The Germans were suffering even more severely than the British during the third battle of Ypres. After the first day of a British assault on Polygon Wood, on 26 September 1917, Ludendorff wrote: ‘A day of heavy fighting, accompanied by every circumstance that could cause us loss. We might be able to stand the loss of ground, but the reduction of our fighting strength was again all the heavier.’
In Britain, questions had begun to be raised about the continuing attrition. Although the Germans were being pushed back a hundred yards here and a hundred yards there, the casualty lists were growing. On September 27 the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, wrote to Haig: ‘I confess I stick to it more because I see nothing better, and because my instinct prompts me to stick to it, than because of any good arguments by which I can support it.’ On the following day Haig wrote in his diary, ‘The enemy is tottering.’ This was his usual argument for continuing.
In the first six days of October, five successive German counter-attacks were driven off and more than 4,000 of the attackers captured. By October 5 more than 20,000 Germans had been taken prisoner. But this was at a cost of an estimated 162,768 dead and wounded. Haig’s two most senior generals, Plumer and Gough, urged him to end the offensive, but he would not do so. The British offensive was renewed on a six-mile front on October 9. One of those who took part in it, Hugh Quigley, wrote home a few days later, from hospital, about how ‘the officers told us the usual tale, “a soft job”, and I reckon it might have been easy enough if we had had a decent start. But none of us knew where to go when the barrage began, whether half-right or half-left….’
Quigley and the men with him reached their first objective, ‘a ghastly breastwork littered with German corpses’, after which he was knocked out for a while by a shell. ‘One sight almost sickened me before I went on: thinking the position of a helmet on a dead officer’s face rather curious, sunken down rather far on the nose, my platoon sergeant lifted it off, only to discover no upper half to the head. All above the nose had been blown to atoms, a mass of pulp, brain, bone and muscle.’ Apart from that episode, Quigley added, ‘the whole affair appeared rather good fun. You know how excited one becomes in the midst of great danger. I forgot absolutely that shells were meant to kill and not to provide elaborate lighting effects.’ For a short while he looked at the barrage, ‘ours and the Germans’, as something provided for our entertainment—a mood of madness, if you like’. The mood of madness soon passed. One of the men in his platoon, loaded with five hundred rounds of ammunition, ‘acted the brave man, ran on ahead, signalled back to us, and in general acted as if on quiet parade. The last I saw of him was two arms straining madly at the ground, blood pouring from his mouth, while legs and body sunk into a shell-hole filled with water.’
Then the Germans launched a massive artillery barrage, with mustard gas and high-explosive shells. ‘Before us the country seemed a mass of crawling flame,’ Quigley wrote. As they advanced, men ‘grew nightmarish, as if under a cliff of fire’. British shells, falling short, burst near groups of men trying to go forward. ‘But when the mud and smoke cleared away, there they were, dirty but untouched. The clay, rain-soaked, sucked in the shell and the shrapnel seemed to get smothered, making it useless.’ At that moment a German shell burst among them. ‘A man beside me put his hands to his ears with a cry of horror, stone-deaf, with ear-drums shattered.’ Advancing further, Quigley himself was hit by German machine-gun fire. ‘Four men carried me on a stretcher down the Passchendaele road, over a wilderness of foul holes littered with dead men disinterred in the barrage. One sight I remember vividly: a white-faced German prisoner tending a whiter “Cameron” who had been struck in the stomach. In spite of the fierce shelling he did not leave him.’ Two men carrying a wounded Highlander were hit by the explosion of a shrapnel shell. They were both killed. The wounded Highlander survived. ‘The only trouble was his being dropped into a stinking shell-hole. I came down myself once or twice, the path being so bad, but my stretcher bearers, Royal Army Medical Corps, were good stuff, afraid of nothing, and kind hearted, apologising for any jolting.’
Stretcher cases were needing up to sixteen men to carry them back across the mile of mud to the duck-board tracks and advance dressing stations.
