Knowing where George was buried did little to ease his mother's grief. He had, she wrote, been "thrown like carrion into a pit. When I think of the inhuman waste of a beautiful life I can hardly endure myself or to be a part of a world where such things were possible." Nor did his death bring her any closer to her estranged husband. "You and I can't talk about any of the great vital things without my saying something which might touch upon your religious views," she wrote to him, "so I won't write about the Great Dissolver, Death—we have no common ground at all.... I had written and ... then came your letter with a reference to 'future life' and I felt mine had better go into the fire and the whole subject remain untouched."
Like most Britons, Violet Cecil did not question the aims of the war. As a memorial to George, she wanted to donate something to his old boarding school, Winchester. Her gift was a rifle range. Rudyard Kipling, his bushy eyebrows still black though his hair and mustache were turning gray, gave a speech at the opening ceremony, fired the inaugural shot, and hit a bull's-eye.
After several months of war, the hopes of peace-minded socialists throughout Europe were all but gone. Their dream had dissolved in the face of an ancient and greater force: the deep, instinctive human impulse for solidarity with fellow members of one's tribe—a group most people defined, in this moment of crisis, not by class but by nation. Surprisingly haunting testimony to the strength of this feeling came from someone who largely resisted it, the prominent left-wing editor George Lansbury, who argued that it was nothing less than criminal madness for Europe's workers to be fighting each other at the behest of the ruling classes. Nonetheless, once it became possible for journalists to visit the front, he confessed that "every troop or regiment of troops on the march created a longing in me to get out and march with them. I had no sort of feeling about killing or being killed. There was a sense of danger and service—impersonal service—which, as men swung past, made me wish to be with them." If even a committed antiwar socialist could experience such longing, young Britons without leftist convictions felt it far more, and those speaking out against the war found themselves depressed and isolated.
Among them were Sylvia Pankhurst and Keir Hardie. Although no longer lovers, they still saw each other frequently. He was in despair that all his efforts against war had failed, and she was bruised by her final, very public rupture with her mother and sister. The written record is scanty, but they seem to have offered each other some solace during what must have been, for each, the worst winter of a lifetime. One night when Sylvia was giving a speech, she received a telegram from Hardie telling her to pay no attention to press reports that he was ill—which sounds like a desperate plea for her to do just the opposite. As soon as the meeting was over she rushed to his flat and found that he had been escorted home after having had a seizure in the House of Commons. Near the end of the year he suffered a stroke, as if his body were reflecting the grief he felt at the war. He was only 58, but, his writing arm now paralyzed, he had to compose by dictating. For a time he was not even able to take his daily walk.
Sylvia worked on in the East End, ceaselessly badgering officials at every level. In this time of emergency, why not impose government controls on prices? Why not nationalize food supplies? Immersed in the war of daily life, she saw the war in Europe as the enemy of all she had been trying to do. To read her autobiographical account of these years, The Home Front, is to enter the trenches of down-and-out London: women getting by on their husbands' paltry military pay and allowances (a mere extra twopence per day per child at the start of the war), women crowded out of hospital beds needed for wounded soldiers, a blacksmith with nine children and no work because so many horses had been commandeered for the army. The book is humorless, intense, and long-winded; you cannot imagine her bursting into song, as Hardie, in better days, had been wont to do.
Yet she did amass some solid accomplishments in a difficult time, when the nation was focused on war against Germany and not against poverty at home. She opened a garment workshop and a boot-making co-op, upending tradition by paying women the same wage as men. She took over a pub, the Gunmaker's Arms, renaming it the Mothers' Arms and installing a Montessori nursery school. Many of its pupils had fathers at the front; soon there would be others whose fathers were jailed war resisters. When women and children were evicted by their landlords, if no shelter could be found, she took them into her own home. On one occasion when no midwife was available, she assisted at a birth. And throughout this time she edited one of the few newspapers in Europe where voices dissenting from militarism could be heard.
