Over several months, as the British and French held many urgent high-level strategy meetings, Milner spent about half his time in France, ironing out disputes. Few of the two countries' generals spoke each other's language well, and Milner's fluency in French helped; he sometimes interpreted for Lloyd George. Between trips he reported to the King, who at one point invited him to Windsor Castle for the weekend—although of course Violet could not go with him.
In purely military terms, the spring of 1918 was Haig's finest hour. Paradoxically, when the mere appearance of weakness or indecision at the top might have been fatal, the same qualities that had led him to uselessly sacrifice so many British lives at the Somme and Passchendaele—his stubbornness, his unshakable faith in the rightness of Britain's cause, his almost mindless optimism in the face of bad news—proved essential. They made him into the calm, unyielding defensive commander that British troops needed.
The Germans still had many more troops on hand than the Allies, for the collapse of Russia had enabled them to add a stunning 44 divisions—more than half a million men—to their army in the west. In early April, after German forces launched another storm-trooper-led attack near Ypres, Haig issued a dispatch to all his soldiers, drafted with few changes in his own steady, confident handwriting: "Many amongst us are now tired. To those I would say that victory belongs to those who hold out the longest.... Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end."
British troops did indeed feel they had their backs to the wall. Haig's words embodied something else as well, absent from years of earlier exhortations: honesty. To say that "victory belongs to those who hold out the longest" was acknowledging at last that the war would be won not by dramatic cavalry charges, but by attrition. Which army would exhaust itself first? Moving over an already ravaged landscape now freshly gouged by new shell holes, the German advance continued.
In mid-April, as Britain's retreating armies continued to stagger backward under the worst German blows in nearly four years of fighting, Milner became secretary of state for war. His signature now appeared on the condolence cards sent to soldiers' families, below a standard message: "The King commands me to assure you of the true sympathy of His Majesty and the Queen in Your Sorrow. He whose loss you mourn died in the noblest of causes."
The cards flowed out in a ceaseless stream. (Families of officers were notified sooner, by black-bordered telegrams.) But when it came to Stephen Hobhouse's youngest brother, his parents, like so many others, simply received word that in the new German offensive the 23-year-old Paul was "missing, presumed killed." He had been seen fighting, then falling, when his unit's position was overrun. Several months later, the family's hopes were raised when a fellow officer passed on a rumor that Paul was wounded and a prisoner in Germany. With mail going through contacts in neutral countries, Stephen got in touch with a pacifist committee in Berlin. "I was very glad to be able to set on foot by this means a search for my brother Paul. Alas, no trace of him could be found. My poor mother for over six months ... persisted in the fond belief that Paul would return." During that time Margaret Hobhouse never ceased to write letters to her son, although they eventually came back marked "Undeliverable. Return to Sender." Paul's body was never found.
The German attacks of March and April 1918 were a severe setback to the British army but by no means a boost to antiwar feeling. When troops had their backs to the wall, the public showed little desire to question the war's aims. The number of workdays lost to strikes
dropped. "The recent severe fighting on the Western front appears to have had a most salutary effect on public opinion," the Scottish Command told army headquarters in a Weekly Intelligence Summary; in Aberdeen, overage men were volunteering, and a deserter surrendered himself "on account of the gravity of the situation." Another agent reported that "at Liverpool recent events have had a steadying influence on the working man." The intensified fighting produced the same result in Germany, where threats of labor militance temporarily evaporated.
Redoubling his efforts to keep up civilian morale, Rudyard Kipling spoke at munitions factories and barraged high officials with long, detailed memos about everything from mobilizing "parsons and priests" for the war effort to bringing documentary films—he sketched out scenarios for half a dozen—to factories so workers could see the splendid effect of the weapons they produced. The British workman "has a great respect for the gift of the gab," he declared. "...Almost as important as the cinema is the lecturer who accompanies [it].... The munitions workers listen best to a person they consider of their own class." John Buchan's propaganda offensive also aimed at the working class, taking labor unionists on tours of the front line; by mid-1918, more than 1,000 union leaders and rank-and-file members had been on these trips. Union men serving at the front were encouraged to write to their branches back home, especially when strikes loomed; military censors made sure it was the patriotic letters that got through. The jingoistic newspaper John Bull published a cartoon showing a CO sitting comfortably by a hearth, in an easy chair, with the caption "This little pig stayed at home."
