Beginning in the last months of the war, an even more deadly cataclysm flamed across the world: the great influenza pandemic, whose total death toll is estimated at 50 million or more. Its spread was directly connected with the war, for the first outbreak to attract attention, in the spring of 1918, was at a large army base in Kansas. The following months saw hundreds of shiploads of American soldiers heading to Europe, bringing the disease with them. It spread rapidly from Brest, their main disembarkation port in France. With millions of soldiers sharing cramped quarters in troopships, trains, and huge army camps, the flu could jump from one person to another, with almost everyone in a packed ship's cabin, barracks, tent, or dugout sickening in a day.
The disease swept around the globe in several waves, speeded by the large numbers of troops on the move. In half-starving Germany, some 400,000 people died of influenza in 1918 alone. Most unusually for epidemic diseases, it took the worst toll on the fittest, those aged between 20 and 35, many of whom were soldiers feeling lucky to have survived combat. The human immune system fought the disease by filling the victim's lungs with frothy scarlet fluid, which contained antibodies but which in effect often drowned someone from the inside; healthy young bodies had the best immune systems and so suffered the highest death rate. Hundreds of thousands of young men in uniform on both sides succumbed in 1918 and 1919, as if in the aftermath of a gas attack, their faces quickly turning purple, their mouths, noses, and sometimes ears and eyes oozing blood, strangling to death.
Young men were also in close quarters in prison. The records are incomplete, but influenza was the likely killer of most of the 73 British conscientious objectors who died behind bars, in alternative-service work camps, or soon after their release.
Flu victims came from every level of society. Edward Cecil, who had remained at his post as a colonial bureaucrat in Egypt for most of the war, succumbed to the epidemic a month after the Armistice. His ashes were buried in the family graveyard near Hatfield House, next to those of his mother and father, prime minister in a sunnier time.
Some two months later, the disease claimed a victim from very different circumstances. When Lloyd George had released Alice Wheeldon from prison, she had returned to Derby, frail from her hunger strikes, needing help just to make her way along the railway station platform when she arrived. Although comrades on the left were loyal, neighbors ostracized her, and her secondhand clothes shop failed. Her daughter Hettie, who had managed to avoid jail, lost her job as a schoolteacher. When Sylvia Pankhurst paid the family a visit, she found mother and daughter supporting themselves by growing vegetables on a rented plot, and tomato plants in what had once been the shop window.
Alice Wheeldon died of the flu in February 1919. Winnie—just re-leased from prison—and Hettie were both too ill themselves to come to their mother's burial. A reporter for a Derby newspaper managed to find the unannounced ceremony and wrote a story headlined, "Funeral of Mrs Wheeldon; Sensational Incidents at Graveside; Rhetorical Sneers at Prime Minister."
The disapproving journalist noted that Wheeldon's "severely plain oak coffin" was buried in a manner so "devoid of all Christian ceremony" that not a single one of the 20 mourners wore black. Indeed, Alice's son Willie, only recently released from prison for evading the draft, pulled a large red flag from his pocket and placed it, fluttering in the winter wind, over his mother's coffin. The only recorded speaker was John S. Clarke, whose appearance was all the more dramatic because he was still on the run from the police. Alice Wheeldon was the victim of "a judicial murder," he declared from atop the pile of dirt heaped up by the freshly dug grave. Lloyd George "in the midst of high affairs of State stepped out of his way to pursue a poor obscure family into the dungeon and into the grave."
To cries of "Hear, hear," Clarke continued: "Mrs. Wheeldon was a socialist. She was a prophet, not of the sweet and holy bye and bye but of the here and now. She saw the penury of the poor and the prodigality of the rich, and she registered her protest against it.... If Mrs. Wheeldon could speak ... she would tell us ... to fight more fearlessly than before, so as to obtain that glorious time when peace and joyousness shall fill all life."
