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

by Adam Hochschild

  Of all the careers that were built on defending the British government against threats from antiwar radicals like Clarke, Brockway, and Hobhouse, and from imaginary conspirators like the Wheeldon family, none involved a more dramatic fall than that of Basil Thomson, who had become Sir Basil in 1919. Two years later, he and the home secretary had a falling-out and he left government service, but remained in the public eye, embarking on a successful lecture tour of the United States, and in rapid succession writing My Experiences at Scotland Yard and other books in the same vein. In 1925, however, he suffered an embarrassing blow when arrested one night in Hyde Park for committing "an act in violation of public decency" with a woman who gave her name as Thelma de Lava. In court, Thomson indignantly protested that he was "writing a book dealing with vice conditions in the West End, and had gone to Hyde Park to gather data.... As I entered the park I was accosted by a young woman.... When she said she was hard up, I unbuttoned my coat for the purpose of getting out a few shillings and giving them to her." Thomson's lawyer tried a different tack, claiming that his client had gone to the park "to follow up certain information about an alleged Communist, who was to be found there." Although his punishment was only a fine of £5, according to one news account, "the crowds of spectators who jammed the court room throughout the trial whooped gleefully and had to be quelled." We do not know if the audience included any of those Thomson had so assiduously spied on during the war.

  The person most identified in the public mind with that war was, of course, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. After the Armistice, he led his army, in somber triumph, into Germany, to occupy the west bank of the Rhine. Invited to London for a ceremony in which Lloyd George was honoring Marshal Foch of France, he was miffed to discover "that I was to be in the fifth carriage.... I felt that this was more of an insult than I could put up with." He refused to attend. Before long, though, honors began to flood in: an earldom, medals, a £100,000 gift from Parliament, and a successful public fund-raising campaign to buy him the ancestral seat of the Haig family, Bemersyde House, on Scotland's River Tweed.

  Even though by the war's end his mind had opened up enough to embrace new advances in military technology, when he soon afterward retired from the army it seemed to close down again. "Some enthusiasts to-day ... prophesy that the aeroplane, the tank, and the motor-car will supersede the horse in future wars," he wrote a half-dozen years after the war ended. "I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever.... Aeroplanes and tanks ... are only accessories to the man and the horse."

  Haig deployed his skills as a political infighter better than he had ever deployed his forces, to ensure that he would be remembered for winning the war and not for the disastrous offensives of 1916 and 1917. While he disingenuously claimed to be "very lazy on the question of the history of the war," he was anything but. The new battlefield, which he dominated with considerable success, was the preparation of the multivolume Official History of the war, as well as other histories and memoirs; his weapons were the texts of his self-serving diary, letters, dispatches, and other documents that he gave to trusted loyalists, including the Official History's main author. Knowing that his reputation would probably be under assault after his death, Haig even orchestrated a posthumous counterattack on his future critics by mobilizing two generals to write a long memorandum in his defense, which was deposited with the British Museum for release in 1940.

  The unruly world of postwar Britain, filled with vocal labor unionists who staged a general strike in 1926, dismayed Haig, but on a visit to Italy he was impressed with the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini: "I found him most pleasant. There is no doubt that he has already done much good in this country. His view is, that everyone is a servant of the State and must honestly do his best to serve the State. If anyone fails he is punished. We want someone like that at home at the present time." Curiously, the field marshal who had formerly commanded millions now did not even use a secretary, and answered all letters by hand. Haig died suddenly of a heart attack in 1928 and was mourned at an elaborate state funeral in Westminster Abbey. Only that same year was the cavalry lance officially retired as a combat weapon of the British army.

  Another funeral also took place in London in 1928. Its proces sion also marched in orderly ranks, but instead of guardsmen and army bagpipers, the marchers were almost all women. And instead of scarlet and khaki, they wore purple, white, and green; some displayed, as badges of honor, the arrow insignia of prison garb. When they followed the coffin to the cemetery there was some tension in the air, for one of the mourners stood, solitary and defiant, apart from the others.