In this bleak spring, Bertrand Russell finally joined those Britons in prison. As their excuse, authorities seized on a few sentences in an article in the No-Conscription Fellowship's Tribunal, where Russell predicted that the American troops now starting to arrive in England and France might be used as strikebreakers, "an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home." In court, the prosecutor claimed that this passage would have a "diabolical effect" and interfere with relations between Britain and a key ally. "A very despicable offence," thundered the judge, and sentenced Russell to six months. When he arrived to begin serving his time, Russell wrote, the warder taking down his particulars "asked my religion and I replied 'agnostic.' He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.'"
Officials were so awed by Russell's intellectual stature and aristocratic lineage that, alone among British war resisters, he was allowed to be a "First Division" prisoner—an ancient, privileged status that permitted inmates to keep the tools of their trade, which for him were pen, books, and paper. He was allowed to receive the Times and to have books, flowers, and fruit sent in from outside, and was assigned an extra-large cell and a fellow convict to clean it for him at sixpence a day. Russell had a lively and unconventional love life, and, evading the limits on correspondence, was able to smuggle out letters to two women he was involved with, all the while still nominally married to a third. A set of letters to one lover, a young actress, were in French, which he knew his guards would not be able to read; Russell convinced them that these were historical documents copied from his research materials. A letter to another woman he slipped inside the uncut pages of the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, telling her the volume was more interesting than it appeared. The actress sent him love notes through the "Personals" column of the Times, until Scotland Yard caught on after a "many happy returns" message appeared on Russell's birthday. One of Thomson's sleuths showed up to question her. Always self-disciplined, Russell wrote four hours a day, producing, among other work, 70,000 words of his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.
Outside prison walls, mounted police broke up a rally in London's Finsbury Park in the midst of a speech by Charlotte Despard. And the authorities were particularly eager to shut down the NCF's Tribunal, which had long been an impertinent voice against the war's madness. Reluctant to tarnish Britain's free-speech image by banning the paper outright, they tried other methods.
At the National Labour Press, where the Tribunal was printed, the police arrived and dismantled the press machinery. The paper switched to a new printer, which was soon raided, and found its presses damaged too. Produced on a small hand press, the paper promptly reap-peared as a one-page leaflet with the triumphant headline "Her
e We Are Again!!" When the two men who operated this press ran out of type for the large capital letters used for headlines, they borrowed them from friendly fellow printers on Lord Northcliffe's rabidly prowar Daily Mail. For months to come, moving once or twice because of suspicious neighbors, this secret press continued to print the paper, although distribution difficulties—the police were watching the mail—greatly reduced its circulation. Basil Thomson's men never found it.
Trying to figure out where the Tribunal was being printed, agents twice raided the NCF, and watched the office constantly. An impoverished-looking woman with a baby carriage who visited the building every few days, apparently hoping for a handout, never attracted their attention. She was smuggling proof sheets of the Tribunal beneath the blankets of her carriage. Indeed, as one after another of the NCF's male leaders had gone to prison for defying the draft, women had become the organization's backbone. Catherine Marshall, a talented organizer and suffrage movement veteran, was the group's central figure until she broke down from exhaustion in late 1917. Joan Beauchamp spent a month in prison for an article she published as the Tribunal's editor, and Violet Tillard two months for refusing to reveal to police where the paper was being printed.