The mourners dispersed. The grave was not marked, for fear it would be defaced. Clarke slipped back underground. The following year, Hettie Wheeldon married a labor unionist comrade who had been part of the family's antiwar circle, gave birth to a premature baby who did not survive, and then herself died painfully from a burst appendix. Winnie and Alf Mason emigrated to Australia, to try to rebuild their lives. Willie Wheeldon, unable to regain his prewar job as a schoolteacher, worked in a dairy and then in the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby, but was fired after being active in the union during a strike.
With its economy drained and burdened with huge public debt by the war just ended, Britain was shaken by many more labor upheavals. Workers in Belfast and along the River Clyde went on strike, demanding that the wartime 54-hour work week be reduced to 40. On January 31, 1919, mounted police charged a crowd gathered in Glasgow's St. George's Square, injuring some 40 people. In the resulting uproar, the red flag was briefly raised over the town hall and the authorities panicked. At 10 Downing Street, Milner and his colleagues heard the secretary of state for Scotland say that "it was a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike—it was a Bolshevik rising." The cabinet swiftly dispatched six tanks and 8,000 troops, who set up machine-gun posts around the city.
Early 1919 saw sparks of rebellion even in the British armed services. Sailors on a Royal Navy patrol ship, the HMS Kilbride, mutinied and hoisted the red flag. Three thousand soldiers marched to the town hall in Folkestone, ripping down a "For Officers Only" sign on a railway station waiting room. Some 4,000 British troops manning the docks, trains, cranes, and warehouses at the French port of Calais went on strike. An enraged Haig demanded "the supreme penalty" for the rebels, but wiser heads restrained him. In other military protests there were more red flags and talk of solidarity with comrades in Russia, but the soldiers' greatest grievance was that they wanted to come home. As troops were demobilized, the demonstrations died away.
Another group of men were also impatient to come home: the more than 1,000 British war resisters still behind bars. Angry that their prison sentences were outlasting the war itself, some 130 went on a hunger strike. Among the voices calling for their release was an unexpected one, that of John Buchan. Unlike the pugnacious, short-fused heroes of his novels, he had a certain generosity of spirit, and once the war ended he drafted an appeal to the prime minister, which many other well-known figures signed, urging that COs be released. "A majority of these men," the petition said, "are sincerely convinced that they have acted under the demands of their conscience and in accordance with deep moral or religious convictions."
By mid-1919 the conscientious objectors were all free. Over the years, as the war's toll sank in, they and others who had gone to jail for their beliefs began to win considerable respect from a public that had once condemned them. Fenner Brockway and several others became members of Parliament. Five years after serving his hard-labor sentence in Pentonville Prison, the journalist E. D. Morel was the Labour Party's chief spokesperson on foreign affairs in the House of Commons. Bertrand Russell continued to write. Several decades after the war ended, his top-heavy thatch of hair now white but as thick as ever, Russell would appear in formal dress in Stockholm as one of the few writers of nonfiction ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. A trade unionist named Arthur Creech Jones spent two and a half years in prison as a CO; 30 years later, he was in the cabinet. Ramsay MacDonald, an antiwar Labour MP, had not gone to prison during the war but had been under police surveillance and was repeatedly stoned when he spoke at peace meetings. Angry patriots had even voted to expel him from his golf club. In 1924, he became prime minister.
During 1919, militant labor revolts shook countries around the world, even including orderly little Switzerland, which had its own nationwide general strike. Germany, too, experienced great
upheavals, but in the Armistice agreement the Allies had deliberately allowed the German army to keep thousands of machine guns for crowd control. In Berlin, after she took part in a failed general strike and uprising, her petite figure with its large hat and parasol still considered a threat by right-wingers, Rosa Luxemburg was beaten and shot by army officers and her body dumped in a canal. The hope that revolution would spread from Russia to other countries in Europe receded.
One of those who had felt that hope was Willie Wheeldon, who became an early member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Soon enough, however, like thousands of like-minded men and women in Western Europe, he began to think that if he wanted to live in a revolutionary society, he would have to go to Russia. In 1921, at age 29, he emigrated to the nation he was convinced had the best chance of achieving what John S. Clarke, at his mother's burial, had called "that glorious time when peace and joyousness shall fill all life." Learning Russian, Wheeldon became a Soviet citizen, settling in Samara, an old fortress city on the Volga River that the Bolsheviks were turning into a center of new industry, and marrying a local woman. For some years he wrote often to his sister Winnie and her husband Alf. Eventually he moved to Moscow, where he worked as a government translator. Then the letters stopped.