***
On October 12, as the Allied troops drew close to the ridge at Passchendaele, heavy rain turned the fields into liquid mud. So high were the German casualties that Ludendorff was forced to divert, to Flanders, twelve German divisions then on their way to the Italian Front. So heavy was the rain, and so deep the mud, that on October 13 Haig cancelled the attack that was to have gone beyond Passchendaele. Commented one British general laconically: ‘Mud stops operations in Flanders. Snow stops operations in Italy.’ In the last five days of the battle for Passchendaele, during which Australian troops reached the outskirts of the village, 130 officers and more than 2,000 men were killed, and 8,000 injured. Many of those who died were injured men who fell into the mud and were drowned.
Among the Allies there was a greater sense of achievement after Third Ypres than after the Somme. More ground had been gained, and for fewer casualties. The dead and the wounded during Third Ypres totalled 244,897. Of these about 66,000 were killed.180
For the Germans, the Third Battle of Ypres had been a severe blow to their strength and morale. Their losses in dead and wounded were in the region of 400,000, almost twice the British. General von Kuhl, the Chief of Staff on the Flanders Front, later described the battles that culminated in Passchendaele as ‘the greatest martyrdom of the World War’ and added: ‘No division could stick it out in this hell for more than fourteen days.’
***
The American troops were still in training, their numbers growing more slowly than Pershing would have liked, the supply programme hampered by the need for the Americans themselves to construct many of the docking facilities. On October 3, during an inspection by Pershing of the 1st Division, Major Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former United States President, demonstrated an attack on an enemy trench. When Pershing exploded at the lack of competence, as he saw it, of the senior officers commenting on the demonstration, it was Captain George Marshall who intervened, to explain some of the training difficulties. All was not yet well with the army on whose shoulders a heavy burden of fighting was eventually to fall. ‘I fear that we have some general officers’, Pershing wrote to the Secretary for War, Newton Baker, on the following day, ‘who have neither the experience, the energy, nor the aggressive spirit to prepare their units or to handle them under battle conditions as they exist today.’
***
At sea, the fortunes of the Allies were mixed. On October 2, in the Baltic, the Russian Fleet refused to obey the orders of the Provisional Government, enabling the Germans to make plans to land on the two large islands in the Gulf of Riga, Dagö and Oesel. As the Germans brought troop transports up for these further landings, the crew of a Russian minelayer, the Pripyat, refused to lay its mines. In the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, however, the institution of the convoy system was showing good results for the Allies. The merchant shipping losses for September were the lowest of the year, with only 159 British, Allied and neutral ships being sunk, though 293 British merchant seamen had perished in these sinkings, a high toll. On land, the Allied powers were passing through unfortunate days. On the Isonzo and Trentino Fronts the number of Italian deserters had risen by early October to 70,000. In Palestine the Turkish secret police had broken the Jewish spy ring working for the British, and arrested one of its leaders, Sarah Aaronsohn. For four days they tortured her, but she revealed nothing. Then, on October 5, she killed herself.
Influenced by the enthusiasm and practical schemes of Sarah Aaronsohn’s brother Aaron, the British Government had begun to look with favour on the idea of replacing Turkish rule in Palestine by a Zionist entity under British rule. That summer, Lord Rothschild had given the British Government a draft formula for a Jewish National Home in Palestine, that would serve to encourage Jews in all the Allied armies to see the defeat of the Turks as an important aim. At first, the British Government moved slowly in its response. But on October 2, British Intelligence learned of a meeting in Berlin at which plans were made by the Germans and Turks to offer the Jews of Europe a German-sponsored Jewish National Home in Palestine. This stimulated the British search for a formula that would make the Allied offer to the Jews more attractive.
***
Throughout 1917 the future of the Czechs had exercised the policy-makers in Vienna and the nationalists in Prague. On August 4, as a hoped-for focus of anti-Hapsburg opinion, the French Government announced the formation on French soil of a Czech army. In Vienna, despite this inducement by the Entente, opposition remained strong to any real concessions to the national minorities. Czech national hopes had been raised by the accession of the Emperor Charles, one of whose first acts was to commute the death sentences on the nationalist leaders Karel Kramar and Alois Rasin to fifteen and ten years’ imprisonment respectively. The new Emperor, who was thirty years old in August 1917, had moved swiftly to mark the change from his great-uncle’s old order: appointing a moderate Prime Minister, Seidler; convening Parliament for the first time in more than three years; and proposing a federal system for Austria, in which the Czech lands would be autonomous. Dr Kramar was also released from prison.
