A mere four years before, Lloyd George had so enraged WSPU suffragettes by his opposition to votes for women that they planted a bomb in the house he was having built. "We have tried blowing him up to wake his conscience," Emmeline Pankhurst said proudly at the time. For endorsing that crime, Pankhurst had been awarded a three-year prison sentence in this very courthouse. Now the past was conveniently forgotten. And she would do a far greater favor for the prime minister, on a mission abroad, in the months to come.
After the Wheeldon trial, those on the right spoke in horror of a murder plot emanating from a sinister nexus of socialists and draft dodgers. Many on the left, however, were convinced that Booth and Gordon had framed the Wheeldons. To some war supporters, too, the conspiracy sounded less plausible than the plot of the latest John Buchan novel, and several MPs asked embarrassingly pointed questions in Parliament. Like the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the United States, the Wheeldon affair has continued to stir strong emotions ever since.* And it raises a question: Why, in the midst of a terrible war, did the British government devote so much effort to prosecuting this unlucky family on such far-fetched charges?
Intimidating the antiwar movement was, of course, the main motive, but a wide array of personal ambitions were also involved. Attorney General Smith, a holdover from the Asquith government, leapt at the chance to prove his loyalty by personally prosecuting the case against the new prime minister's alleged would-be murderers. Intense rivalry among proliferating counterintelligence agencies further inflamed matters. The military, Basil Thomson at Scotland Yard, and the Ministry of Munitions spy unit were all engaged in a fierce turf war—and an investigation that won a dramatic conviction in court would be a boon. Within the Ministry of Munitions unit itself, in the weeks before he ingratiated himself with the Wheeldons, Alex Gordon felt his job was at risk, for he had slipped up badly on a previous assignment. From Manchester, he had reported that all was calm, only to see the city's trolley car drivers promptly go out on strike. The Wheeldon case offered a chance for him to make up for his mistake and regain favor.
Meanwhile, the ambitious Thomson found himself in an ambiguous position. If there was a murder plot against the prime minister, he wanted credit for foiling it. But he was equally eager to show that the Ministry of Munitions spycatchers who nabbed the culprits were an unreliable bunch, no match for his Scotland Yard professionals who deserved to take over their work. (Soon after the Wheeldon trial, they did.) In one of several self-aggrandizing memoirs he wrote after the war, Thomson managed to make both claims, while hinting that the idea of the "poison plot" originated with Alex Gordon. Describing the agent as "a thin, cunning-looking man of about thirty, with long, greasy black hair," he added, "I had an uneasy feeling that he himself might have acted as what the French call an agent provocateur."
Thomson was right. If not for wartime paranoia, the prosecution's story of a plan to kill the prime minister with a blowpipe and dart would have been quickly discredited because the key witness who claimed to have first heard it, Gordon, never testified. Little wonder, because he was a prosecutor's nightmare. Only after the arrest of the Wheeldons, it appears, did the prosecution team learn that Gordon was not his real name, that he had a police record, and that he had once been found criminally insane.
His subsequent short career as a spy revealed him as an unabashed agent provocateur who relished the role. The very day Mason and the Wheeldons were sentenced, an alarmed intelligence operative informed Milner and other top officials that "Gordon went to Leicester and Coventry and offered poison and bombs to the A.S.E. [a labor union] man there." More reports of this sort kept coming in. Clearly, if Gordon continued traveling around Britain offering people poison, sooner or later he would be exposed, humiliatingly unraveling the case against the Wheeldons. The authorities swiftly found a solution: Gordon was put on board a ship at Plymouth with £100 and a one-way ticket to Cape Town.
The Wheeldons' friend and political comrade, the former lion tamer John S. Clarke, liked to write inscriptions for the tombstones of his political enemies even while they were still alive. His "Epitaph on Alex Gordon," published in the newspaper he continued to edit in hiding, the Socialist, became a favorite recital piece at labor gatherings:
Stop! stranger, thou art near the spot
Marked by this cross metallic,
Where buried deep doth lie and rot,
The corpse of filthy Alex.