  In the casket was the body of Emmeline Pankhurst. More than a thousand followers gathered at the graveside, where they surrounded her daughter Christabel, whose eyes were red from weeping. The solitary mourner, of course, was Sylvia, estranged from her mother for the past 15 years. Also at the cemetery was someone whose arrival had deepened the estrangement, causing Mrs. Pankhurst, supporters said, a shock that hastened her death: a six-month-old baby boy to whom Sylvia had given birth out of wedlock. Emmeline had nothing but contempt for the baby's father, Silvio Corio, with whom Sylvia now lived. An Italian radical and convert to Islam, he already had two earlier illegitimate children.

  Emmeline Pankhurst's life had been a wild journey between extremes, from socialist to rock-throwing suffragette to staunch prowar patriot to enthusiast for Russia's Women's Battalion of Death. But one strand of her character remained constant: her strict Victorian sense of sexual morality. When she read in the newspaper that Sylvia, who advocated "marriage without a legal union," had had a baby, she wept all day and kept saying, "I shall never be able to speak in public again." She never did.

  Although loyal to her mother to the end, Christabel took another of the abrupt turns so common to this family. The strident voice that had once urged suffragettes to smash the windows of government offices and then harshly denounced Britain's enemies would be devoted with no less fervor for the remainder of her life to proclaiming the second coming of Christ. She eventually settled in that home of so many messianic movements, Southern California. After their mother's funeral, she and Sylvia never saw each other again, and she died in Santa Monica in 1958.

  Adela Pankhurst, banished to Australia in 1914, never returned to England. Emmeline had cut off contact with her when she took a strong stance against the war, and urged the Australian prime minister to denounce her. Adela's politics, too, began to take a strangely twisting course. She was a founder of the Australian Communist Party, then veered rightward to start a branch of the Women's Guild of Empire, and eventually was interned as a Japanese sympathizer during the Second World War. She and her husband named their dogs Adolf and Benito, after the leaders of Japan's two European allies. Her final conversion, a year before her death, was to Roman Catholicism.

  Of all the Pankhurst women, Sylvia best escaped—at least for a time—the family's attraction to rigid, all-encompassing belief systems. After the war she continued to edit the Workers' Dreadnought, which employed Britain's first black correspondent and also published Indian writers; hers was a rare voice against the tightening of racial discrimination in South Africa, the foundations of what would become apartheid. In a foresighted 1922 pamphlet she predicted that in the later part of the twentieth century the major nations of the world would be fighting over oil. On a postwar trip to Italy, she saw some of Mussolini's thugs in action and began speaking out against fascism, something few people in Britain yet took seriously.

  In 1935, fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, whose ruler, Emperor Haile Selassie, appealed in vain to the League of Nations for help. Sylvia now had the cause that would occupy her for the rest of her life. She and her lover Corio began publishing New Times and Ethiopia News, which reported on Italian atrocities in Ethiopia and denounced the rise of the Nazis. When his country was a victim of Mussolini, Haile Selassie was widely supported by many other progressives a
nd intellectuals. Once restored to his throne by the Allies in the Second World War, however, he again became a ruler whose absolute power was underlined by his official titles: Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings, and Elect of God. None of this deterred Sylvia from once again becoming a quintessential Pankhurst true believer. "In those irresistible eyes," she wrote, "burns the quenchless fire of the hero who never fails his cause." At the age of 74, she moved to Ethiopia and continued to sing the Emperor's praises in print. He awarded her various medals, and she was one of the few people given the privilege of not having to bow and walk backward on leaving his presence. She died in Addis Ababa in 1960.

  When Adela suffered a fatal heart attack in Australia the following year, the last of the Pankhurst sisters was gone. It was as if the mother and three daughters had been split apart by centrifugal force: each of the four ended her life on a different continent.

