The crucial thing, in the eyes of the agents, was that the Wheeldon family had been sheltering young men fleeing the call-up—the "flying corps," as they were known. Some draft evaders were principled left-wingers, others simply very young and very scared. "Many comrades kept an open door for men on the run," remembered one radical who knew the family well. "In Derby, the house of Mrs. Wheeldon was a haven for anyone who was opposed to the war." At the start of 1917, the Wheeldons were keeping a young socialist in the house, who, Hettie wrote to her sister, "is terrified. Sticks in all day and only emerges at night." A frequent visitor who put a gleam in the secret agents' eyes was a suitor of Hettie's, a labor agitator working as a mechanic for the Cunard shipping line in Liverpool and using contacts with radical seamen and Irish nationalists to smuggle deserters and war resisters out of England.
To a spycatcher's mind, finding a pretext to arrest the entire household would be a coup indeed. The agents began monitoring the Wheeldon family's mail. The contents of one package that Alice sent to Winnie, who lived with her husband in Southampton, included, they carefully noted, four mince pies, two pairs of socks, and a stuffed chicken. Thanks to the closely watched correspondence, we have a touchingly detailed portrait of life inside this beleaguered family, ranging from everyday human concerns (Winnie wrote to her mother fretting that her menstrual period was late) to what they read, which included socialist newspapers, the NCF's Tribunal, and George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession. Even in wartime, life for committed socialists was a life of constant reading.*
One day a Ministry of Munitions secret agent using the name of Alex Gordon turned up at the Wheeldon house claiming to be a "conchie," or conscientious objector, on the run. Ever trusting, Alice put him up for the night and confided in him her worries about the dangers facing her fugitive son. She was trying to arrange covert passage out of the country, she said, for Willie, another draft evader, and Winnie's husband, who also feared being called up. Delighted, Gordon swiftly brought in his immediate superior, Herbert Booth, introducing him as "Comrade Bert," supposedly an army deserter. Although Hettie was suspicious, Alice seems to have believed both men, who then sprang their trap.
On January 30, 1917, Alice, her daughters Hettie and Winnie, and Winnie's husband, Alf Mason, were all arrested, Winnie and Hettie at the schools where they taught. Hettie's astonished pupils watched from a classroom window as plainclothesmen in bowler hats took their teacher away. The family had always known they ran a risk for helping antiwar fugitives, but the charge now made against them left them astounded. It was that all four "did amongst themselves unlawfully and wickedly conspire, confederate and agree together ... willfully and of their malice aforethought to kill and murder." And whom were they accused of conspiring to murder? Headlines on both sides of the Atlantic screamed the shocking news: their targets were Arthur Henderson, a member of the War Cabinet, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
For a government eager to disgrace the antiwar movement, there could be no more dramatic charge. The country's attorney general himself went all the way to Derby to lay out the case against the accused at a preliminary hearing. Stunned, the four family members waited in jail for their trial to begin.
The same month the Wheeldons were arrested, the passenger liner Kildonan Castle, in better days a luxury steamer on the run to Cape Town, quietly slipped out of the Scottish port of Oban, escorted by a Royal Navy destroyer. No announcement was made in the press. On board the ship was a high-ranking delegation of British, French, and Italian military and civilian officials, 51 strong. Heading the British contingent, on his first overseas assignment since joining the War Cabinet, was Alfred Milner.
The delegation was on its way to Russia. That country had so far suffered a staggering six million war casualties, Milner estimated. Its huge, clumsy army had been repeatedly and embarrassingly beaten by far smaller numbers of German troops, who now held a wide swath of Russian territory, its grain, coal, iron, and other riches feeding the German war effort. British and French leaders were increasingly exasperated by the sluggishness of their ally. What could be done?
Running a gauntlet of German submarines, Allied ships had been delivering large amounts of equipment and supplies to Russia's Arctic Ocean ports. In two years, for instance, Britain had sold Russia 2.5 million rounds of ammunition, a million rifles, 27,000 machine guns, 8 million hand grenades, and almost 1,000 fighter planes or aircraft engines. But British military attachés saw few signs of any of these actually reaching Russia's armies in the field. Why? It was difficult to get information out of the secretive authorities, yet Russian envoys kept asking for more supplies, as well as huge loans to cover their cost. What could really be expected from Russia as a partner in the war? This group of notables was on a mission to find out.
As the ship and its escort skirted the northern edge of the European continent, lookouts watched constantly for German U-boats. All on board knew that no one could survive more than a few minutes in these icy waters. The first shock for the Allied delegation only came, however, when the Kildonan Castle arrived at Port Romanov, today's Murmansk, the single ice-free port in the Russian Arctic. Thousands of boxes of British and French munitions lay piled up on the town's docks and in vacant lots. Crates of dismantled Sopwith and Nieuport fighter planes, awaiting reassembly, sat covered with snow. While ships were delivering a daily average of 1,500 tons of supplies, it turned out that the rail line leaving the port, hobbled by equipment shortages and official corruption, could carry away only 200 tons a day.