The year's end brought no improvement to conditions in the East End—or at the front. Every British soldier, however, received an embossed brass box of cigarettes, pipe, and tobacco (or another gift for nonsmokers, such as spices for Indian troops) and a Christmas card from the royal couple, showing the Queen in broad choker necklace and crown and the King in his field marshal's uniform. In Haig's headquarters, they celebrated Christmas well, with turtle soup and other delicacies; Leopold de Rothschild sent the general some prized 1820 brandy and more than 50 pairs of fur gloves for him to distribute as presents to his staff. In the trenches, however, a very different sort of Christmas was under way.
South of Ypres, where the British and Germans faced each other across the white-frosted fields of Flanders, as northern Belgium was known, Christmas morning dawned cold and foggy. Looking at one section of German trench, British soldiers noticed that a wooden board had been hoisted with the words "You no fight, we no fight." From another trench farther down the line, a German officer emerged with a white flag. On the British side, some soldiers of the Queen's Westminster Rifles climbed out of their trench, waved, then jumped back in. When no shots were fired, they emerged a second time and began a cautious, unarmed advance into no man's land. "Suddenly from the enemy hurrahing was heard," a German soldier wrote to a socialist newspaper in Berlin, "and, surprised, we came from our mouse-holes and saw the English advancing towards us.... They had no rifles with them, and therefore we knew it could only be a greeting." Soon a German NCO hauled a Christmas tree into no man's land.
These forays multiplied along more than two-thirds of the British-held section of the front. By that afternoon, thousands of British and German soldiers were trading cigarettes, helmets, canned food, and other souvenirs, taking pictures, and singing carols in both languages. One lieutenant, wielding barbed-wire clippers, snipped two buttons from a German officer's coat in exchange for two of his own. Some German soldiers turned out to speak English well, having worked in Britain before the war, often as clerks, barbers, or waiters. (British troops would sometimes shout "Waiter!" from their trenches.) A German soldier who had lived in Suffolk gave a lieutenant of the Scots Guards a postcard to mail to his girlfriend there. A member of the 3rd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade got a haircut in no man's land from a German who had been his barber on London's High Holborn.
One officer described the day almost as if it were the fraternization between teams following a soccer match. "The Germans came out ... they're good fellows on the whole and play the game," he wrote to the Times. In several stretches of no man's land British and German troops played games of soccer, despite the half-frozen ground pocked with shell holes. "We marked the goals with our caps," wrote a German lieutenant, Johannes Niemann. "Teams were quickly established ... and the Fritzes beat the Tommies 3–2." Where there was no ball, the two sides made use of a tin can or a sandbag stuffed with straw.
Later in the day, a German juggler who had been onstage in London before the war gave a bravura performance; soldiers from both sides chased and caught hares running between their trenches. Men from the Cheshire Regiment slaughtered a pig, cooked it in no man's land, and shared it with the Germans, and some Saxon troops rolled a barrel of beer over their parapet and into eager British hands.
The Christmas Truce, as it came to be called, has passed into legend, celebrated in books, poems, popular songs, short stories, and films. The truce repre
sented, it is said, an outburst of spontaneous solidarity among ordinary, working-class soldiers that outraged higher-ups and militarists on both sides. Adolf Hitler, for example, at the front in an infantry regiment and much given to brooding alone in his dugout, strenuously disapproved: "Such a thing should not happen in wartime," he told his fellow soldiers. "Have you no German sense of honor?" But tempting as it may be to see the Christmas Truce this way, the Britons who strolled out between the lines to wish their German counterparts a Merry Christmas ranged as high as colonels. Sir John French seems to have learned of the truce only after the fact, and promptly issued orders that nothing of the sort should happen again. Looking back after the war, however, he wrote of the occasion as a valiant gesture within the warrior caste, and compared it to a Christmas in the Boer War when he had sent whiskey and cigars through the lines to an opposing general. "Soldiers should have no politics, but should cultivate a freemasonry of their own and, emulating the knights of old, should honour a brave enemy only second to a comrade, and like them rejoice to split a friendly lance [i.e., take part in jousting competitions] today and ride boot to boot in the charge tomorrow."