  Among the millions of veterans released from the British army in the months after the Armistice was Albert Rochester. Returning to his job in Wiltshire as a signalman for the Great Western Railway, he resumed writing for labor newspapers. Now bitterly disillusioned with the war, he praised those who had gone to jail as COs. In print and on the lecture platform, he returned repeatedly to his most searing wartime memory, witnessing three British soldiers executed one freezing January dawn in 1917. In the early 1920s, he joined forces with a founder of the No-Conscription Fellowship, who had spent most of the war in prison, to press for an official inquiry into the executions. The War Office rebuffed them. Rochester's anger at the generals who had ordered these three working-class lives snuffed out was of a piece with his position as an untamed labor militant. In speeches he gave as he traveled the country by train and motorcycle, he offered to show anyone who doubted his story the location of the three unmarked graves. In 1926, he died suddenly at the age of 41, of septicemia following minor surgery.

  In recent decades, argument over the army's death sentences revived, and became a curious proxy battle for how the entire conflict should be remembered. Were the First World War's 346 known British military executions—minus a few dozen for murder, rape, or other noncombat-related crimes—merely measures essential to maintaining military discipline in an age that took capital punishment for granted? Or were they the work of bullheaded generals who refused to acknowledge that trench warfare could drive men mad? And was the whole war itself a matter of such madness that soldiers executed for cowardice, desertion, or casting away arms were tragic victims, if not heroes, for refusing their parts in it?

  In 1990, a citizens' group called Shot at Dawn began demanding posthumous pardons for the executed; among its members were relatives of Lance Sergeant Joseph Stones and Lance Corporal Peter Goggins, both of whom Rochester had seen shot. The war's executions became the subject of a half-dozen books, several TV documentaries, at least two plays, a children's book, a memorial in sculpture, and a song, "Deserter," by a Bristol rock band. Local newspapers in England and Ireland took up the cases of executed soldiers from their communities, and bishops, city councils, labor unions, and the Irish government added their voices to the demand for pardons. Each year, Shot at Dawn members joined the November remembrance ceremony at the Cenotaph, the London war memorial, wearing white badges to symbolize the white handkerchiefs or envelopes pinned over the hearts of condemned men to provide targets for firing squads. Finally, in 2006, the British government granted a blanket pardon to more than 300 executed First World War soldiers, including the three men Rochester had watched die.

  The pardon may have ended the public argument over the executions, but a larger dispute over how to judge the war goes on. Was its horrendous death toll heart-rending but necessary to prevent the German conquest of all of Europe? Or was it senseless, a spasm of brutal carnage that in every conceivable way remade the world for the worse? Nowhere has the argument been more heated than in Britain, which, because it had not been attacked in 1914, had a clearer choice than France or Belgium about whether to join the fighting.

  Within a decade after its end, the war had already come to be seen by many as a needless tragedy that, at least where Britain was concerned, should have been avoided. In films, novels, and onstage the conflict today is usually portrayed as an unmitigated catastrophe, where both sides wasted men's lives and cynically coveted territory and colonies in the manner of empires immemorial. In 1998, the Daily Express, which was unsurpassed in its drum-beating chauvinism during the war years, published a call to remove the equestrian statue of Haig from its prominent place on Whitehall in London.

  In recent decades, however, a number of British military historians have, surprisingly but unconvincingly, come to Haig's defense. The field marshal's admirers have even formed the Douglas Haig Fellowship, which presents a lecture in his honor each year, and in Britain theirs has become the new academic orthodoxy. In an onslaught of books and articles they have argued that, whatever his flaws, Haig did more than anyone else to contain the German assault of early 1918, turn the tables, and win the war. More important, these historians insist, the war had to be won: Germany had violated Belgian neutrality and, without resistance, an aggressive, militaristic Germany and its allies would have overrun Europe.

