While Woodrow Wilson is said to have called the struggle just ended the war to end all wars, Milner, grimly realistic, called the Versailles treaty "a Peace to end Peace."
Just as Nazism was to spring directly from the ashes of the war, so was another of the twentieth century's great totalitarian systems. After several years of ruthless combat, the Russian civil war came to an end, and with it the attempt by Allied troops to prop up counterrevolutionary forces. The Bolsheviks began to refer to themselves as communists, and soon no other parties were allowed to exist in what in 1922 became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Although some British leftists of this era, like Willie Wheeldon, saw the Soviet Union as the world's best hope, one person who decided otherwise was Bertrand Russell. He traveled there in 1920 and was dismayed to find a police state where "our conversations were continually spied upon. In the middle of the night one would hear shots, and know that idealists were being killed in prison." Unswayed by the red-carpet treatment he received, he was chilled to hear Lenin laugh at a British socialist "for believing in Soviets without dictatorship."
Sylvia Pankhurst also traveled to Russia in 1920, and also met Lenin, whom she, by contrast, found "more vividly vital and energetic, more wholly alive than other people." She saw the country through totally optimistic eyes, managing to convince herself that in this glorious new society "the Russian people have mostly forgotten the very existence of alcohol." John S. Clarke, who was there at the same time, also fell under Lenin's spell and was able to use his knowledge of circus animals to cure the leader's dog of an unspecified illness.
Plenty of other Western leftists, in eager search for the embodiment, at last, of what Pankhurst once called a "Golden Age" of peace and plenty for all, also found paradise in the Soviet Union. Charlotte Despard was to visit in 1930, by which point Stalin's murderous dictatorship was completely entrenched. She found everything to be splendid: the diet was good, children privileged, education enlightened, orphanages first-rate, and the courts wise and generous. In Soviet prisons, she claimed, the worst punishment "inflicted by a court of the prisoners themselves was to be kept out of the club room for one month."
To give them some credit, John S. Clarke drifted away from his infatuation soon enough, and Pankhurst abandoned hers even more quickly and vocally, dissent getting her expelled from Britain's Communist Party in 1921. But the hunger among leftists to see the Soviet Union as a shining alternative to war-ravaged capitalist Europe remained deep. In the USSR's first decade and a half, tens of thousands of believers in that dream emigrated there from around the world.
Then in the mid-1930s, in what became known as the Great Purge, an increasingly paranoid Stalin ordered waves of arrests, gathering people by the millions into execution cellars or the far-flung prison camps of his expanding gulag. Tapping an ancient vein of xenophobia, the secret police always seized people on the pretext that they were spies or saboteurs for some foreign power, and so the many foreigners who had come to live in Russia were at particular risk. Thousands of them vanished. Government files on the fate of most were not opened until the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among the victims they revealed, arrested on October 5, 1937, and on Christmas Day of that year sentenced to be shot, was Willie Wheeldon.
23. AN IMAGINARY CEMETERY
THERE WAS NO ANNOUNCEMENT beforehand, and only a handful of guests were present for the ceremony at St. James's Church, Paddington. Although the bride was well into middle age, her wide-set dark eyes still evoked the renowned beauty of her youth. After lunch with a few friends, the couple slipped away from London by train. On their two-week honeymoon in Provence, they motored and strolled past the ruins of Roman amphitheaters and aqueducts, weathered stone relics of an empire past, while in Britain newspapers belatedly discovered the secret wedding of one of the great empire builders of the present. It was February 1921, and more than two decades after they first met, Alfred Milner and Violet Cecil were finally married.
He was 66, she 49. A respectable interval had passed since Edward Cecil's death, and so at last Lord and Lady Milner could be officially received by all, from the King and Queen on down, as the couple everyone had long known they were. But just as it was the twilight of the age when the appearance of conventional marriage mattered greatly, so it was the twilight of the empire in which Milner and his new wife had the deepest belief. "The man of no illusions," as Churchill had once called him, was facing the death of his greatest illusion.
Details of the empire's gradual unraveling crossed his desk daily, for the month after the war ended he had become colonial secretary. In India, where less than a decade earlier King George V and Queen Mary had been majestically installed as Emperor and Empress, Mohandas Gandhi was preaching civil disobedience as a weapon against British rule; and, in 1919, a hotheaded general ordered soldiers to open fire on a protest meeting in Amritsar, killing 379 people by the official—most likely understated—count and wounding at least 1,200 others. The massacre became a catalyst for Indian nationalists; although achieving independence would take nearly thirty years more, after Amritsar it was never in doubt. Later that year, trouble erupted in Egypt, and Milner was dispatched to Cairo to negotiate with restive nationalists. ("The difficulty," he reported back to Lloyd George, "is to find a way of making Egypt's relation to Great Britain appear a more independent and dignified one than it ever really can be.") The prospect of independence for Ireland—something he had furiously fought in 1914—now loomed as well, and bloodily so. In London, the year after he and Violet married, Irish militants assassinated Sir Henry Wilson, the friend with whom he had gone to Russia in 1917, on the field marshal's own doorstep. Milner rushed to the house to comfort his widow.
