8. AS SWIMMERS INTO CLEANNESS LEAPING

THE NEWS THAT armies were on the march spread instantly throughout the continent, from Trafalgar Square to Nevsky Prospekt. At Saint-Malo on the coast of France, a picturesque walled city in Brittany, townspeople and summer vacationers gathered somberly to hear the mayor read Germany's declaration of war. Among the crowd was a fugitive from British justice.

In the preceding months, Emmeline Pankhurst had tangled with the authorities more furiously than ever, and they had begun using a new legal tool against her. To deprive suffragettes on hunger strikes of their martyrdom, the government was applying a law called the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, which everyone immediately rechristened the Cat and Mouse Act. Any hunger-striking suffragette would be released when she became weak, allowed to re-cover, and then rearrested as many times as necessary for her to serve her sentence.

A court had sent Pankhurst to prison the previous year because one night several suffragettes had slipped into a country house being built for Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and planted a bomb, whose blast destroyed five rooms. Pankhurst had not known about the bombing beforehand but promptly gave it her enthusiastic blessing. As a result, she was found guilty of "wickedly and maliciously" inciting "persons unknown" and given three years' penal servitude.

Declaring herself to be "a prisoner of war," she repeatedly went on hunger strikes, and the government repeatedly released and rearrested her. During her most recent imprisonment she had reached a new peak of defiant fury, and was put into solitary confinement for a week, accused of insubordination, using offensive language, and striking a prison officer. Released, she was ordered to return to prison once again on July 22, 1914. Instead, pale and emaciated, she had fled across the Channel to recuperate in the company of the exiled Christabel. British officials must have expected both mother and daughter to be ardent opponents of the war; indeed, on its very eve, as ultimatums filled the air of Europe, Christabel was quick to declare that war would be "God's vengeance upon the people who held women in subjection."

But as soon as actual fighting began, everything changed: Emmeline ordered all Women's Social and Political Union activity to halt. The British government, meanwhile, unconditionally freed all imprisoned suffragettes. (The amnesty was greeted with relief at Scotland Yard's Special Branch, where it released many of Basil Thomson's agents for new duties, including the 12 who earned a bonus of three shillings a week for knowing shorthand. They had often been kept busy recording suffragette rallies.) Although the next issue of the WSPU's fiery newspaper, the Suffragette, had already been printed, Emmeline and Christabel canceled its distribution and embarked for home. As the ferry took them across the Channel to England, tens of thousands of John French's soldiers were on troop transports steaming in the other direction. Emmeline was heading toward a battle of her own—with her daughter Sylvia.

Just before the war began, Emmeline and Christabel had pushed Sylvia out of the WSPU. But the rift was about to deepen. True to her socialist convictions, Sylvia passionately opposed British participation in the war. A public clash with her mother and sister seemed inevitable.

Voices like Sylvia's were few. Even Charlotte Despard, who had spoken against "this criminal war" to a rally of more than 2,000 women on the night Britain declared hostilities, fell uncharacteristically silent; it was hard to oppose the war when her beloved younger brother was now commander in chief at the front. Keir Hardie, who continued to call the war a catastrophe, found himself jeered on the street in London. A fellow MP came upon him sitting on the terrace of the House of Commons, gazing despairingly at the Thames. Although he roamed the country speaking his mind, one comrade described him as "crumpled in body and broken in spirit." In the euphoria of mobilization, press coverage of his speeches was scanty, and few people seemed to notice when his Independent Labour Party issued a defiant proclamation: "Across the roar of guns, we send sympathy and greeting to the German Socialists.... They are no enemies of ours, but faithful friends."

Hardie faced a dilemma common to peace activists then and now: how do you oppose a war without seeming to undermine the husbands, fathers, and brothers of your fellow citizens whose lives are in danger? Occasionally he equivocated, at one point speaking of pushing German troops back across their borders. His heart went out to the families who soon started receiving tragic news from France, sometimes those who were his political enemies. After the only son of a wealthy, stridently chauvinist Conservative MP was killed at the front, Hardie wrote to a friend that he wanted "to go up to him and put my arms around his neck."

For a country that, until almost the last minute, had looked as if it might not join the conflict, the transformation was stunning. Military recruiters were warmly welcomed everywhere, as streets were cordoned off so that men waiting to enlist could practice bayoneting dummies. Newly enlisted soldiers marched off to railway stations singing. On August 1 only eight men had signed up at the army's principal recruiting office in London. Three days later, the crowd trying to get in was so large that 20 policemen were needed to force a path for the officer on duty to reach his post. Three days after that, to accommodate all applicants, the Edinburgh recruiting office had to remain open all night.