Keir Hardie, on the other hand, was eager to see the truce as anything but chivalry. Many descriptions of the event by soldiers appeared on newspapers' letters pages; still crippled by his stroke, he dictated a column quoting them and hailing the truce as an omen of revolutionary changes. "Why are men who can be so friendly sent out to kill each other? They have no quarrel.... When the war is over ... each will realise that the lies told them by their press and their politicians had been deliberately concocted to mislead them. They will realise ... that the workers of the world are not 'enemies' to each other, but comrades." The Christmas Truce, he felt, was essentially a matter of soldiers staging a one-day wildcat strike against the war. And if that could happen now, why not a general strike before the war went on much longer?
Above: Charlotte Despard, suffragette, prison veteran, pacifist, communist, IRA supporter. Right: Her brother, "dearer to me than anyone else," Field Marshal Sir John French, cavalryman, commander in chief on the Western Front, viceroy of Ireland.
Horsemen en route to Kimberley, South Africa,
for Britain's last great cavalry charge, 1900.
Rudyard Kipling, staunch patriot in his country's wars.
Above: Alfred, Lord Milner, the "man of no illusions." Below: His great love, Lady
Violet Cecil (left); his nemesis, antiwar campaigner Emily Hobhouse (right).
The Pankhurst family, bitterly split by the war: Christabel (left), Sylvia addressing a public meeting (opposite), and their mother, Emmeline, under arrest (below).
Socialist leader (and Sylvia's secret lover) Keir Hardie speaks
against the coming war, Trafalgar Square, 1914.
Above: Royal cousins before the storm: Tsar Nicholas II (left) and Kaiser
Wilhelm II (right) on Wilhelm's yacht. Below: King George V and
Queen Mary in Delhi as Emperor and Empress of India.
Basil Thomson, Scotland
Yard spycatcher
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig
John Buchan: novelist, officer,
chief propagandist
Bertrand Russell: resisting the
"red blast of hate"
Friends who met similar fates: John Kipling (left), George Cecil.
The tight Royal Navy blockade cut off food and fertilizer
imports to Germany, hastening hundreds of thousands of
deaths. A woman faints in a Berlin food line.
III. 1915
10. THIS ISN'T WAR
SIR JOHN FRENCH still believed that some of his most "valuable" officers in France and Flanders were "county men of position and influence, accustomed to hunting, polo and field sports." But for others, the metaphor of war as sport was no longer convincing. At the beginning of 1915, if you were a British officerp eering into no man's land, what met your gaze resembled the cratered surface of the moon more than any fox-hunting meadow or polo field. The only horses in sight were dead ones. Even to safely look out of your trench you had to use a special set of binoculars whose lenses could be raised above the sandbag parapet like twin periscopes. Between you and the German front-line trench, which might be anywhere from 50 to several hundred yards away, was a desolate landscape filled with rusted tangles of barbed wire, mercilessly pitted and gouged by hundreds of shell bursts. Now, in winter, it would usually be covered with snow, and the rainwater that collected in shell craters would be frozen. On warmer days, your trench would thaw into a muddy morass. Better-off soldiers begged their families to send them rubber waders. Otherwise, you stood in the cold slime day after day until your feet swelled, went numb, and began to burn painfully as if touched by fire. This was the dreaded "trench foot," which sent men crawling or being carried to the rear by the thousands.