Another place where people hoped to bring a new and different society into being was Ireland, where nationalists were fighting to be free of British rule at last. The militant Irish Republican Army began attacking British troops and police barracks, and John French's forces fought back ruthlessly. In the guerrilla war of ambushes, assassinations, and torture that followed, well over 1,000 people on both sides were killed. With his own narrow vision reinforced by a lifetime in the army, French saw everything in military terms, dismissing officials he considered too soft and urging Boer War—style concentration camps. He also proposed removing all civilians from certain areas where the IRA was active, bringing in warplanes, and establishing what, half a century later in Vietnam, would be called free-fire zones. In December 1919, while he and his bodyguards were driving near Dublin's Phoenix Park, he narrowly escaped death when IRA guerrillas threw grenades at his car and opened fire from behind a hedge.
Adding to French's consternation, among the many supporters of the IRA was his sister. They appear to have broken off all contact at this time, and on her visits to Ireland he had her closely shadowed. "The pore lady was niver foive minutes widout somebody followin' her about, though she doesn't know ut," an Irishman in Cork told a visitor from England. At one point, Charlotte Despard and the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne were speaking to a crowd of sympathizers when French roared past in his motorcade without stopping. The two women traveled the country gathering testimony about violence by British forces. "With her I was able to visit places I should never have been able to get to alone in the martial [law] areas," Gonne wrote to a friend. When they were stopped at roadblocks, "it was amusing to see the puzzled expressions on the faces of the officers ... who continually held up our car, when Mrs. Despard said she was the Viceroy's sister."
Meanwhile, just as after the pancontinental war against Napoleon, the winners gathered in January 1919 to divide the spoils. The number of negotiators and their entourages of secretaries, cooks, valets, translators, messengers, chauffeurs, and guards soared into the thousands—the British Empire's mission alone totaled 524—for many branches of every Allied government wanted a hand in reshaping the world. The Paris Peace Conference lasted, with a few breaks, for a full year, and out of it came a string of treaties and decisions that helped determine the course of the next 20 years and speed the way to a second, wider, more ruinous war. A noble-sounding but ineffectual League of Nations was created to settle international disputes. Everywhere the victors redrew boundaries and from Finland to Czechoslovakia recognized a bewildering array of new countries that emerged from the ruins of fragmented empires. Germany was partly demilitarized and its territory reduced by about 10 percent; it was also burdened with huge reparations payments and the humiliating requirement to formally acknowledge its guilt for starting the war.
The rearranged map was a global one. Germany's possessions in the Pacific and Africa, some of the latter with valuable deposits of gold, copper, and diamonds, were divided among the victors. The Ottoman Empire was partly dismembered and its various Arab lands parceled out, mostly to French and British control. In Paris, among the black top hats and morning coats of the triumphant prime ministers and the battle ribbons and epaulets of the generals, were representatives in more humble attire, coming to plead the cause of various colonized peoples. After all, hadn't the trigger for this war been the invasion and occupation of a small country, Belgium?
These visitors knocked on doors in vain. The Allied rhetoric about self-determination of peoples did not apply to African or Asian colonies, or to Arab territories known to have oil. With all these uppity colonials on hand, it was no wonder that the ubiquitous Basil Thomson was put in charge of security for the British delegation, adding two dozen intelligence agents in Paris to the several hundred already under his control in England and Ireland.
Violet Cecil was also in Paris for much of the conference, because Milner was part of the British delegation—in charge of it, in fact, whenever the prime minister was not in town. Day by day, his diary records how he and other delegates disposed of different parts of the globe, from the Cameroons and German Southwest Africa to the three former Ottoman provinces fatefully cobbled together into the British protectorate of Iraq.
