Up until now, those who questioned whether the war was worth the human cost had almost all come from the left end of the political spectrum. But as 1917 approached its close, such a voice unexpectedly rang out from the highest reaches of the country's hierarchy. Lord Lansdowne, a great landowner, former viceroy of India and secretary for war, had as foreign secretary years earlier forged the understanding with France that virtually ensured Britain's participation in the war. Early in the fighting he had lost a son. His doubts about battling to an unconditional victory began after the Somme. Very much a man of his class, he was particularly appalled by the number of British officers slain. "We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands...," he had written to Asquith, then prime minister. "Generations will have to come and go before the country recovers from the loss."
His misgivings only grew, and Passchendaele made him decide to go public. After the shocked Times refused to publish it, an open letter from him appeared in the Daily Telegraph on November 29, 1917. "We are not going to lose this War," Lansdowne wrote, "but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it." He prophetically sensed something about the future the great conflict was leading to: "Just as this war has been more dreadful than any war in history, so, we may be sure, would the next war be even more dreadful than this. The prostitution of science for purposes of pure destruction is not likely to stop short." He then laid out some proposals for a negotiated peace, including future compulsory arbitration of international disputes. Lansdowne was privy to government intelligence reports that many influential Germans and Austrians favored negotiations. He believed that Lloyd George's rhetoric about a "knock-out blow" only provided ammunition to German die-hards determined to fight to the bitter end. The Allies should strengthen the hand of "the peace party in Germany," he wrote, by offering assurances that they "do not desire the annihilation of Germany as a Great Power."
Attacked by many former colleagues and by right-wing patriots, Lansdowne was, to his bewilderment, greeted with great warmth by the socialists whom he had always found an anathema. Bertrand Russell praised his courage and, noting the fury toward Lansdowne in the mainstream press, wryly remarked, "Before long, it will probably be discovered that his great aunt was born in Kiel, or that his grandfather was an admirer of Goethe." Kipling thought Lansdowne an "old imbecile" who had taken such a cowardly position only because some woman must have "worked upon" him.
In their confidential reports on the public mood, undercover intelligence agents began speaking darkly of "Lansdownism." Many soldiers, however, wrote to Lansdowne congratulating him on his bravery. But he represented no mass of followers and sparked no new peace movement. Indeed, not long after his letter appeared, Britain and France issued a hard-line declaration explicitly shutting the door on any negotiations, something that decisively undermined moderates hoping to gain influence in Germany. And by now there was another barrier to any chance of a compromise peace: the British and French governments were counting on the millions of fresh troops promised by the United States to at last bring about an Allied victory.
Margaret Hobhouse, still campaigning for the release of her son, managed to get 26 bishops and more than 200 other clergymen to sign a statement arguing for more lenient treatment of COs. With Milner pulling strings behind the scenes, in December 1917 some 300 of the more than 1,300 COs in prison were ordered released on grounds of ill health. Stephen Hobhouse accepted his freedom, knowing it was not for him alone. Opposition to the mass release was quelled when it was agreed that Parliament would be asked to disenfranchise, for five years, conscientious objectors who had gone to jail. Milner seems to have deftly engineered this particular bargain, getting his former Kindergarten member who was editor of the Times to produce an editorial on the subject at the right moment.
The Hobhouses were a family in which, Stephen wrote, "differences of outlook were put aside." (And yet, he added, "my father could never quite forget the disgrace that his eldest son had brought upon himself.") His two brothers in the army were both home on leave, and they, Stephen, and his wife spent Christmas together in their parents' house. Paul Hobhouse, although recovered from his wounds, seemed to feel some foreboding. "I thought P. changed in tone—had lost his buoyancy," wrote a relative who saw him just before he departed for the front, "...and was more grave and silent."
Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, the Christmas season of 1917 saw a landmark in the war. To negotiate an end to hostilities between Russia and the Central Powers, a Bolshevik delegation passed through the Eastern Front under a white flag, near the ancient riverside city of Brest-Litovsk, in Russian territory now occupied by the Germans. Awaiting them in the city's sprawling red-brick fortress was a group of generals in dress-uniform spiked helmets and other officials prepared to negotiate for Germany and its allies. The Bolsheviks ushered into the fortress were unlike any other group of diplomats and negotiators in European history. The Germans and Austrians, the upper reaches of whose diplomatic services were the almost exclusive preserve of the aristocracy, were hard put to contain their astonishment.
Facing the foreign ministers of the two countries across the long negotiating table was a Bolshevik delegation headed by a bearded Jewish intellectual. Educated as a doctor, Adolph Joffe had spent part of his life in exile and, in Vienna, had undergone Freudian psychoanalysis. Another Jew high in the revolutionary movement, Lev Kamenev, was his chief associate. And to even more dramatically show the world that this was not diplomacy as usual, the remainder of the Bolshevik delegation included a worker, a soldier, a sailor, a peasant, and a woman, Anastasia Bitsenko, who had spent 17 years in Siberia for assassinating the Tsar's former minister of war. The elderly peasant, Roman Stashkov, had been included at the very last minute. Joffe and Kamenev, driving to the Petrograd railway station, had suddenly realized that, for political reasons, their delegation had to include a representative of the class that constituted the vast majority of Russia's people. They noticed the unmistakably peasant-like Stashkov walking along the street, stopped their car, found that he belonged to a left-wing party, and invited him along. The bewildered Stashkov, his enormous gray beard untrimmed, sat through the meetings at Brest-Litovsk beneath glittering chandeliers, but could not rid himself of the habit of addressing his fellow delegates, in the prerevolutionary manner, as barin, or master.
On December 15, 1917, the two delegations announced an armistice. The war between the Central Powers and Russia, which had left millions of dead and wounded and tens of thousands of square miles of devastated land, was over. The news reverberated around the world.
Russia and its former enemies immediately began protracted negotiations toward a permanent peace treaty. Hoping to speed the process along, the Germans gave a banquet, one of the more unusual on record. While the diplomats wore their high-collared formal attire and the chests of the German and Austrian generals glittered with medals, the Russian worker delegate, in everyday clothes, used his fork as a toothpick. The bearded old peasant Stashkov, unfamiliar with wine, asked which was stronger, the red or the white—and then proceeded to get cheerfully drunk. The Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, kept a close eye on Bitsenko, the assassin. "All that is taking place around her here she seems to regard with indifference," he observed. "Only when mention is made of the great principle of the International Revolution does she suddenly awake, her whole expression alters; she reminds one of a beast of prey seeing its victim at hand and preparing to fall upon it and rend it."
The Germans and Austrians had no doubt they were the prey, but were polite conversationalists nonetheless. The mild-mannered Joffe sat between Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria, the German commander in chief on the Eastern Front, and Count Czernin, who found his tone "kindly." To Czernin, Joffe said, "I hope we may be able to raise the revolution in your country too." If the entire war did not end soon, Czernin n
oted wryly in his diary that night, "we shall hardly need any assistance from the good Joffe, I fancy, in bringing about a revolution among ourselves; the people will manage that."