Kramar was received back in Prague amid scenes of rejoicing. But the Hungarians were determined not to allow their frontiers to be altered in any way, and vetoed not only the Czech claim to Slovakia, but also the Roumanian and South Slav demands. Yet even the Hungarians were now being drawn into the web of uncertainty and chaos with which the future of the war was bedevilled. On September 19, Count Karolyi, the leader of the Hungarian Independence Party, had set out the details of a campaign designed to bring about an end to the war as soon as possible.
There was a humiliating moment for the Czechs on September 27, in Parliament, when an Austrian deputy, Karl Hermann Wolf, in reply to a Czech call for the integrity of the Bohemian lands, stated that the claims of Bohemia lay at the root of Austria’s woes. Wolf went on to say that the new Prime Minister ‘behaved with a goodness, a gentleness, a delicacy, a sweetness in which one can perhaps indulge in highly civilised circles, but which one cannot show towards tigers. In a menagerie one does not work with promises and caresses, but with the whip.’
There was uproar, and for twenty minutes Wolf could say no more, but when the noise subsided he continued in similar style. Commented the historian of Czech national aspirations, Elizabeth Wiskemann: ‘The Czechs were hyper-sensitive enough—over their “servants’ language” and their uncouthness, which amused the Viennese so much—without being likened to wild beasts.’
Civil unrest followed where parliamentary procedures had failed. During a strike in the Moravian town of Prostejov (Prossnitz), twenty-three workmen were shot dead and forty wounded when Austrian troops opened fire.
***
The Kaiser, eager to show Turkey that Germany was determined to continue the war despite the Wilhelmshaven naval mutiny, the rumblings of the Reichstag and the heavy losses in the Ypres Salient, travelled to Constantinople. He could at least point with confidence to the imminent collapse of the Eastern Front, where, beginning on October 6, more than a million Russian railway workers were on strike, making the movement of the troops to the front virtually impossible.
There were several other German successes that October. On the Western Front, a series of French attacks was beaten off. At Passchendaele, albeit with heavy losses, the German defences held and the wider British plan to advance deep into Belgium collapsed. In the Baltic, an amphibious operation was launched against three Russian islands, Dagö and Oesel, and the smaller Moon Island, with an armada of warships, including eleven battleships, and nineteen steamers for the 23,000 soldiers and 5,000 horses. The islands were defended by Admiral Altvater, but his task was made impossible by the revolutionary sailors under his command. As he later told General Hoffmann: ‘The influence of Bolshevik propaganda on the masses is enormous. I was defending Oesel and the troops actually melted away before my eyes.’ The islands were occupied and 5,000 Russian soldiers taken prisoner.
***
In German East Africa, the German forces continued to battle with the British, and prepared under Lettow-Vorbeck’s tenacious leadership to invade Portuguese East Africa: after many brushes with his enemies over a vast geographical area, he was not to surrender until fourteen days after the armistice in Europe. In the North Sea, two German cruisers, the Bremse and the Brummer, attacked and broke up a Norway-Shetland convoy, sinking nine merchant ships in just over two hours. Two British destroyers that tried to intervene, Mary Rose and Strongbow, were both sunk, and 135 of their crew drowned. That same day, October 17, the United States transport ship Antilles was sunk by a German submarine, and sixty-seven of those on board were lost.
A German submarine commander, Martin Niemöller, whose submarine was then off the coast of Morocco, later recalled those heady days. ‘On the 20th October, as night falls, we sink an unknown—probably British—steamer, near the coast, by means of a torpedo after a gunnery duel. On the 21st we have a stand-up fight with another British steamer which first comes towards us and then turns away. It is Sunday and the steamer is lucky to begin with, as she increases her distance and we have to cease firing. Shortly after noon the SS Gryfevale appears to have a hot bearing as she eases down and we are able to reopen fire. She runs ashore in the surf. After her crew have landed, we destroy her by gunfire and her remains are then not recognisable as a steamship.’181
These were German successes. There were German failures, too, that month, including the execution just outside Paris on October 15 of the 41-year-old Dutch-born dancer, Mata Hari, found guilty of spying for the Germans.182 The Times reported: ‘Mata Hari, the dancer, was shot this morning. She was arrested in Paris in February, and sentenced to death by Court-Martial last July for espionage and giving information to the enemy…. She was in the habit of meeting notorious German spy-masters outside French territory, and she was proved to have communicated important information to them, in return for which she had received several large sums of money since May 1916.’ Her real name was Margueretha Gertruida Zelle, who had been a dancer in France since 1903, when she was twenty-seven.