Paradoxically, the very war Milner had helped to win proved the death knell for another of his illusions, the dream of a "League of British Nations" with an overarching common parliament and cabinet. When he had put this idea before a meeting of dominion prime ministers during the war, it met with an embarrassing lack of enthusiasm. In his imagination, Canada and Australia had always been two major building blocks in such a federation, but neither government showed the slightest interest. The horrendous bloodshed of the war proved unexpectedly crucial in forming Canadian and Australian national identities sharply distinct from that of Britain. In both countries, the bitterest and most sacred war memories were of the tens of thousands of their men sacrificed at places like Passchendaele and Gallipoli by inept British generals. After the war, the various dominions went their separate ways politically more than ever, as the British Empire became the British Commonwealth of Nations in 1931, and finally, in 1949, merely the Commonwealth of Nations.
Imperialist true believers like Milner, Kipling, and Buchan had celebrated the way more than a million men from British colonies had fought for the empire in the war. But that experience had only raised expectations: these men often fought next to white soldiers who were far better paid, and in Europe they saw a continent of independent nations, not colonies. No one was more affected than the Indian troops. "Here the ladies tend us, who have been wounded, as a mother tends her child," a Sikh wrote to his father in the Punjab from England. "... They put us in motor cars and take us through the city. When, at four o'clock, we go out from the hospital, the ladies of the city give us fruit." He was astonished that British nurses emptied the hospital bedpans of wounded Indians. Another Indian soldier, quartered in a French home, was equally startled to find that Frenchwomen "attend to our wants and tidy our beds, and eat at the same table as we do." Such encounters nurtured something British colonial authorities had long tried to block: the idea of human equality.
Troops from other British colonies also found the war experience eye-opening. A month after the fighting ended, several thousand British West Indian soldiers at a base in Taranto, Italy, mutinied when they were ordered to clean white soldiers' latrines and failed to get a pay increase the whites had received. One man was killed in the fighting, 60 were s
ent to prison, and one was executed by a firing squad. Two weeks after the mutiny, in a sergeants' mess, 60 West Indian soldiers took part in the first political meeting ever held in which blacks from different British islands discussed how to work together for their rights. "Nothing we can do," a worried government official noted in a confidential memorandum the following year, "will alter the fact that the black man has begun to think and feel himself as good as the white."
In Belize, capital of British Honduras, returning veterans led a wave of rioting against their status as second-class citizens in their own homeland. The authorities declared martial law. "The participation of West Indian negroes in the war," the colony's governor wrote in a dispatch marked "Secret" to Milner, "has given rise to a strong and dangerous ill-feeling ... against Europeans." His desk flooded with similar reports, Milner asked the Royal Navy for the loan of the armored cruiser HMS Devonshire "in connection with the preservation of order in Jamaica during the demobilisation of the British West India Regiment," and warned that a second warship might also be needed.
Milner retired from the cabinet in 1921. Three years later, he and his wife made a sea journey to South Africa, the scene of his imperial triumph and their falling in love. The trip was filled with nostalgic visits to Boer War battle sites, the government providing them a private train to Kimberley. While in South Africa, however, Milner was apparently bitten by a tsetse fly and infected with sleeping sickness. On his return to England, his health declined rapidly, and Violet asked that the church bells in the village next to their country home be silenced, so as not to disturb him. On May 12, 1925, he was elected to the honorary post of chancellor of Oxford University. He died the next day, at 71.
She survived him by 33 years, remaining a member of the Ladies Empire Club and continuing to befriend the powerful and influential of later generations, such as the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow when he was a correspondent in London during the Second World War. After her brother, who had long edited the archconservative National Review, fell ill in 1929, it became, in the words of the bemused Kipling, a "she-edited magazine." Violet saw every issue into print and in editorials ferociously assailed such targets as the League of Nations, the possibility of Indian independence, and British military unpreparedness. "Never forget, Prime Minister," she said to Stanley Baldwin when he came to lunch one day, "our frontier is on the Rhine."
She and the Kiplings visited one another frequently, and Rudyard sometimes read his work aloud to her. Still grieving the loss of his son, he found solace in his work as a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, writing inscriptions for monuments and visiting military cemeteries as far distant as Egypt and Jerusalem. He and his wife made a pilgrimage to Chalk Pit Wood near Loos at the time of day they estimated that John Kipling had been killed there. Fulminating against the fraying of the British Empire, he contributed to a fund for the general who had massacred the Indians at Amritsar. "I hate your generation," he once burst out to a much younger man, "because you are going to give it all away."
In this period of his life, however, Kipling wrote "The Gardener," a haunting story utterly bereft of his usual jingoism. In it, a heartbroken woman searches in France for the war grave of her "nephew," who is really her illegitimate son. At last a gentle cemetery gardener—who, unknown to her, is Christ resurrected—looks at her "with infinite compassion" and forgiveness.
"Come with me," he says, "and I will show you where your son lies."