In London alone, 100 new recruits were sworn in every hour. Some two dozen plays on patriotic themes, with titles like Call to Arms, were rushed into West End theaters, and during intermissions recruiters signed up men from the audience. At Knavesmire, Yorkshire, delighted spectators filled the stands at a racecourse to watch squadrons of the Royal Scots Greys practice the cavalry charges they planned to use against German troops in France. Everywhere, recruiters found that one thing above all was certain to draw a torrent of eager men: music from a military band. Some units were so flooded with would-be recruits that they began charging an entrance fee; others had to drill with umbrellas or broomsticks for lack of rifles. Tens of thousands of men were turned away on grounds of age or health, among them the imperial-minded novelist John Buchan, who was deeply disappointed. Within a year or two, the need for soldiers would be so great that those barriers would diminish, but at the beginning men felt them keenly: when Edgar Francis Robinson, a 33-year-old London lawyer, was turned down by the army for health reasons, he shot himself.

Similar fervor was to be found around the world. In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, among the white population of South Africa and British settlers in colonies throughout the empire, men rushed to sign up, and battalions of those who were already trained began boarding ships for Europe, to support the mother country in its hour of need.

In Britain itself, labor unrest came to an almost complete halt; plans for a general strike in November were shelved; union leaders spoke at recruiting rallies and so many members of the coal miners' union joined up that the government, worrying about coal supplies for the navy, forbade more from enlisting. Emrys Hughes, a 20-year-old college student who would later marry Keir Hardie's daughter, was appalled to find a group of soldiers recruiting in his mining town in the Welsh hills. "I thought that in the Westphalian villages [of Germany] the same appeal was being made, and that the miners there would leave their homes among the hillsides ... to fight ... in exactly the same spirit."

The national mood was summed up by the 27-year-old poet Rupert Brooke, newly commissioned in the Royal Navy:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary...

Brooke would die early the next year, on board a hospital ship.

His feeling of joy and gratitude that war had come at last was echoed in Germany. The war meant "purification, liberation," said Thomas Mann, from the "toxic comfort of peace."

Gray-uniformed German troops now headed for Belgium in 550 trains a day, some with "To Paris" chalked on their sides and bedecked with flowers by enthusiastic crowds. "You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees," the Kaiser told his soldiers. The far smaller Belgian army, however, put up an unexpectedly stiff fight. Just as horse-mad as the British, the Germans had included in their invasion force eight cavalry divisions—each with more than 5,000 horses—the largest body of horsemen ever sent into war in Western Europe. But they quickly discovered that the lances and sabers of their famed Uhlans were useless against massed quick-firing Belgian rifles. Hundreds of Uhlans were shot out of their saddles. A ring of Belgian forts surrounding Liège, near the German border, further delayed the invasion until they were finally pounded into submission by giant siege guns, each so large it required 36 horses to pull. Explosions from their shells flung earth and masonry 1,000 feet into the air.

Exasperated by the resistance, the Germans soon imposed a regime of terror, in town after occupied town setting houses aflame, some with families inside. They shot Belgian hostages by the thousands on the pretext—for which there was no clear evidence—that civilians were sniping at German troops. By late August, German forces had taken the capital, Brussels, pushed the remnants of the Belgian army out of the way, and were moving, if considerably behind schedule, into northern France. Still anticipating quick victory, Kaiser Wilhelm II proposed to his generals that, after the war, Germany should permanently take over border areas of France and Belgium, clear them of inhabitants, and settle them with German soldiers and their families.