The delegation had to take that same line to the imperial capital. Traffic crept so slowly that even this VIP train of cabinet ministers and generals, met midway by special emissaries from Tsar Nicholas II, took three days and nights to huff and wheeze the 700 miles to the city now called Petrograd. (In a fit of patriotism, Russia had rid itself of the German-sounding "St. Petersburg.") At the royal palace in Tsarskoe Selo, outside the city, escorted by court officers in full dress uniforms, the Allied delegation was presented to the Tsar. Milner delivered several letters from the Tsar's cousin King George V and two days later talked with him privately for nearly two hours. After a lunch that included the Tsarina and several of their children, Milner told his friend General Henry Wilson, the senior British military official in the delegation, that the imperial couple, "although very pleasant," had "made it quite clear that they would not tolerate any discussion of Russian internal politics."
An endless succession of silver-plate banquets, gala receptions, opera performances, and medal-awarding ceremonies exasperated the always efficient Milner. At one event, an observer noticed that he "kept throwing himself back in his chair and groaned audibly," muttering "We are wasting time!" To his dismay, toasts and long-winded speeches about friendship between the two great allies stretched one Anglo-Russian luncheon into an agonizing five hours. Some of the other delegates, however, thoroughly enjoyed themselves.*
Milner felt he got straight talk only when he met some reform-minded officials in Moscow, who spoke frankly of Russia's precarious state. Wilson, meanwhile, made a quick visit to the front lines, where he learned that, after two and a half years of war, Russian soldiers still did not have wire cutters. Expected to tear down German barbed wire entanglements by hand, some asked him whether British troops did the same. While the delegation was in Moscow, bread riots broke out in the streets. Inflation was out of control, and the government was printing new banknotes so fast they did not even have serial numbers.
So great was their fear of German spies gathering information from Russia's eminently bribable officialdom that, on their departure for home, the Allied delegates left Petrograd in the middle of the night, each person sacrificing a pair of shoes. These were left outside their hotel room doors to be polished, as if they expected to be in their rooms the next morning, rather than heading for their ship. After another slow-motion train journey, Milner sailed for England plunged into gloom. On the streets of the Petrograd he had left behind, ther
e was an antiwar demonstration, and the British military attaché estimated that a full million Russian soldiers had deserted the army, most slipping quietly back to their villages.
Once home, however, in a most uncharacteristic burst of wishful thinking, Milner told the War Cabinet that "there is a great deal of exaggeration in the talk of revolution and especially about the alleged disloyalty of the army." Despite the railway bottleneck he had seen, he urged his colleagues to do all they could to bolster Russia with more military aid, perhaps accompanied by Allied technicians who could make sure the supplies reached the front and were used. He saw no alternative. An inept ally in the east was better than none, and if the Tsar's army did not have the weapons to keep on fighting the Germans, he reasoned, the danger of revolution would be far greater. "If an upheaval were to take place," he wrote, "its effect on the course of the war might be disastrous."
17. THE WORLD IS MY COUNTRY
BY NOW THE WAR had become the most deadly catastrophe to strike Europe since the pandemic of the fourteenth century, the Black Death. "I did not write the truth to you before," an Indian soldier named Bhagail Singh told his family from the Western Front in January 1917, his words copied by censors monitoring the troops' morale. "Now I write the truth.... Consider us as having died today or tomorrow. There is absolutely no hope of our ever returning.... None will survive. I pass both day and night in lamentation." The next month another Indian wrote: "We are like goats tied to the butcher's stake.... There is no hope of escape."
Unlike the bubonic plague, of course, the cataclysm ravaging the continent was entirely man-made—and the organized opposition remained small. Although deserting soldiers in Russia were voting against the war with their feet, more open protest there was dangerous, and dissenters in most other countries were dealt with no less harshly. Even had there been more freedom for protesters, however, there might not have been many more protests. The war had everywhere unleashed powerful national chauvinism, witch-hunts for traitors, and public fury at any apparent lack of resolve to fight.
Only in Britain was there the political space for a substantial antiwar movement, and yet in early March 1917, just after Milner returned from Russia, several of its members were about to become the subjects of the war's first big show trial. The attorney general, F. E. Smith, had already announced that he would prosecute the Wheeldon case personally. A blood-and-thunder right-winger, Smith was known for his love of brandy and cigars, his wit and his snobbery. A trade union leader newly elected to the House of Commons, who had not learned his way around, once asked him the way to the men's room. "Down the corridor, first right, first left and down the stairs," Smith told him. "You'll see a door marked 'Gentlemen,' but don't let that deter you."
Smith used his influence to get the trial moved from Derby to London, a better place for a public shaming designed to intimidate antiwar forces. "The persons in this case," he declared, "are a very desperate and dangerous body of people ... bitterly hostile to this country, shelterers of fugitives from the Army, and persons who do their best to injure Great Britain in the crisis in which this country finds itself to-day."