Four days after Mata Hari’s execution, later a carefully planned air raid against the industrial cities of northern England by eleven Zeppelins went badly awry. One Zeppelin dropped its bombs over London, four were blown off course by a 60-mile-an-hour gale and ended up over German-occupied France, one was shot down by French anti-aircraft fire at 19,000 feet, one crash landed, one fell intact into French hands and one disappeared without trace over the Mediterranean.
There was a moment of ill omen for the Germans on October 21, on the Lunéville sector of the Western Front, when the first American combat troops were attached to various French units. They were sent to a quiet sector of the front, deliberately chosen as such. The scheme was to send individual battalions, in rotation, to the front-line trenches. One American battalion captured the first prisoner to be taken by the Expeditionary Force, a German orderly who wandered into their sector by mistake.
***
On October 23, on the Aisne, the French launched a limited but sustained attack on the German positions defending the Chemin des Dames. The attack had been preceded by a six-day (and night) artillery bombardment in which one of the batteries of French 75-millimetre guns was operated by American artillerymen. The attack itself, by eight French divisions, assisted by eighty French tanks, advanced two miles across the pulverised terrain, taking 10,000 German prisoners, and depriving the Germans of an important observation point at Laffaux. Among the places captured by the French on that occasion was the Fort de la Malmaison, a former fortress which had been sold before the war to a private builder, for use as a stone quarry. Known as the Battle of the Quarries, the victory was what one historian has called ‘neat and compact and satisfying as a gift package; indeed a gift to cheer a tired and discouraged country’.183 The Germans, unwilling to face a protracted battle, withdrew from the Chemin des Dames to a lower position two miles further north.
The focus of German offensive planning was on the Italian Front, where a substantial German force had joined with the Austrians to break through on the Isonzo. It was the twelfth battle among the inhospitable high peaks, but the first whose planning, scale and pattern had been determined by the Central Powers. It began with a four-hour artillery bombardment, two hours of which was with gas shells against which the Italians had no adequate protection. The Italians, devastated by the gas, fell back in panic as much as fourteen miles. That afternoon German forces entered the town of Caporetto. For the Italians it was to be a name with shameful connotations, though their men had no means of resisting such an overwhelming assault.
Death made no discrimination among the armies: among those killed on the Isonzo that week was the 25-year-old Austrian lyric poet, Franz Janowitz. Also in action at Caporetto was Lieutenant Rommel, who on October 25 led his men to two mountain peaks, capturing 3,600 Italians as he did so. By the end of that day the German army had taken 30,000 prisoners in all, and more than three hundred guns. On the following day the Austro-German advance continued, with Austrian troops capturing Mount Maggiore. Rommel, after a twelve-mile advance, reached the 5,414-foot summit of Mount Matajur. After fifty-two hours of fighting he had taken more than 9,000 prisoners, at a cost of only six men killed.
On this third day of the Austro-German success against the Italians, Haig launched a last British attempt to take Passchendaele. ‘The enemy charged like a wild bull against the iron wall’ was Ludendorff’s comment. On October 26, the very day the final Passchendaele offensive began, hoping to avert an Italian collapse in the south, Lloyd George ordered two Western Front divisions to be sent to Italy without delay. It was too late for any immediate redress of the military balance: on October 27 the Italian army withdrew from its positions on the Isonzo. That day Mussolini, one of Italy’s most strident journalists, called for renewed patriotic zeal. For as long as the struggle continued, he wrote, ‘we must abandon the great phrase “Liberty”. There is another which in this third winter of the war should be on the lips of the cabinet when they address the Italian people, and it is “Discipline”.’ His exhortation to his readers on October 27 was: ‘Face the enemy.’ Italians must consider, ‘Not the gravity of the hour but the greatness of the hour.’