But no one showed the Kiplings. Rudyard died in 1936 and his widow Carrie three years later, without finding out where John's body lay. British authorities continue to try to identify remains, and in 1992 thought they had finally found John's, erecting a headstone with his name. But several military historians argue convincingly that the identification is false and that John Kipling is still among the more than 400,000 British Empire dead from 1914–1918 whose resting place is not known.
One by one, other players left the stage. In John Buchan's postwar writing there were only one or two brief hints of doubt about the war; he revealed, for instance, that he could no longer bear to read Homer, because of the way the poet glorified battle. He never said more. Unlike his friend Kipling, however, at least a few of his ideas changed with the times: he placed great hope in the League of Nations as an alternative to war, and eventually accepted the concept of self-rule for India. Buchan died in 1940 while serving in the figurehead post of governor general of Canada, and a British destroyer carried his ashes home. Many of his novels remain in print today on both sides of the Atlantic, testimony to the lasting appeal of swashbuckling action, sinister conspiracies foiled by a bold hero, and an abiding, benevolent British Empire.
That empire slowly dissolved over the course of the century, starting with Ireland. As the bitter guerrilla warfare there grew more intense, the British cabinet came to understand that it could be ended only by some form of Irish independence, and that the mercurial John French was hardly the right person to carry on such talks. In April 1921 he was eased out of his job as viceroy, and others negotiated an agreement whereby Britain would retain naval bases and certain other privileges and the six predominantly Protestant counties of the north would remain part of the United Kingdom, while the rest of the island became the Irish Free State, in name part of the empire, but in effect a self-governing country.
Just as French's removal as commander in chief on the Western Front had been softened with a viscountcy, so now his dismissal was accompanied by an earldom. He slipped away to the south of France for a holiday with Winifred Bennett. Still believing that he was essentially a man of Ireland, where he already owned one country home, he extravagantly bought a second. But such purchases left him, as ever, short of cash, and French owed his sister money from a loan she had made while he was still speaking to her. For a few years, his mustache now turned white, he kept busy giving speeches to veterans' associations and unveiling war memorials. Cancer ended his days in 1925, not long after he sat up in his sickbed near a window to return the salutes of some veterans who had gathered outside. He would have been furious had he known that one of the pallbearers at his funeral would be Haig.
During her brother's final months, Charlotte Despard hoped for a reconciliation. Several times she wrote affectionately to "My dearest Jack," and once went to the hospital where he was being treated, but was not allowed to see him—whether on his orders or the doctor's we do not know. She remained on good terms with French's long-neglected wife, but neither Eleanora French nor her children could comprehend Despard's politics, nor why, when she arrived for visits, she called her chauffeur "Comrade Tom." To the end of her life, no cause was too radical for her. A friend once said, "I've only got to send a telegram to Mrs. Despard to say, 'Tomorrow noon I'm going to attack Battersea Town Hall,' and she'd be there, she won't ask me why."
Despite their differences, she shared one improbable faith with her brother: Despard, too, was convinced that at heart she was Irish. "I have to go to Ireland," she told a group of supporters who had gathered to celebrate her birthday. "It is the call of the blood." She settled there for good in 1921.
The following year, a fierce civil war broke out in the Irish Free State over whether in the independence negotiations its leaders had given away too much to Britain. The fratricidal fighting ended only after several thousand deaths, but many of the most radical nationalists continued to belong to an uncompromising underground faction of the Irish Republican Army, determined to unite Northern Ireland with the south and create a socialist revolution. Despard, of course, was among them. She bought a large Victorian mansion north of Dublin where IRA men on the run sometimes found shelter or stashed their arms. The police raided the building from time to time, but always took care to leave the venerable Despard alone. Black mantilla fluttering in the breeze, she still spoke at large political rallies in Ireland, England, and on the Continent. She died in 1939, at the age of 95.
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Few of the COs sent to British jails during the w
ar had ever been behind bars before, and they were shocked by what they saw. Soon after the war's end, Stephen Hobhouse took a job coordinating a comprehensive study of the nation's prisons. When his health broke down, Fenner Brockway joined him and helped complete English Prisons Today. Published in 1922, the 735-page book was an acknowledged landmark in prison reform and, among other accomplishments, helped end the infamous rule of silence. Hobhouse, living frugally but guiltily on his inherited wealth, spent the rest of his life writing on mysticism and Quaker history, and died in 1961 at 79. After the Armistice, his cousin Emily, whose convictions had helped shape his own, worked on getting relief supplies to the hungry in Germany and Austria. She died in 1926.
As the government's wartime paranoia about radicals receded, John S. Clarke was able to emerge from underground. In 1929 he began serving several years as an Independent Labour Party member of Parliament, where he successfully argued against a bill that would have imposed strict regulations on circuses. When colleagues protested that the training of circus animals required cruelty, Clarke assured them that it did not—and invited them to join him in a lion-and-tiger cage so he could demonstrate. No one took him up on this. Late in life, while serving as a member of the Glasgow City Council, he would periodically perform again. Once he had been the country's youngest lion tamer; now he was the oldest.