After the bleak years of war, here was a chance for Violet to once again be in the glamorous center of great political events. She rented a house by the Bois de Boulogne, and together she and Milner walked in the park, visited with Lloyd George and Clemenceau, and took in the sights of the victorious city in spring: the captured German guns lining the Champs Élysées; the embassy receptions; the whirl of diplomats, generals, and French aristocrats at dinners and balls; the amateur theatricals—not considered fitting in wartime—that could now be staged by the younger British Foreign Office staff. Military bands were everywhere. Gone were the drab years of wartime restraint; long-stored jewels, pearls, and ostrich feathers adorned women once more. Famous restaurants were restored to their prewar glory, and the delegates from starving Germany—who had guards to protect them from jeering French patriots—were amazed by the array of food at their hotel.
There was, of course, an undertone that no victory celebration could wipe out. The war had been particularly devastating for the extended Cecil family. Of the ten grandsons of Lord Salisbury, the former prime minister, five, including George Cecil, had been killed at the front. Violet again made a pilgrimage to George's burial site, but now, in 1919, she was far from the only Englishwoman visiting a grave—or searching for one in vain. Thousands of British, French, American, and Canadian widows and mothers roamed the former war zone. Hotels were filled with the grieving, and former Red Cross hospital trains had to be pressed into service to house the overflow. Shattered tanks dotted meadows, and everything from cathedrals to farmhouses lay in ruins. Along hundreds of country roads, lined in European style with rows of plane or poplar trees, all that remained were bare trunks, the limbs victim to shrapnel. The mourning women mixed uneasily with French villagers trying to salvage their cratered fields, while police and soldiers tried to keep everyone away from unexploded shells. German POWs, still in custody, were at work clearing the rubble.
A Cecil cousin who survived the war wrote of visiting the Somme battlefield to try to find his brother-in-law's grave: "Everywhere lies the ordinary debris of occupied trenches—bully beef tins, biscuit tins, traces of half-executed meals.... A dented white basin with traces of soapy water stands on a box; shaving tackle all spattered with soil and mud spreads itself upon an improvised table. Something of a meal remains—a marmalade jar with tin plates and rusted knife and fork. A pair of muddy, hardened boots.... Will we find our friend, or do the dead lie too thick—are the crosses too many?"
An exhaus
ted Milner returned to the peace talks seven times (on one such trip taking his first airplane ride), and on June 28, 1919—the fifth anniversary of the assassinations at Sarajevo—in the packed Hall of Mirrors at the palace of Versailles, he was one of the five men who, on behalf of Britain, placed their signatures next to the red ribbon and sealing wax on the final page of the main peace treaty. He and other skeptics had been unable to persuade Lloyd George to ease the harsh terms imposed on Germany. The prime minister had won an election the month after the Armistice by thundering about making Germany pay for the war, and Clemenceau of France was even more vehement. Having seen his country invaded twice in his lifetime, Clemenceau, it was rumored, had asked to be buried on his feet, facing Germany. Both leaders were also prisoners of four and a half years of the greatest political propaganda barrage history had seen: the xenophobic torrent to which Buchan, Kipling, and so many others, along with their counterparts in France, had contributed. All this had forged a public that demanded Germany be punished—and punished painfully. The resulting peace treaty, wrote the diplomat-historian George F. Kennan years later, had "the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil's own hand."
That Germany and the now vanished Austria-Hungary really had started the war, that they had ruthlessly exploited the territory they conquered, that the Versailles treaty's provisions would be softened later, all made no difference whatever to Germans. The public ignominy of being dictated to by the Allies rankled deeply across the political spectrum, eroding support—just as Ludendorff and von Hindenburg had planned—for the moderate, civilian regime that was forced to accept the treaty, and providing essential grist for the rise of Hitler. As he wrote in Mein Kampf a few years later: "What a use could be made of the Treaty of Versailles.... How each one of the points of that Treaty could be branded in the minds and hearts of the German people until sixty million men and women find their souls aflame with a feeling of rage and shame; and a torrent of fire bursts forth as from a furnace, and a will of steel is forged from it, with the common cry: 'We will have arms again!"'