So distressed was one British liaison officer in Italy, Sir Samuel Hoare, at the widespread defeatism and anti-war feeling in Milan, and at the pro-German feeling he found in Rome, that he sought out Mussolini and obtained permission from British Military Intelligence to help finance his newspaper and to encourage outspoken articles against the Milanese pacifists. ‘Leave it to me’ was Mussolini’s comment to an intermediary who brought him the British money. From his editorial chair Mussolini continued to advocate courage, resistance, defiance and sacrifice. On the Isonzo, where the Italians had withdrawn as far south as Udine, French and British troops were hurrying to sustain their ally.
***
Everywhere the Allied armies were engaged in tremendous struggles, each one potentially decisive for the outcome of the war. It was on October 30 that Canadian soldiers finally entered Passchendaele, but their casualties were heavy and they were driven back. ‘The sights up there’, a future Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Brigade-Major Alan Brooke, Royal Artillery, wrote a few weeks later, ‘are beyond all description; it is a blessing to a certain extent that one becomes callous to it all and that one’s mind is not able to take it all in.’ At a conference addressed by Haig, Brooke recalled: ‘I could hardly believe that my ears were not deceiving me! He spoke in the rosiest terms of our chances of breaking through. I had been all over the ground and to my mind such an eventuality was quite impossible. I am certain he was misinformed and had never seen the ground for himself.’
***
In Palestine, the Turkish Eighth Army, commanded by General Kress von Kressenstein, a veteran of Gallipoli, was preparing to throw back a third British attempt to drive the Turks from the southern border of Palestine. Twice before Gaza, guarding Palestine from the south, had been attacked in vain. The third attack, however, was to be different, and not primarily on Gaza at all. It had been preceded by a two-month deception plan aimed at convincing the Turks, through false orders ‘inadvertently’ captured, that the main assault would indeed be at Gaza, as before. Three weeks before the battle, a British officer, Richard Meinertzhagen, rode up to a Turkish guard post, allowed the guards to chase him, and, just as he disappeared from view, dropped a haversack smeared with horse’s blood, to give the impression he had been wounded. Inside the haversack were carefully prepared details, all spurious, of the next attack on Gaza, and a letter from the Intelligence department advising the impracticability of an attack on Beersheba.
The main British offensive, the first in Palestine commanded by General Allenby, took place against Beersheba on October 31. The Turks, having been successfully deceived into thinking that no great attack on them was intended there, were confronted by an assault force of 40,000 men. The Turkish commander, General Ismet, was forced to throw in his reserves to meet the first assault.184 As so often in battle, luck also played its part: the newly formed Turkish Seventh Army had already left Jerusalem for the Beersheba Front, but was not yet half way there.
The first of the attackers to go into action were New Zealand cavalrymen. On the battlefield a British soldier, Corporal Collins, while carrying a wounded man to safety, bayoneted fifteen Turks who tried to bar his way back to the British lines. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. In the capture of Beersheba itself, Australian cavalrymen carried out a full-scale cavalry charge, using their sharpened bayonets as swords. Aerial reconnaissance, a branch of warfare to which Allenby paid particular attention, had revealed that the Turks were protected by neither barbed-wire or anti-cavalry ditches. Believing that the Australians were the advance guard of a far larger force, the Turks fled back into the town. The Australians followed, capturing more than a thousand prisoners.
In the aftermath of Beersheba’s capture, Gaza was also taken, the assault being preceded by a massive Anglo-French naval bombardment from off shore, with ten warships taking part. Even then the power of the Turco-German combination was not to be scorned: a German submarine moved in close to the shore and sank two of the Allied warships. But when the combined infantry and cavalry attack on Gaza came, it swept all before it, and the fortification system which it had taken von Kressenstein twenty-five weeks to build was overrun in the same number of minutes. When it was discovered that the minaret of the main mosque was being used as an artillery observation point orders were sent to the naval flotilla, and the minaret was fired on and demolished.