And maggot-worms in swarms below,
Compete with one another,
In shedding tears of bitter woe,
To mourn—not eat—a brother.
Less than a week after the Wheeldons were sentenced, the known world turned upside down.
"During the afternoon of March 13, 1917," Winston Churchill would later remember, "the Russian Embassy in London informed us that they were no longer in contact with Petrograd. For some days the capital had been a prey to disorders.... Now suddenly ... there was a silence.... The great Power with whom we had been in such intimate comradeship, without whom all plans were meaningless, was stricken dumb. With Russian effective aid, all the Allied fronts could attack together. Without that aid it might well be that the War was lost."
Within days of Milner and his delegation's leaving the Russian capital, demonstrators began marching in the snowy streets, protesting against the endless war and shortages of food and fuel. They shouted revolutionary slogans, broke shop windows, and sang "The Internationale." And that was only the beginning. The marchers' ranks were soon strengthened by some of the 200,000 munitions workers who now went out on strike. Bitter fighting broke out on barricaded, freezing boulevards, and the Tsar's government lost control of the city. A unit of troops mutinied, killing their commanding officer, and put themselves and their rifles at the service of the rebels. The rest of the capital garrison, ordered to suppress the mutineers, instead joined them, rampaging into government buildings and camping defiantly in palace ballrooms. An armored car rolled through the city with FREEDOM! chalked on its side. Crews of Russian naval vessels in the harbor mutinied as well.
It was the kind of upheaval in the ranks that every general in this war had always dreaded. By March 17 the Tsar had been forced to abdicate, a new Provisional Government was in power, and a few days later, at the palace where Milner had visited them the previous month, Tsar Nicholas II and his family were placed under house arrest. Petrograd's main prison and the secret police archive were set ablaze. Across the vast country, jubilant soldiers and civilians began ripping down flags and smashing statues and plaques with the double-headed eagle emblem of the Romanov dynasty. More than 300 years of Romanov rule were suddenly history.
The Germans were delighted, while the dismayed Allies took cold comfort when Russia's Provisional Government, under strong pressure from them, announced it would remain in the war. That promise meant little, however, for the very municipal government of Petrograd—in a process repeated in some other cities—came under the control of a much more radical soviet, or council, which began issuing its own orders to the army. Among them, men in all military units were to elect their own soviets, a dramatic break in the centuries-old chain of command. The already high rate of desertion only increased, sailors lynched dozens of naval officers, and on March 27, 1917, the Petrograd Soviet declared that the peoples of Europe should "take into their own hands the decision of the question of war and peace." It urged the workers of Germany and Austria-Hungary to join their Russian comrades in refusing to fight in the war of "kings, landowners, and bankers." A Russian War Ministry official confessed to the British military attaché that army discipline was collapsing: when replacement troops were sent forward, so many deserted that less than one man in four reached the front. The army was still fighting, but at this rate, how long would that last?
Radical opponents of the war across the continent were thrilled with the news from Petrograd. "The wonderful events in Russia," wrote Rosa Luxemburg from the German prison cell where her antiwar protests had landed her, "affe
ct me like an elixir.... I am absolutely certain that a new epoch is starting now and that the war cannot last much longer." The conscientious objectors serving time in London's Wormwood Scrubs were delighted that as one of its first acts, the Provisional Government had granted amnesty to all political prisoners—including more than 800 war resisters in Russian jails.