If you turned to face the back of your trench, you would see a protective wall almost as high as the parapet, because exploding shells were as likely to drop behind you as in front. At intervals along the back of the trench, you could see the beginning of a communication trench that snaked its way to the rear, so that troops moving to or from the front line would have some protection from bullets and shrapnel. If you looked to either side, you would not see far, for soldiers were already learning to build narrow trenches with right-angle turns every ten yards or so. These zigzags better contained the blast of a direct hit from an artillery or mortar round, while also preventing any German raiding party from taking control of a long stretch of trench with one well-placed machine gun. If you looked down, you might see the entrance to one of many dugouts carved into the side of the trench and reinforced with planks and beams. These underground spaces for crude sleeping quarters, command posts, or emergency first aid would be the size of a small room at best, filled with clammy air smelling of mud, sweat, and stale food. Worse, you might be sharing your trench not just with your fellow soldiers but with the dead. When the poet Edmund Blunden first arrived at his front-line post in Flanders it was night; only in the morning did he notice that "at some points in the trench, bones pierced through ... and skulls appeared like mushrooms." Later, Blunden came across "a pit, the result of much sandbag filling; among its broken spades and empty tins I found a pair of boots, still containing someone's feet."
By now it was clear to both sides that to defend yourself against attack you needed to dig ever deeper—or, when you couldn't dig more without hitting the water table, pile up sandbags. Each shell that hit a trench meant rebuilding with yet more of those sandbags, which were filled not with sand but with earth that oozed out in muddy rivulets when it rained. When the temperature dropped, waterlogged sandbags froze and burst. As 1915 began, Britain was shipping a quarter-million empty sandbags a month across the Channel; by May, the monthly total would rise to six million.
Because both ground water and freezing rain collected in your trench, a crude floor of boards might cover the deepest puddles and a pump would be going constantly. There were seldom enough pumps, and in the dreaded lower-lying areas, it felt as if you were living in a swamp. "Spent the morning trying to dry out our clothes," Corporal Alex Letyford of the Royal Engineers wrote in his diary on January 5, 1915. "We are all covered in mud from head to foot. At 6 P.M. I go with Captain Reed to the trenches and fix six pumps. Wading about in water to our waists until 2 A.M."
The sound of splashing, or the suck of a boot being pulled out of mud, or an inadvertent cry of rage when someone fell into a water hole often alerted the other side's snipers to troop movements. To the accompaniment of harmonicas, soldiers sang:
I've a little wet home in a trench,
Where the rainstorms continually drench,
There's a dead cow close by
With her feet towards the sky
And she gives off a horrible stench.
In addition to the stink of decomposing bodies, which grew worse with the spring thaw, another smell came to be indelibly associated
with the trenches: that of human waste. Many soldiers simply relieved themselves in the nearest shell hole. There were also pit latrines in small, specially built dead-end trenches, but if a shell struck one, it blasted the contents in all directions, leaving men covered with feces.
The barbed-wire moonscape of no man's land was no place for cavalry charges, which the German high command reluctantly recognized several months into the war, withdrawing cavalry units from the Western Front. But French optimistically kept masses of British horsemen on hand. The cavalry busied themselves with training and by staging competitions: the 12th Royal Lancers won several prizes at their Divisional Horse Show in early 1915, for example. Behind the lines, some officers pursued foxes and hares with hunting dogs they had brought to France. "This afternoon we went off to the hunt," one officer wrote to the Times. "Half a dozen couples of beagles and a good field went off after bunny at a fine pace, but, fortunately for bunny, there were plenty of wide ditches in this flat country, and she and all the rest got away scot free." After objections from infuriated local farmers the practice was banned, but some horse-loving officers continued to slip off for furtive hunts.
With thousands of impatient cavalrymen waiting in the wings, the generals were eager for the long-awaited breakthrough that would loose their horsemen into open country. The first British attempt of 1915 came at the French village of Neuve Chapelle, in the sector of the front under Haig's command. After the infantry smashed the German front line, British and Indian cavalry were to charge through. So went the plan, and French, who wore his spurs at headquarters, personally briefed the British officer commanding the Indian horsemen, a fellow Boer War veteran who, French wrote, "thinks he may be able to do some dashing cavalry work." On the damp, foggy morning of March 10, after a surprise artillery bombardment, the British unleashed an assault by some 40,000 British and Indian soldiers. Far outnumbering the Germans they faced, the infantry gained a mile or so of ground, at which point Haig ordered the cavalry forward to be ready to attack.