  To this, it is easy to respond: the Second World War, which grew so inevitably out of the First, did result in Germany's overrunning almost all of Europe—and the Nazis carried out an immeasurably more murderous agenda than Kaiser Wilhelm II ever would have. The war that prevented a German conquest of Europe in 1914 virtually guaranteed the one that would begin in 1939.

  Although this argument over the war's worth has often been one between the political right and left, one powerful contemporary voice arguing that Britain should have stayed out comes from the Scottish-born conservative historian Niall Ferguson, who has called the war's toll "the worst thing the people of my country have ever had to endure." He points out that one of the Kaiser's principal war aims was to establish a pan-European customs union, a "United States of Europe," which Germany, by its size, would dominate. How different is that, he asks provocatively, from today's European Union? Germany was indeed the aggressor in 1914, but would a German conquest of France then—something that had already happened once, in 1870–71—have been so disastrous? Whatever brutalities or shifts in the balance of power this would have caused, Ferguson argues, seem paltry compared to the war's death toll and catastrophic aftereffects, above all the rise of Nazism.

  To this we can add that the war of 1914–1918 left a wider legacy as well. For example, the unprecedented, massive government propaganda operations on both sides, filled with false claims of glorious battlefield victories and wild exaggerations of the other side's atrocities, engendered a deep postwar cynicism—a cynicism that years later made many people first dismiss as propaganda the early reports of Nazi death camps. More important yet, the war smashed many barriers in the realm of what most Europeans considered morally permissible. In the frenzy for military advantage, international agreements and the long-standing distinction between soldiers and civilians went up in smoke: chemical warfare by both sides, German torpedoing of neutral ships, the British attempt to blockade Germany into starvation—the list could go on. And these barriers, once broken, were gone forever. The barbed-wire-ringed camps in Germany for laborers conscripted from France, Belgium, and Russia would be duplicated in far larger and crueler dimensions by the Nazis and the Soviets. The Turkish genocide of the Armenians would be repeated, on a vaster scale, against Europe's Jews. The poison gas attacks foreshadowed the gruesome toll in birth defects from the American spraying of defoliants across South Vietnam. The indiscriminate German bombings of British and French cities would be replicated by both sides, with an immensely greater death toll, in the Second World War, reaching a climax in the atomic leveling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The unexpected aristocratic dissenter of 1917, Lord Lansdowne, was entirely right to see that the war had irrevocably unleashed "the prostitution of science for purposes of pure destructio
n."

  Would we have devised such means of inflicting pain, terror, and death without the First World War? Probably yes, for human beings have been inventing new ways to kill each other for thousands of years. But the scale of the conflict and the way the belligerents mobilized their economies for total war accelerated such developments greatly, and left a bloodied Germany determined to seek revenge. The most toxic legacy of the conflict and its misbegotten peace settlement lies in the hardly imaginable horrors that followed. If we were allowed to magically roll back history to the start of the twentieth century and undo one—and only one—event, is there any doubt that it would be the war that broke out in 1914?

  On a warm, sunny day in Ypres, the land seems at peace. Just outside of town, a farmer on his tractor says, yes, a visitor can certainly step inside one of the seven half-buried British bunkers on his property, their rounded concrete roofs bearing the ribbed imprint of corrugated iron. They now house a flock of bleating baby goats, who rush out, frightened by the sound of approaching footsteps. A few miles away, a German trench has been carefully reconstructed, with wattle holding the sides firm, duckboards on the bottom, a rim of sandbags along the parapet. The nearby small villages like Passchendaele, whose very names were once synonymous with mass death, are now filled with old men chatting in sidewalk cafés, leafy town squares with bandstands, schoolchildren heading home with leather bookbags, shops selling Belgian chocolates. The air smells of fresh-cut grass. Every road is so well paved, every street so clean, every red-roofed home with its window boxes of bright flowers so well kept, that it is difficult to imagine this same countryside engulfed in blood and flame, this same blue sky filled with deadly shards of metal and the screams of the wounded, this same breeze carrying the pervasive stink of rotting bodies.