On entering Gaza the British troops, among them the specially-recruited Jewish soldiers of the 39th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, found a city in ruins. They also found, among the graves of the British soldiers who had died in the two previous assaults, the grave of James Bonar Law, son of the senior Conservative politician and future Prime Minister, Andrew Bonar Law. The city itself had been looted by the Turks before they withdrew. Near Huj, north of Gaza, the Turks tried to block the further British advance, using Austrian howitzers and gunners. But Allenby’s cavalry, undeterred, charged at Austrian artillery and Turkish machine guns alike. Most of the gunners, seeing the attackers thundering up the hillside towards them, limbered up and galloped away to the north. Others, realising too late that they would be overrun, and that their chance of escape was lost, ‘fired point blank’, as Allenby’s biographer Raymond Savage has written, ‘into the mass as it surged up the slope. Horses crashed disembowelled on the guns at the impact, as unflinching gunners met their death.’
Three Austrian howitzers and nine field guns were captured. Cavalry had fought and beaten artillery. The cavalry charge swept on, capturing the Turkish machine guns ‘which were then swung round to harry the retreating Turks’. Von Kressenstein and the Turkish Eighth Army fell back almost to Jaffa. The way to Jerusalem, Allenby’s goal, was open. From the fields and ditches around Gaza the bodies of the fallen victors were gathered up, and buried just to the east of the railway station, where they lie to this day: 3,000 British soldiers, an airman, a nurse and a nursing sister, a hundred Australians, twenty New Zealanders, nine British West Indians, two British officers from the Indian Army, four South Africans and two members of the Egyptian Labour Corps. The Jewish soldiers are identified by a Star of David on their tombstones. There are also 781 tombstones of men who could not be identified. A special Indian cemetery, containing forty graves, is divided into a Hindu and a Muslim section. At the military cemetery in Beersheba are 1,239 British and Dominion burials.
***
Over Britain, on October 31, the German Gothas carried out their first incendiary bomb raid of the war. The raid was not a success, little damage being done by the eighty-three ten-pound bombs which were dropped, many of which failed to ignite. Ten civilians were killed. London’s anti-aircraft guns, arranged so that each battery could alert its neighbour to the incoming bombers, drove off some of the raiders altogether and dispersed others. Of the twenty-two raiders, five crash landed on their return.
United States troops were now ready to go into action. They did so for the first time on the evening of November 2, when an American infantry battalion took over from French troops at Barthelémont. At three o’clock the next morning one of its isolated outposts was subjected to an hour-long artillery bombardment, after which a raiding party of 213 Germans, from a Bavarian regiment, attacked. The Americans were outnumbered four to one. Three were killed: Corporal Gresham and Privates Enright and Hay. One was shot, one had his throat cut, and one had his skull smashed in. The raiding party then withdrew. It had lost two of its own men killed and one deserted to the Americans, but it took back to the German lines twelve American prisoners-of-war.
The survivors of the outpost were found with ‘white, drawn faces and haunted eyes’. Pershing, on being told of the attack, wept. An inquiry decided that the American troops were not sufficiently trained and should be taken out of the line. Bitterly the local French commander, General Paul Bordeaux, cast doubt on ‘the courage and ability with which the Americans had defended themselves’. After his critical comment was challenged, General Bordeaux retracted, asking that the bodies of the three dead Americans ‘be left here, be left to us for ever’, and he declared: ‘We will inscribe on their tombs “Here lie the first soldiers of the famous United States Republic to fall on the soil of France, for justice and liberty.” The passer-by will stop and uncover his head. The travellers of France, of the Allied countries of America, who will come here to visit our battlefield of Lorraine, will go out of their way to come here, to bring to their graves the tribute of their respect and of their gratefulness. Corporal Gresham, Private Enright, Private Hay, in the name of France, I thank you. God receive your souls. Farewell!’
Seventy-five years later a British guidebook directed visitors to this very battlefield in Lorraine, to the very site of this first American offensive action on the Western Front.185
***
On the Eastern Front, war was rapidly giving way to revolution. Despite the assertion on October 16, by the new Russian Minister of War, General Verkhovski, to Colonel Knox, that ‘we will restore the Russian Army and make it in a fit condition to fight by the spring!’, Knox noted in his diary two weeks later: ‘There is evidently not the slightest hope that the Russian Army will ever fight again.’ On November 2, hoping in part that Russian Jews might be influenced to urge their compatriots to go on fighting, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, the letter from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, expressing Britain’s support for ‘a National Home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. The final discussions leading to the declaration had touched directly on how it might serve to rally patriotic feeling in Russia.