Emrys Hughes, the future husband of Keir Hardie's daughter, was in prison in Wales when another CO furtively handed him a newspaper page wrapped in a handkerchief; he turned his back to the peephole in his cell door and read the electrifying news: "The old order was dead, a new society was being born ... the end of the war was in sight." Bertrand Russell hailed the upheaval in Russia as "a stupendous event ... more cheering than anything that has happened since the war began." As March ended, nearly 12,000 Londoners packed a rally in the Royal Albert Hall to show their support for the Russians who had overthrown the Tsar; 5,000 more were turned away at the door. It was the first time in over a year that a dissident public meeting in the city had not been broken up by patriot gangs. "I longed to shout at them at the end to come with me and pull down Wormwood Scrubs," wrote Russell. "They would have done it.... A meeting of the kind would have been utterly impossible a month ago."
"I remember the miners," the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan recalled years later, "when they heard that the Tsarist tyranny had been overthrown, rushing to meet each other in the streets with tears streaming down their cheeks, shaking hands." May Day gatherings brought more celebrations: a crowd one left-wing newspaper claimed at 70,000 in Glasgow, a big peace march in London, and a rally in Liverpool that featured actual Russians: 150 bewildered sailors who happened to be in port and found themselves greeted as heroes. In Manchester, the head of the transport workers' union declared, "Revolutions like charity begin at home."
France saw strikes and the largest May Day demonstrations of the war years, with red flags flying and speakers calling for peace. An American correspondent on the Eastern Front watched through his field glasses as Russian and German enlisted men met in no man's land to communicate in sign language: the Russians blowing across their open palms to show that the Tsar had been blown away, the Germans thrusting their bayonets into the earth. Could this finally be the moment that Hardie had hoped for so fervently, when soldiers on both sides refused to continue killing each other? Sylvia Pankhurst jubilantly called the change in Russia "the first ray of dawn, after a long and painful night."
At sea, as on land, nothing was going well for the Allies. Germany's ramped-up U-boat war had severely disrupted the vital transatlantic lifeline and sowed fear among sailors and passengers. For them, the danger of being sunk by a torpedo was magnified by the fact that the explosion could crack a ship's engine room boilers, releasing below decks a high-pressure blast of scalding steam. An officer on a merchant ship taking supplies to Russia reported that some officials he was carrying stayed on deck, near the lifeboats, for most of the voyage. The area just southwest of Ireland, crossed by ships approaching most major English and Irish ports, became what Churchill called "a veritable cemetery of British shipping."
Once a submarine had shown its location by firing a torpedo, a Royal Navy ship could attack it by dropping depth charges—explosives set to go off underwater, at the level the submarine was thought to be. But seldom was a warship close by, for it was impossible for them to escort each of the thousands of cargo vessels crossing the Atlantic. Few U-boats were sunk and, ominously, the Germans were increasing the size of their submarine fleet. Senior Admiralty officers had long resisted one possible solution: sending merchant ships in convoys, guarded by a screen of destroyers or other small warships. Convoys were cumbersome, limited to the speed of the slowest ship, and ports became clogged when dozens of ships arrived together. The navy chiefs, writes war historian Trevor Wilson, "were imbued with a proud tradition, according to which going hunting for the enemy seemed a proper course and chugging along in support of merchantmen did not." The navy preferred to be, as it were, cavalrymen of the sea. But wiser heads eventually prevailed. Milner, now wielding unprecedented powers supervising Britain's entire war economy, was acutely aware of its depen dence on shipping and helped persuade Lloyd George to adopt the convoy system. On May 10, 1917, 17 merchant vessels and their naval escorts set off for England from Gibraltar, and, at a time when more than 300 ships a month were being torpedoed, not a single ship in the convoy was sunk.
Convoys made life far more difficult for U-boats, for if one did torpedo a cargo ship, fast destroyers with the convoy could rush to the scene to drop depth charges. And with electric engines limiting their underwater travel to a mere eight knots, less than a quarter of a destroyer's speed, submarines had trouble getting away. Before the year was over, more than half of Britain's overseas trade would be carried by ships in convoy. U-boat "kills" dropped dramatically. The submarine, though still much feared, was not going to win the war. Germany's great gamble at sea had failed.