The COs in prison were getting more restive. In May 1918, following Stephen Hobhouse's example, some COs jailed in Liverpool announced that they would break all prison rules they considered "inhuman and immoral," including the rule of silence. For ten days the prison resounded with talk, laughter, and singing. Then the warders cracked down, moving the men they thought to be ringleaders to other prisons. Some COs went on hunger strikes, only to find themselves force-fed like the suffragettes. Many drew encouragement from knowing that they were not the only political prisoners in Britain. When Fenner Brockway was being punished for the Liverpool protest, he was placed in solitary on reduced rations. One day an older convict, a trusty who did odd jobs around the cellblock, slipped a note into his cell: "Dear Brockway—Just heard you are here. What can we do for you?...We are Irishmen and can do anything you want—except get you out. Have your reply ready for 'Trusty' when he calls to-morrow. Cheerio!"
Among these Irish prisoners was Eamon De Valera, who, a decade and a half later, would become his country's prime minister. With their help, Brockway smuggled a letter to his wife, and then got his hands on what he craved most: newspapers, including the Labour Leader, whose editor he had once been. He retrieved these by lowering a thread from his cell window to which his unseen Irish friends attached the precious cargo. In a corner of his cell out of sight of the spy hole, which now and then clicked open, Brockway devoured the papers. "Only those who have been cut off from family, friends and the world can understand what this meant to me."
Brockway's fellow prisoners were not the only Irish patriots in jail, for Ireland was in turmoil. The execution of the Easter Rising leaders two years earlier had inflamed long-simmering nationalist feeling, and the planned draft of Irishmen seemed like the final blow. Why be compelled to join a war supposedly fought for Belgium's national integrity when exactly that was denied to Ireland? The island's Catholic bishops, never known for their radicalism, issued a ringing manifesto against conscription; Irish trade unions called a 24-hour general strike, and everywhere (except in the Protestant north) factories, newspaper presses, trains, trolleys, and horse cabs came to a halt. Even the pubs closed.
With British troops on the Continent reeling, this new rebellion in Ireland posed a crisis. To contain it, the British cabinet felt it needed an experienced military man with a firm hand. On May 4, 1918, Milner, on behalf of Lloyd George, offered the position of Viceroy of Ireland to John French.
Five days later, the diminutive, bowlegged field marshal took the mail ship across the Irish Sea. Regarding his position as a war posting, he brought with him neither his wife nor Winifred Bennett (although she would later visit many times). Within days of being sworn in at Dublin Castle, he ordered the arrest of an array of independence leaders. Long convinced that his own Irish ancestry gave him special insight, he saw himself as more Irish than the nationalists, regarding them as "people steeped to the neck in the violent forms of crime and infamy and with the smallest possible proportion of Irish blood in their veins." Once this was widely understood, he believed, "The Irish would cast them out like the swine they are."
The Irish, he told Lloyd George, were "like nothing so much as a lot of frightened children who dread being thrashed." With proper discipline all would be well. Basil Thomson made his intelligence network indispensable to the new viceroy, and French was confident he could soon restore order.
The same month French set off for Ireland, Emmeline Pankhurst embarked on a speaking tour of the United States, aimed at encouraging war enthusiasm. Meanwhile, in Britannia, Christabel kept up a steady fusillade of support for her mother while calling for the burning of all socialist books "by the public hangman." On her return from her American trip, Emmeline told an audience at Queen's Hall in London: "Some talk about the Empire and Imperialism as if it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. It seems to me that it is a great thing to be the inheritors of an Empire like ours."
To Sylvia, the transformation of both her mother and older sister still seemed incomprehensible. "I only look in wonder," she wrote to the banished Adela, in Australia, "and ask myself, 'Can those two really be sane?'"
