At the Cavalry Club on Piccadilly, he often dined with his old friend Douglas Haig. Both men lived in a world of comfortable certainties: of ranks of cavalry trotting smartly on parade with boots polished to a high gloss, of the nobility of Britain's imperial mission, of their own guaranteed steady rise through the army's senior ranks. Haig, naturally, was a comrade-in-arms in the great battle to restore the lance, testifying before a high-level commission, "I am thoroughly satisfied from what I have seen in South Africa that the necessity of training cavalry to charge is as great as it was in the days of Napoleon." In print, Haig attacked a skeptic who dared question the usefulness of a cavalry charge in the age of the machine gun and the repeating rifle. It was as strong a tactic as ever, Haig was certain, since the "moral factor of an apparently irresistible force, coming on at highest speed ... affects the nerves and aim of the ... rifleman." The horse, after all, had been central to warfare since the earliest recorded history, a position of dominance unshaken by every advance in weaponry from the crossbow to breech-loading, rapid-firing artillery. Why should it not remain central in the next war?
Haig played polo for his old regiment's team, befriended wealthy and influential people like the banker and racehorse breeder Leopold de Rothschild, and served as aide-de-camp to King Edward VII, who in due course would give him a knighthood. He also formed a lasting bond with someone of his own generation, the Prince of Wales—the future King George V, who had spent more than a decade of his youth in the Royal Navy and took a great interest in military matters. Even though Britain's was a constitutional monarch with little direct power, his voice carried weight in the making of key military appointments, so being in royal favor could be of crucial help to an officer's career. Well aware of this, Haig never failed to note in his diary, after dinners and banquets, whenever he sat next to, or across from, the King. In 1905, when he was on leave, Edward invited him to Windsor Castle the week of the Ascot races, and Haig found himself playing golf with the Honorable Dorothy Maud Vivian, a lady in waiting to Queen Alexandra. He proposed to the well-placed Dorothy within 48 hours. "I have often made up my mind on more important problems than that of my own marriage in much less time," he would later say. The couple were married in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, a privilege apparently without precedent for someone not a member of the royal family.
Haig then returned to his current post as inspector general of cavalry in India. As he traveled about the subcontinent in a special railway car, every crease and campaign ribbon in place on his uniform, he established a new cavalry school and pushed the Indian mounted regiments through a rigorous training schedule, including mock combat designed to mimic the great cavalry battle that, military theorists agreed, would open the next war. In his 1907 book, Cavalry Studies, Haig declared that "the role of Cavalry on the battlefield will always go on increasing," thanks, in part, to "the introduction of the small bore rifle, the bullet from which has little stopping power against a horse."
Except in the distant, always troubled Balkans, Europe had been enjoying nearly half a century of peace. But there were disturbing undercurrents, even beyond the escalating naval arms race. Most ominous was the existence of a pair of rival blocs, tightly tied together by mutual security treaties, which virtually guaranteed that, should an armed clash break out between two countries, others would be sucked in as well.
Fifty percent larger in land area than today, Germany was the continent's economic powerhouse and was closely allied with the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, where a German-speaking elite in Vienna dominated an array of restless ethnic groups. France, where nationalists still smoldered over the mortifying loss to Germany of the border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, had made a treaty with the vast, unstable empire of Tsar Nicholas II. The Franco-Russian alliance inflamed German paranoia, since both countries bordered Germany, promising that the next war would be a two-front affair. Moreover, Russia's economy was expanding rapidly and its railway network, critical for moving troops to the front, was the fastest-growing in the world. German generals and politicians feared its population—more than twice Germany's—and its huge army, which, completely mobilized, could reach an intimidating six and a half million troops. For more than a decade, some German generals had quietly talked of launching a war against Russia before its power grew too great.
Periodically, Germany needled its rival to the west, France. In 1904, as the last colonial spoils in Africa were being divided up, France made a secret treaty with Spain sharing Morocco between them; the following year, the German Kaiser visited the territory, and from his yacht declared his support for Moroccan independence. It took a months-long international conference of colonial powers to calm the roiled waters.