VI. 1918
20. BACKS TO THE WALL
IF OBSERVERS ON another planet had been able to look closely at the Earth at the start of 1918, they might have been struck not only by the unusual propensity of its inhabitants to kill one another, but by their willingness to travel huge distances to do so. Never had so many people gone so far to make war. Under British command on the Western Front were troops from Canada, South Africa, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, and India—which alone would send nearly a million soldiers overseas to various fronts by the end of the war. Canadian Private John Kerr, who would later win the Victoria Cross, had walked 50 miles from his Alberta farm to enlist; to join a unit fighting in Africa, Arthur Darville Dudley, a British settler in Northern Rhodesia, rode 200 miles by bicycle on dirt roads and paths through the bush. Soldiers from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands found themselves fighting in both East and West Africa as well as in towns in Palestine whose names they knew from the Bible. To help protect Allied shipping in the Mediterranean came a naval squadron from Japan. British troops from Wiltshire and Devon were fighti ng soldiers from Bulgaria—an ally of Germany—in Greece. Later in the year, Africans from the French colony of Senegal would fight alongside soldiers from Serbia. From Egypt, the British brought some 80,000 men to work on the docks at Marseille and elsewhere in Europe. More than 90,000 Chinese did construction work for British forces in France or unloaded supplies at the ports. Other military laborers came from Fiji in the Pacific, Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the mountains of Basutoland in southern Africa, and the French colonies of Vietnam and Laos. Living quarters for African and Asian laborers behind the Western Front were almost always in fenced-off compounds, an attempt—not entirely successful—to prevent any mixing that might give rise to ideas about equality.
The troops on three continents fought not just in steel helmets but in fezzes, turbans, kepis, and tropical pith helmets. Guns and supplies were hauled into battle by oxen, horses, mules, and trucks in France, by camels in the Middle East, and everywhere by exhausted men. Soldiers succumbed to malaria and sleeping sickness in Africa and to frostbite in the Alps, where the Italians fought from fortifications hacked out of snow and ice. On both sides, the colossal cost of the war was measured not only in human life: British war-related spending had by 1918 reached 70 percent of the gross national product—triple what it had been at the height of battling Napoleon, and higher than it would be in the Second World War. Only huge loans made this possible, and taxpayers in the warring countries would bear the burden for years to come as these were repaid; Britain's national debt, for example, increased more than tenfold during the conflict. And no end was in sight: Lloyd George and other officials would soon be making plans for a war continuing into 1920 and beyond.
For the Allies, the signs were not good. A year before there had been roughly three British Empire, French, or Belgian soldiers for every two Germans in the west. Now, every week, trains were racing across Germany bringing troops no longer needed against Russia—just as tens of thousands of British and French soldiers were being urgently diverted from the Western Front to prop up the collapsing Italian army. By January 1918, therefore, there were some four Germans for every three Allied soldiers in the west. The U.S. Army was not yet much help: although millions of men were being drafted and trained, barely more than 100,000 of them, almost all inexperienced, had made it to Europe. And if casualties continued at the current rate, British forces would need to find more than 600,000 men in the coming year just to replace their losses—far more than conscription could supply. As Churchill put it, "Lads of eighteen and nineteen, elderly men up to forty-five, the last surviving brother, the only son of his mother (and she a widow), the father the sole support of the family, the weak, the consumptive, the thrice wounded—all must now prepare themselves for the scythe." Nonetheless, Haig wanted to launch new attacks in Belgium once the weather allowed. The War Cabinet was dismayed.
Behind the scenes, Milner continued to promote his belief that the real enemy was not Germany but revolutionary Russia, an idea so inflammatory that almost all mentions of it are only in diaries. Writing after a dinner with Milner, a member of the War Cabinet staff predicted that the remainder of the war would be "to decide where the Anglo-German boundary shall run across Asia." A similar note was sounded in the diary of the well-connected writer Beatrice Webb in early 1918, just after she met with Lloyd George: "The EM. and Milner are thinking of a peace at the expense of Russia.... With Russia to cut up, the map of the world is capable of all sorts of rearrangements."
The Germans, however, showed no signs of being interested: they had already beaten Russia and, following the end of the fighting, had helped themselves to a colossal additional expanse of its territory. Why should they share the spoils? They were determined to next achieve a similar victory over Britain and France and dictate a Europe-wide peace. While Milner's imagined rearrangement of the globe languished, the Germans prepared a new offensive.
Although the balance of troops on the Western Front favored Germany, the army high command, which by now was largely running the government, could hear two clocks ticking. They knew that the great battle to decide the war had to be won before summer; otherwise hundreds of thousands, and soon millions, of American troops would join the fight. And in Germany itself there were signs that the country might not be able to hold out long.
