold tragic consequences of the First World War, but when the guns were firing and the pressure from friends and family to support the war effort was overwhelming, it required rare courage to resist.

  As antiwar organizations carried on their uphill struggle, their offices were raided and searched, their mail was opened, and they were infiltrated by informers and agents provocateurs. Before long the authorities began raiding sports matches, cinemas, theaters, and railway stations to round up men who were not in uniform. Hysteria against pacifists rose everywhere. A pamphlet by "A Little Mother" typically declared that "we women ... will tolerate no such cry as 'Peace! Peace!'...There is only one temperature for the women of the British race, and that is white heat.... We women pass on the human ammunition of 'only sons' to fill up the gaps." It sold 75,000 copies in a few days. "The conscientious objector is a fungus growth—a human toadstool—which should be uprooted without further delay," screamed the tabloid John Bull. The Daily Express declared that COs were financed by German money. Those against the war were so accustomed to being ostracized that they were sometimes startled when it didn't happen. When an old friend, now in uniform, warmly greeted E. D. Morel in the street, Morel was so moved that he burst into tears, exclaiming, "I did not think anyone would speak to me now."

  In April 1916 the largest group backing resisters, the No-Conscription Fellowship, or NCF, drew some 2,000 supporters to a convention in a London Quaker meeting hall while an angry crowd milled about in the street outside. The organization's chairman, wrote the young editor Fenner Brockway, "did not wish to incite further attack by the noise of our cheering. He therefore asked that enthusiasm should be expressed silently, and with absolute discipline the crowded audience responded." When Bertrand Russell addressed the gathering, he was "received with thousands of fluttering handkerchiefs, making the low sound of rising and falling wind, but with no other sound whatsoever."

  Russell continued to write articles, books, and letters to newspapers, in prose that rang with moral clarity. He hated German militarism, he always said, loved the tradition of English liberty, and would prefer an Allied victory to a German one. But the longer the war went on, the more it was militarizing Britain in Germany's image, while killing and maiming men by the millions and making certain an embittered and dangerous postwar world. He not only lent his enormous prestige to the No-Conscription Fellowship; for much of the war his thick shock of graying hair was a familiar sight at the NCF headquarters each day, for he became the group's acting chairman when its head went to prison for refusing the call-up. He attended the courts-martial of COs, visited them in prison, and devoted hours to the most mundane office tasks, writing numerous "Dear Comrade" letters to branches around the country, signed "Fraternally Yours, Bertrand Russell." And he made clear to all that he was as willing to sacrifice his freedom for what he believed as were the younger men and women around h
im. When the government began prosecuting people for distributing an NCF leaflet, he immediately wrote to the Times: "Six men have been condemned to varying terms of imprisonment with hard labour for distributing this leaflet. I wish to make it known that I am the author of this leaflet, and that if anyone is to be prosecuted, I am the person primarily responsible." For this he was fined £100 (which he refused to pay, forcing the authorities to seize some of his property), dismissed from his post at Cambridge, and denied a passport for a trip to lecture at Harvard. The government was still uneasy about the bad publicity in the United States that would come from throwing such a prominent intellectual in jail. Incidentally, like thousands of people in Britain at this time, Russell came from a divided family: his first cousin was a War Office official who at one point ordered a raid on the NCF headquarters.

  Believing—correctly—that sooner or later most of its leaders would be arrested, the NCF set up a "shadow" structure modeled on that used before the war by the Pankhursts' WSPU. If any officer was jailed, someone else, designated in advance, would automatically take his or her job. Similarly, wrote one member, "in various secret places, buried in an orchard in Surrey, or locked in an unsuspecting city merchant's safe, or at the back of the bookshelf in the house of a remote sympathiser ... were duplicates of every document likely to be seized." These included a daily bulletin on the numbers of men arrested, court-martialed, and imprisoned, and file cards showing the whereabouts of every CO. Any instance of their mistreatment was recorded and turned over to one of the small band of sympathetic MPs willing to ask questions in the House of Commons. Communications were often in code: if a telegram said that a meeting was to be at Manchester, it in fact meant Newcastle. Basil Thomson's Scotland Yard agents frequently raided the NCF office, so its staff took care to leave enough unimportant documents on the desks and shelves so that the police would think they were seizing something valuable.