No formal alliances bound Britain, but a looser set of understandings left no doubt that if the country did join hostilities, it would be on the side of France, and therefore of Russia too. The British government on no account wanted the Germans in control of the continental side of the English Channel, the crucial narrow-necked funnel through which ships going to or from London and many other English ports passed. For this reason Sir John French and other high military officials regularly talked with their counterparts in France about plans for what he believed was the "eventual certainty" of war with Germany. Then, at last, great cavalry charges would strike fear into the German army, while the Royal Navy's powerful battleships pounded German vessels and ports to smithereens.
While French, Haig, and other officers waited for the next conflict to start overseas, another war seemed to be breaking out on the very streets of London. And those waging it were, of all people, women.
Take, for example, the crowd that surged into Parliament Square on a cold, rainy February 13, 1907. To the tune of "John Brown's Body," some 400 women, marching four abreast, lustily sang:
Rise up women! For the fight is hard and long,
Rise in thousands, singing loud a battle song....
Leading the march was none other than French's sister. "I asked myself," Charlotte Despard wrote this year, "'Can this be the beginning? Is this indeed a part of that revolutionary movement for which all my life long I have been waiting?'"
The cause was votes for women, and into it, with the thrill of a new love affair, Despard poured all her energy. To many horrified Englishmen, the new movement did indeed seem revolutionary. Foreigners and the lower classes could always be expected to cause trouble, but women? A double line of policemen was waiting in front of the Parliament buildings while to one side the horses of "London's Cossacks," as the mounted police were known, neighed impatiently.
On similar occasions in recent months, the police had been reluctant to arrest the sister of a famous war hero, and so today Despard had taken the precaution of not wearing her trademark lace mantilla. Instead she donned a "motoring hat," tied on with a headscarf, meant for a woman to wear in an open automobile. As she strode down the wet pavement her face was further disguised by a long veil. When the women, brandishing umbrellas, came up against the phalanx of police, a younger marcher cried out in alarm, seeing Despard squeezed between officers on horseback. "I'm quite safe," Despard yelled back. "I love horses!" To intimidate the crowd, the policemen made their mounts rear. "The women began to fight like tigers and they received and inflicted many bruises...," reported one newspaper. "A dense mass of people swayed and heaved." Some younger women tried to surround Despard protectively, but she angrily waved them off. Amid the shouts of women knocked down and the clatter of horses' hooves on the pavement, a constable grabbed at Despard, ripping off her coat sleeve. Finally, much to her satisfaction, she was arrested, and, along with more than two dozen other women, sentenced to jail. As the leader of the march, she received a longer term than most of the others: 21 days in solitary confinement.
Two days later, her brother was at the Savoy Hotel to chair the officers' banquet that took place each year on the anniversary of the Kimberley cavalry charge—and he was n
ot happy. "If she insists on joining in with these people she must expect it," Sir John told the press. "We have tried all we could to keep her from mixing up with these foolish women.... I wish she wouldn't do these things, but I can't prevent her."
Progressive Britons had long called for women's suffrage, but only in the new century had the cause caught fire. Activists were eager to have the well-known Despard in their camp, and the previous year she had been recruited by a new organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, or WSPU, and began traveling the country giving speeches on its behalf. She called for equality for women not just at the ballot box but in the workplace and in pensions. She even demanded wages for housework. When working-class women finally flooded the country's polling booths, Despard believed, the socialist state she had long dreamed of would burst into being. And just as soldiers form strong bonds in war, so in this new kind of battle Despard felt an electric excitement and solidarity. "I had sought and found comradeship of some sort with men," she wrote. "I had marched with great processions of the unemployed.... [But] amongst all these experiences, I had not found what I met on the threshold of this young, vigorous Union of Hearts."