Meanwhile, the war news grew worse. At the end of May the Germans launched yet another powerful surprise offensive northeast of Paris, preceded by two million artillery shells fired off in less than five hours. In three days, the Germans pushed panicked Allied troops back 20 miles, advancing with such speed that they captured a French military airfield with all its planes still on the ground. The jubilant Kaiser went back and forth from Berlin to the front, inspecting troops in the field, newly captured villages, and the great guns shelling Paris. However, it was not France that the Kaiser saw as the main enemy, but Britain and its empire, in "a conflict between the two approaches to the world. Either the Prussian-Germanic approach—Right, Freedom, Honor, Morality—is to remain respected or the Anglo-Saxon, which would mean enthroning the worship of gold."
With the enemy now only 37 miles from Paris, Clemenceau considered evacuating the city. Parisians fled south by the hundreds of thousands, and high stacks of baggage jammed the platforms of railroad stations. To the government in London, simultaneously dealing with a brewing upheaval in Ireland, the future looked bleak and terrifying. At one point the cabinet discussed evacuating all British troops from the Continent. Fierce backbiting between Haig and Lloyd George and their respective supporters over who was responsible for the British losses spilled over into parliamentary debate and the press. One high-ranking British general lost his job, but Haig once again survived.
"We must be prepared for France and Italy both being beaten to their knees," Milner wrote to Lloyd George in early June while on yet another emergency trip across the Channel. General Sir Henry Wilson, the friend who had been Milner's military counterpart on his 1917 mission to pre-revolution Russia, was now chief of the Imperial General Staff in London and shared Milner's fear of an Allied collapse before the seemingly unstoppable Germans. "What would this mean?" Wilson wrote in his diary. "The destruction of our army in France?"
21. THERE ARE MORE DEAD THAN LIVING NOW
FROM DUBLIN CASTLE, with its round stone tower topped with ramparts, John French, officially Viscount of Ypres and now Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, set out to impose order on his rebellious realm. He established a secret budget to reward informers, ordered police to close meeting halls and seize printing presses, demanded additional troops from London, and sent out a stream of orders that in effect imposed different degrees of martial law on parts of the island. He dispatched special reports to the King, who, evidently unable to read his handwriting, asked French to send them typed. On July 4, 1918, he forbade all processions and meetings throughout Ireland held without permission. But he neglected to ban games of soccer and hurling, t
he Irish equivalent of field hockey, which quickly became gathering points for the most militant nationalists.
"Any hesitation or avoidable delay in carrying out the conscription policy," he wrote the King, "would be fatal to the future of the country." Drafting Irishmen, French believed, would solve two problems at once, providing the beleaguered British army with sorely needed troops and bringing about "the complete removal of useless and idle youths and men between 18 and 24 or 25" from Ireland. (Desperate for new troops at the front, Haig was also pressing for Irish conscription, one of the few things on which these two bitter rivals agreed.) But when French tried to begin calling up Irishmen, the British cabinet restrained him. Lloyd George and Milner, less ham-fisted than he, understood that decreeing a draft for Ireland had temporarily satisfied the English public. Actually imposing it, however, would give Irish nationalists an inflammatory rallying point. For months, French fumed impatiently, firing off messages of complaint to London.
And then, gradually, it appeared that Irish conscripts for the Western Front might not be so urgently needed after all.
Despite the expanse of newly captured French territory that now bulged ominously toward Paris on the map, all was not going well for the Germans. "The threat of an American Army gathers like a thunder-cloud in the rear of our other enemies," a German officer wrote in his diary, and every week brought that threat closer. The brief window of opportunity for a decisive German victory was starting to close.
Furthermore, the very speed of the German advance had caused a problem commanders had not anticipated. Short of food for months, consuming a diet heavy on turnips and horsemeat, exhausted German troops kept halting, against orders, to gorge on tempting supplies of French wine, British rum, canned beef, bread, jam, and biscuits left by the retreating Allies, and to slaughter cows and chickens taken from French farmers. It was a bad blow to German morale to see how well fed the Allies were—especially after soldiers had been repeatedly told that the U-boat campaign had left the enemy starving.