The German high command had long known that unrestricted U-boat warfare would risk bringing the United States into the war. And so it did—but far sooner than the Germans had planned for. In March, the American press trumpeted news of the notorious "Zimmermann Telegram," gleefully decoded and given to Washington by British intelligence, in which Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, foolishly tried to induce Mexico to join the war on the German side by promising it Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Soon after, U-boats sank three American merchant ships, drowning many sailors and prompting an outcry in Congress and the press. On April 7, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. Even though everyone knew it would take nearly a year before significant numbers of American troops could be trained and reach Europe's battlefields, the boost in morale to Britain, France, and Italy was incalculable. In addition, the large fleet of American destroyers quickly joined British warships in escorting convoys. For the first time in its history, the United States was committing itself to waging large-scale land warfare on the continent of Europe. The world's balance of power would never be the same again.
On the heels of its failed U-boat warfare bet, the Germans made an even riskier gamble. Although Russia's armies were in a state of near collapse, the Central Powers still had to keep more than a million soldiers on the long Eastern Front. If, however, Russia fully imploded in revolution and ceased to fight, the German high command could move most of those troops to France and Belgium, launch a decisive offensive to capture Paris, and send the Allied armies reeling before the Americans could arrive in force. The Germans needed, therefore, to ignite further upheaval in Russia.
From the beginning of the war, German agents had been in touch with the most extreme group of dedicated Russian revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, many of whose leaders were in exile in Switzerland. The Bolsheviks wanted to overthrow capitalism and militarism everywhere, including Germany. But what mattered more to Berlin was that these Russians were determined to take their country out of the war. The Bolsheviks were hamstrung, however, because their exiled leadership was cut off from sympathizers at home. The faction's dominant figure, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, was living with his wife in a single rented room in a shabby working-class apartment in Zurich, next to a sausage factory. He spent part of each day at the public library, researching and writing acerbic articles and pamphlets attacking rivals on the left and predicting the imminent demise of capitalism, but, more than a thousand miles away from his followers, was in no position to seize power.
In early April 1917 the German government provided what later became famous as the "sealed train" to the Bolshevik leadership. It carried them across Germany, from the Swiss border to the Baltic Sea, where they could embark for Petrograd and make their revolution. The 32 Russians in threadbare clothes who took the journey would, within a mere six months, leapfrog from penniless exile to the very pinnacle of political power in a vast realm that stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific.
As the train steamed through the night, it carried, as escorts to the re
volutionaries, two German officers—one of whom spoke fluent Russian but was under orders to conceal it, all the better to report overheard conversations back to Berlin. The exuberant passengers sang leftist songs, but when the train pulled into Mannheim, one of the German officers angrily demanded that they be quiet. At Frankfurt, some German soldiers on the station platform heard that the train was full of Russian revolutionaries and rushed up to talk. Although their commanders ordered them away, the encounter left the Russians optimistic that Germany, the industrial titan of the continent, was as ripe for revolution as their own backward peasant land.
For most of the journey Lenin stood by a train window, thumbs in the armholes of his vest. One thing above all struck him about the fields and villages the train rolled through: there were no young men. They were all at the front.
The escort officers handed out sandwiches and beer; Lenin's wife brewed tea for all on a portable kerosene burner. Finally the train reached the Baltic, where the Bolsheviks boarded a ferry and then traveled on through Sweden and Finland to Russia, where party organizers assembled a huge crowd to greet them at Petrograd's Finland Station. In a country ravaged by war and now throwing off centuries of autocracy, the party's message of "peace, land, and bread" had immediate, powerful resonance. And on a war-weary continent it could be highly contagious. In Churchill's words, Germany had sent Lenin on his way to Russia "like a plague bacillus." It remained to be seen how fast the bacillus would multiply.
What Churchill saw as a bacillus, Britain's war resisters saw as their deliverance. Few of them cared about the differences among various left-wing factions in Russia; they simply hoped, above all, that if popular pressure would at last force one country to completely stop fighti ng, others would follow.