The "young, vigorous Union" she had joined was, however, less of a mass movement than it appeared, for the Women's Social and Political Union was by no means democratically controlled by its thousands of members; rather, the organization was run by one family, the formidable Pankhursts. They brought to their cause flamboyance, fervor, and daring when it came to tactics, and a knack for infuriating friends as well as enemies, all of it unmatched in British politics in this era—indeed, in politics almost anywhere.
Emmeline Pankhurst had been widowed at 40, when her older, lawyer husband died suddenly, leaving her with debts to pay off and four children under the age of 18. She accepted money from friends, and took a job as registrar of births and deaths in a working-class district of Manchester. The work proved eye-opening, as it included tabulating the many illegitimate births to poor women raped or seduced by older male relatives. As a member of the Manchester school board, she was outraged to discover that teachers were paid more if they were male. "I began to think about the vote in women's hands," she wrote, "not only as a right but as a desperate necessity."
When the Boer War broke out, she and her children were outspoken in condemning Britain as the aggressor. As a result, her son Harry, whose health was fragile (he would die of polio at 20), was attacked after school and knocked unconscious. A schoolmate flung a book in the face of her youngest daughter, Adela, and a fellow student of another daughter, Sylvia, threatened to break the windows of their house. Already, the Pankhursts were anything but armchair radicals.
When, a few years later, Emmeline formed the Women's Social and Political Union, its membership was limited to women, and its leadership, it seemed, to Pankhursts. Emmeline and her three daughters, for example, were four-fifths of the WSPU's five-woman speakers' bureau. They militantly carried the gospel of votes for women, now, to debating societies, labor unions, and mass demonstrations. When Charlotte Despard was arrested in that 1907 march on Parliament, so were Emmeline and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia.
Approaching 50, Emmeline Pankhurst moved into the public eye as a powerful speaker who seemed made for the stage. The voice with which she rallied crowds, one friend remembered, was "like a stringed instrument in the hand of a great artist ... from which sprang all the scorn, all the wrath, all the tenderness in the world." Her words seemed to come straight from her heart, for she never spoke from notes. An ethereal, delicate beauty that can be seen in photographs of her as a young woman had now turned into a steely middle-aged majesty. Her authoritative presence was somehow only emphasized by her modest, almost fragile-looking stature and impeccable dress. Also indisputably feminine, in traditional terms, was her favorite hobby, sewing. In another ladylike touch, she disliked saying how old she was—and on at least one occasion refused to do so in court. While in the dock at one trial, she held a bouquet of flowers.
Christabel Pankhurst, the oldest daughter and her mother's favorite, also appeared the picture of elegance; her lithe figure and dreamy, silent-film star's good looks surely helped her win headlines. "She was slender, young, with the flawless colouring of a briar rose," wrote the middle daughter, Sylvia, "and an easy grace cultivated by her enthusiastic practice of the dance." Like her mother, Christabel usually wore one of the huge women's hats of the period, with a precarious array of feathers, ruffles, lace, and artificial flowers that was so top-heavy the whole assemblage often had to be anchored in place with a ribbon tied under the chin—all the more necessary if you were expecting to be rudely dragged off to a paddy wagon. As the WSPU's chief tactician, she plotted such actions as driving a furniture mover's truck to the entrance of the House of Commons and then flinging open its doors so that some two dozen women could burst forth and rush the building. At Christabel's instigation, women infiltrated all-male meetings of the ruling Liberal Party: they hid underneath the speakers' platform, rappelled down from skylights, climbed through windows, always shouting "Votes for women!" The Pankhurst family had declared war, and a new style of battle was born—radically different from the war many Britons thought their country should be preparing for, with Germany.
In contrast to her older sister, Sylvia Pankhurst, with her prominent nose, slightly bulging cheeks, and heavily lidded eyes, was not one to fit conventional images of beauty. Heedless of her appearance, she paid no attention to fashion and never wore makeup. "She was one of those people whom it was impossible to keep tidy; her hair was always tumbling down," remembered a colleague. "One day I ... noticed that she had her blouse on inside out. I got her behind some packing cases and helped her change it." Sylvia wrote prolifically and also studied art in both England and Italy, putting her skills to work designing suffrage posters, banners, calendars, and a medal for women who had gone to prison for the cause. Ultimately she would spend more time behind bars than anyone else in this oft-arrested family.