Meanwhile, young Willie Wheeldon, on the run as a draft dodger, was captured at Southampton. The public was riveted, making the case a boon for tabloid newspaper sales: eight photographs and a banner headline, "The Lloyd George Murder Plot," filled the front page of the Daily Sketch. In other newspapers, Alice Wheeldon and her two daughters were shown in their long prison dresses, under the eye of a warder in the jail where they were awaiting trial. From their cells, the three women could hear regular reminders of the war: the firing of guns at a nearby artillery officers' academy. "I think this is only one of the convulsive death rattles of Capitalism," Hettie Wheeldon wrote to a friend about the ordeal they were going through. Her mother also wrote from jail, ending one letter: "Yes, we will keep agoing as you said and will break before we bend. So long, comrade, keep the flag flying ... we will meet again." Then, beneath her signature, she added her defiance of the patriotic mania in the air: "The world is my country."
The trial took place at the Old Bailey, the columned stone courthouse topped with a no less imposing tower and dome. In the packed courtroom, reporters rubbed elbows with society figures and antiwar activists. The gist of the government's case against the Wheeldons was summed up by the attorney general: from Winnie's husband, Alf Mason, an assistant in a chemistry lab, Alice had obtained two vials of strychnine and two of curare, wrapped in cotton wool and packed in a tin box. Secret agent Herbert Booth then took the stand, testifying that Alice had told him and his colleague Alex Gordon that Lloyd George played golf on Saturday afternoons, so it would be easy for someone to hide behind a bush on the golf course and, like South American Indian hunters, to use a blowpipe to shoot him with a poison-tipped dart.
The evidence for this unlikely assassination plot was, to say the least, thin. Aside from displaying the package of poison, the prosecution relied mainly on Booth's word, even though he had spent much less time in the Wheeldon household than his subordinate Gordon. Attempting to shock the jury, the prosecution pointed out that in one letter Winnie had called Lloyd George "that damned buggering Welsh sod." F. E. Smith was a dazzling courtroom orator, and the denunciations, sinister hints, and references to Britain's hour of danger offered up by him and three assistant prosecutors overwhelmed jury and judge. Several times, the judge praised the prosecutors, and joined them in questioning witnesses. Alice proudly affirmed that the family had indeed helped men fleeing the draft. From her defiant denials and her unwillingness to plead for mercy, it was clear that she and her "co-conspirators" knew they had little chance of persuading the jury of their innocence. During a preliminary hearing, Hettie Wheeldon had conspicuously read a newspaper, as if to indicate that there was no point in paying attention to such a farce. During the trial itself the judge admonished the prisoners for showing "levity." But when responding on the witness stand to a question about her son, who had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for evading the call-up, Alice, whom one newspaper described as "haggard and pale," acted with anything but levity. She wept.
Although what little incriminating evidence there was appeared to come mainly from the first agent to worm his way into the Wheeldon house, Alex Gordon, Smith announced "that for reasons which seem to me good I shall not call this witness before the Court." In vain did the Wheeldons insist that it was the mysterious Gordon who had requested poisons they had obtained for him. He had, they declared, promised help in getting Alice's son and other draft evaders out of the country—but he claimed that to do so he needed to poison some dogs guarding an internment camp where COs were being held. In vain did the Wheeldons' otherwise inept lawyer ask, Why did the prosecution choose not to call its key witness? He himself wanted to question Gordon, he said later, but prosecutors would not reveal the man's whereabouts.
The trial lasted less than a week. At the end, the judge made clear what verdict he expected, calling poisoning "the most dangerous and dastardly of all conspiracies." After a grueling ten-hour Saturday session of testimony and concluding arguments, he asked the jury to start deliberating immediately. They conferred for a mere half hour. Hettie Wheeldon was declared not guilty, but her mother was found guilty of conspiracy, soliciting and proposing to murder. For their role in supplying the poison, Winnie and Alf Mason were found guilty of conspiracy. Because of their youth—Alf was 24 and Winnie 23—the jury recommended mercy.
But the judge had no interest in mercy, and without delay he sentenced Alice Wheeldon to ten years' hard labor, Alf Mason to seven years, and Winnie, whom he declared under the "bad and wicked influence of your mother," to five. Alice took her sentence stoically. Guards led the prisoners away. In a final statement to the courtroom, the judge virtually condemned universal education. He was shocked, he said, that the two Wheeldon daughters were schoolteachers, yet had spoken of the prime minister in "language which would be foul indeed in the mouth of the lowest hooligan.... It is difficult
to imagine that education is the blessing we had hoped."
As the proceedings were about to end, something occurred that would have been unheard of in any normal criminal trial. A person with no relation to the case entered the witness box and spoke to the courtroom. The judge not only gave his approval, but asked newspaper reporters present to "take note." The speaker, as elegantly dressed and well spoken as ever, was Emmeline Pankhurst.
She was there because the Wheeldon women had once been members of her Women's Social and Political Union, and now, as a loyal patriot, she was eager to dissociate herself and the WSPU from them. "My Lord," she said to the judge, "since the name of Mr. Lloyd George has been mentioned in connection with us, I want to say that at this present moment, in this crisis of our country's fortunes there is no life which we think more essential to the safety of our country than that of the Prime Minister. We feel that so strongly, that we would even endanger our own, if it were necessary, to safeguard his. And I want too, for the honour of women ... to say the opinions of the prisoners, their actions, their mode of expressing themselves, are abhorrent to us that have devoted ourselves since the commencement of this War to patriotic work."