‘Information from every quarter shows the very important role the Jews are now playing in the Russian political situation,’ a senior Foreign Office official, Ronald Graham, had written to Balfour on October 24. ‘Almost every Jew in Russia is a Zionist, and if they can be made to realise that the success of Zionist aspirations depends on the support of the Allies and the expulsion of the Turks from Palestine, we shall enlist a most powerful element in our favour.’ It was arranged on November 3 that three leading Zionists, among them Vladimir Jabotinsky, would go at once to Petrograd to rally Russian Jewry to the Allied cause. ‘It is a pity so much valuable time has been lost,’ the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Lord Hardinge, wrote that day, but he was not too despondent, telling Balfour: ‘With skilful management of the Jews of Russia the situation may still be restored by the spring.’
It was too late to restore the disintegrating situation. Nothing, however attractive to a minority, or tempting in the long term, could counter the great swell of anti-war opinion. On November 3 it was learned in Petrograd that Russian troops on the Baltic Front had thrown down their arms and begun to fraternise with their German ‘enemy’. When, on November 4, the Provisional Government ordered the 155,000-strong Petrograd garrison to go the front, the Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee urged them not to go. On the following day Kerensky ordered troops outside Petrograd, whom he believed to be loyal to his government, to enter the city. On November 6 they declined to do so. A 1,000-strong women’s battalion loyal to the Government was jeered that day by the soldiers as it marched through the streets on its way to be inspected by Kerensky. That evening the Bolsheviks occupied the principal buildings in the capital: the railway stations, the bridges over the river Neva, the state bank and, most importantly, the telephone exchange.
The vast Empire stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, whose support for Serbia and whose alliance with France had been one of the catalysts of war in 1914, was in turmoil and disarray. On November 7 more than 18,000 Bolsheviks surrounded the Provisional Government ministers in the Winter Palace, defended by a mere thousand soldiers. From the naval base at Kronstadt had come more than 9,000 sailors committed to revolution. They were joined that day by nearly 4,000 more, and by nine hundred soldiers, who reached the capital on board a minelayer, two minesweepers, two steamers and five small naval vessels. That same day, two Russian destroyers arrived from Helsinki: they too announced their support for revolution.
Shortly after ten o’clock that evening, the cruiser Aurora, manned by Bolsheviks and anchored in the Neva, announced that it would open fire on the Winter Palace, and fired a few blank charges as an earnest of its resolve. By one o’clock in the morning of November 8, the Bolsheviks had overrun the Winter Palace, scattering its defenders. Lenin, elected that day Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, was ruler of the Russian capital. Trotsky became Commissar for Foreign Affairs. ‘It could not possibly last,’ the British Ambassador’s daughter Meriel later reflected. ‘Petrograd itself might perhaps be forced to submit to such a rule for a short time, but that the whole of Russia should be governed by such men was not credible.’
Not credible, and yet a reality: the six-month-old Provisional Government had been swept away as assuredly as the Tsar had been swept away before it. In Moscow, Red Guards occupied the Kremlin. Kerensky fled from Petrograd in an American Embassy car, driving to Pskov, where he hoped to rally military forces loyal to his Government. ‘He was forced to borrow a car,’ Colonel Knox noted in his diary, ‘as all the magnetos from the cars collected in the Palace Square had been stolen by the Bolsheviks during the night. He sent back a message to the American Ambassador, asking him not to recognise the new government for five days, as before that time he would return and restore order. In my opinion he will not return.’
Orders and decrees began to flow from the new source of power. The first decree on November 8 was the Decree of Peace. Lenin read it out that evening to an ecstatic crowd. But on the following day, when Trotsky asked the Foreign Ministry, of which he had just been made head, to translate it into foreign languages for immediate distribution abroad, six hundred officials, former loyal civil servants of the Tsar and the Provisional Government, resigned and walked out of the ministry building. On the following day, four million copies of the decree were sent to the front, calling for an end to all hostilities.
The war-making power of Russia, hitherto the eastern arm of the Allies, was broken.