When they weren't in jail, the Pankhursts and their followers sometimes appeared at demonstrations in prison uniforms—surprisingly demure long skirts, white caps, and white aprons. On other occasions they wore the WSPU colors: white dresses decorated with green and purple, meant to signify, respectively, purity, hope, and dignity. On an American speaking tour, Emmeline displayed the colors by wearing a necklace of pearls, emeralds, and amethysts.
In the long run, larger and more moderate suffrage groups would be more responsible for actually winning women the vote. But the Pankhursts contemptuously dismissed all other activists, and, in the stormy decade before 1914, they and their confrontational politics edged the others out of the spotlight. Although it was the right-wing Daily Mail that scoffingly coined the term "suffragette," Pankhurst followers proudly adopted it as their own. "We are soldiers engaged in a holy war," Emmeline declared after one arrest, "and we mean to go on until victory is won."
This holy war, however, appeared to threaten Britain as a military power. Not only had Emmeline Pankhurst been a vocal opponent of the Boer War, but she now implied that all war was the mere byproduct of male stupidity. "We leave that to the enemy," she declared to a mass meeting at the Royal Albert Hall. "We leave that to the men in their warfare. It is not the method of women." If women won the vote and followed her lead, would the country still be able to fight its wars?
Many feared it would not be. Among them was Rudyard Kipling, now living in a majestic sandstone house bristling with chimneys in the Sussex countryside, who often spoke of the inevitable "Great War" to come. Member of an anti-suffrage league, he was convinced that the suffragettes were dangerously weakening the empire's martial spirit. "I wish that a sensible suffragette (if there be one)," he wrote to a friend, "could hear how much and how confidently the Germans count on the 'feminism' of England.... And confidence is an ill weapon to bestow on a possible enemy."
Women had no role in politics, he firmly believed:
And Man know
s it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him Must command but may not govern—shall enthrall but not enslave him.
For someone whose writing was so widely loved, the poet and novelist was a man of many dislikes. Among them were Germans, democracy, taxes, labor unions, Irish and Indian nationalists, socialists, and, near the top of the list, the women he called "suffragines." Women were fated for the gentle role of wives and mothers to Britain's fighting men; enfranchising them would only open the way to further horrors, Kipling feared, such as women becoming ministers and bishops. When family and guests played charades, the Kiplings' young son, John, would mockingly pantomime a "suffragine."
A friend once described Kipling as "a short, wiry, alert man with steely blue eyes peering through his spectacles under bushy eyebrows and bald head, firm chin poked forward. His glasses were part of him, as headlights are part of a car." Central to the writer's life were his beloved children, John, Elsie, and the eldest, Josephine, for whom he began writing the Just So Stories, which would become a part of so many British and American childhoods. Along with his unmatched ability to imagine himself into the mind of a child went a love for everything military: one family photo shows a grinning four-year-old John Kipling shouldering a rifle taller than he is.
Kipling played with his children endlessly; he and his American wife, Carrie, were indulgent, hands-on parents, quite different from the conventional image of emotionally distant upper-class Edwardians, content to put all child care in the hands of a nanny. His love for his children was all the greater because of the devastating impact of losing the six-year-old Josephine to pneumonia on the eve of the Boer War. The affectionate letters he wrote to John and Elsie are sprinkled with spontaneous poems and limericks, with even parental admonitions couched gently: a drawing of a toothbrush and set of teeth to remind John to brush his, and some friendly joshing of John's erratic spelling: "Howe wood yu lick it if I rote you a leter al ful of misspeld wurds?" When John worried that his nearsightedness, apparently inherited from his father, might prevent the naval career he dreamed of, Kipling wrote, "Don't you bother too much about your eyes. They will come all right"