Civilians were suffering more painfully than ever. With imports kept out by the British naval blockade, metal was so scarce that everything possible—kettles and cooking pots, doorknobs, brass ornaments, telephone wire, and well over 10,000 church bells—was being confiscated and melted down for munitions. Buried pipes were ripped from beneath the streets. Coal was in short supply, and those waiting in line for it were often shod in cardboard shoes with wooden soles, since scarce leather was saved for soldiers' boots. So many horses had been sent to the front that the Berlin Zoo's elephants were put to work hauling wagons through the streets. Real wages in nonmilitary industries had dropped to almost half of prewar levels. Nitrates once used in fertilizers went into explosives, making food even scarcer. Bread was made from potato peels and sawdust, coffee from bark, and with horsemeat a rare luxury, often the only meat on sale was that of dogs and cats. The rich turned to a thriving black market, while the poor were left to forage in harvested fields and urban trash dumps for whatever scraps of grain or food they could find. Daily calorie consumption was more than halved, which meant that, on average, German adults lost 20 percent of their body weight during the war. In Austria-Hungary, conditions were even worse.
The brilliant radical theorist Rosa Luxemburg was in a prison in Breslau, cold, ill, and hungry, her hair turning white. She watched grimly as horses drew carts into the prison yard filled with uniforms scavenged from wounded or dead soldiers, sometimes torn by bullets or shrapnel and spotted with blood. The prisoners were put to work cleaning and mending them, so that they could clothe fresh bodies being sent into battle. One day she saw a cart arrive pulled by water buffaloes, war booty from Eastern Europe. "The cargo was piled so high that the buffaloes could not make it over the threshold of the gateway. The attending soldier ... began to beat away at the animals with the heavy end of his whip so savagely that the overseer indignantly called him to account. 'Don't you have any pity for the animals?' 'No one has any pity for us people either!' he answered." Millions more felt the same.
Wartime privations inflamed an angry nationalism in Germany, producing a foretaste of the hysteria that, a quarter century later, would reach a climax of unimaginable proportions. Ominously, making the fraudulent claim that Jews were shirking military duty, right-wing forces demanded and won a special census of Jews in the army. Anti-Semitic books, pamphlets, and oratory proliferated. By 1918, the head of the Pan-German League was calling for a "ruthless struggl
e against Jews."
The generals, however, worried not about anti-Semitism but about revolution. Emboldened by the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, and tired of endless war and shortages, some 400,000 workers went on strike in Berlin at the end of January 1918, demanding peace, new rights for labor, and a "people's republic." The strikes spread to other cities, and to the German navy, less disciplined than the army, which experienced a series of hushed-up mutinies and protests. In shaky Austria-Hungary the strikes grew far larger, and fractures along ethnic lines began to show: Polish, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene deputies in the imperial parliament were loudly demanding autonomy or independence. Eight hundred sailors in the Austro-Hungarian navy in the Adriatic mutinied and raised the red flag; the naval command had to dispatch three battleships manned by loyalists to suppress them. The entire precarious empire threatened to dissolve if the war went on much longer. The inhabitants of Germany's other major ally, Ottoman Turkey, were suffering near famine. As the economy spiraled downward, the government recklessly printed huge quantities of paper currency for its war expenses. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish soldiers began to desert, many still armed, to live off the countryside as brigands.
The example of Russia made one thing dramatically clear: whatever happened at the front, a country could also collapse from within. The German authorities declared martial law in Berlin and Hamburg, and conscripted tens of thousands of strikers into uniform. That stopped the unrest for the moment, although at the cost of scattering militant leftists throughout the army. To fend off further strikes, the German military needed a swift, decisive victory. In early March 1918 Haig received an intelligence report that "an offensive on a big scale will take place during the present month."