The French army proved incapable of containing the Germans flooding across the Belgian frontier, and to the southeast, an offensive of their own, where France directly bordered Germany, was disastrous. French prewar planning had centered on the mystique of the attack: great masses of men filled with élan rushing forward in shoulder-to-shoulder bayonet charges or thunderous cavalry assaults that would strike fear into German hearts. Furthermore, France's troops went into battle in the highly visible blue coats and bright red trousers that had long made them the most flamboyantly dressed of Europe's foot soldiers. At a parliamentary hearing two years earlier, the minister of war had shouted down a reformer who wanted to eliminate the red trousers. "Never!" he declared. "Le pantalon rouge c'est la France!" Cuirassier cavalrymen in tall brass helmets with horsehair plumes made conspicuous targets in a different way: they were, commented a British officer wryly, "easy to see at long distances, as the sun flashed in all directions from their shining breastplates. As the latter were not bullet-proof, it was difficult to understand their exact function." Zouave troops from France's North African colonies were easy to spot in red caps and baggy trousers of brilliant white. The French officers commanding Algerian cavalry were singled out by their bright red tunics. And in case sight was not enough to guide enemy marksmen, there was sound as well: brass bands led many French infantry units on the attack (a practice also sometimes followed by the Germans). Massive French bayonet charges stalled in the face of German machine-gun and point-blank artillery fire that left shattered body parts, still clad in red, blue, and white, littering the battlefield. In less than a month, nearly 300,000 of those well-dressed soldiers would be dead or wounded. No indication whatsoever of this toll appeared in the British press.

Meanwhile, every soldier in the British Expeditionary Force was given a personal message from Lord Kitchener, the victor of Omdurman and now secretary of state for war, an exhortation about honor, duty, and country that reflected his famous puritanism—and the army's fear of venereal disease: "Keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy."

The army Britain fielded in France was not large—when war broke out there were more soldiers on active duty in India than in the British Isles—but the men who began landing on August 9, 1914, in Boulogne and Le Havre were met with a delirium of cheers, ships' whistles, showers of blossoms and candy, and mugs of cider brought by some of the women with whom "intimacy" was to be avoided. Some troops who had served in India greeted the French in the only foreign language they knew, Hindi. Soldiers were rushed to the front by freight train and even by red double-decker London buses that had crossed the Channel with them. The positions they were ordered to defend against a much larger German attacking force were around the Belgian city of Mons, where the Germans had not yet crossed the frontier into France.

The very surroundings hinted that a new, industrialized kind of war was in the offing, for this would be the first time the British army fought in an industrial region. Enlisted men from the working class found themselves surrounded by exactly the world—blast furnaces, factories of grimy brick, drab workers' housing, coal miners emerging from underground with blackened faces—that many of them had joined the army to escape.

Sir John French caused consternation when he impulsively suggested deploying his troops not according to plans British and French generals had carefully worked out over the years, but at the Belgian port of Antwerp, where the remnants of that country's army had retreated. He was overruled, but cabinet ministers were left shaking their heads in dismay. It had not occurred to him that the sea approach to Antwerp, up the Scheldt River, required a long transit through the waters of neutral Holland. Nor, it soon became apparent, was he going to have an easy time getting along with his French counterparts. "They are a low lot," he wrote to Kitchener, "and one always has to remember the class these French generals mostly come from." Worse yet, in the excitement of leaving London for the first British military expedition to the mainland of Western Europe since Waterloo, French's headquarters left its codebooks behind.

All this made no difference to his troops. They loved the short, buoyant field marshal, who wandered around his headquarters after hours in a blue dressing gown, whistling. Their confidence in him was not shared, however, by an ambitious subordinate, General Sir Douglas Haig. "In my own heart," Haig confided to his diary just a week after the war began, "I know that French is quite unfit for this great Command." He strategically voiced the same "grave doubts," he recorded, to someone he had lunch with that day, King George V.

The British Expeditionary Force included four infantry divisions of up to 18,000 men each, and one cavalry division of some 9,000 men. Officers' swords were freshly sharpened. Because of their horses, which had to be hoisted into and out of the holds of vessels in slings, the cavalry took up a disproportionately large amount of space in ships crossing the Channel, and then trains heading to the front. Newly landed in France, his bowlegged gait visible in newsreel films, French inspected two of his infantry units, which he thought looked "well and cheery." In Paris, shouts of " Vive l'Angleterre!" came from thousands of throats when he arrived at the Gare du Nord. President Poincaré was disappointed to discover, however, that despite his name, the jovial British commander spoke little French. (The field marshal himself believed otherwise. Reportedly, he was addressing one group of French officers when he heard several of them call out, "Traduisez!" [Translate!] He tried to explain that he was already speaking their language.)

While inspecting his units, French was happy to run across men who had served under him in the Sudan, India, and South Africa. His gray mustache and ruddy face became a familiar sight as he spoke before ranks of soldiers, sometimes supporting his short, 61-year-old figure by leaning on a gold-plated walking stick. Kitchener, who was receiving intelligence on a huge buildup of German troops, peppered French with anxious messages. But the field marshal was not worried. "I think I know the situation thoroughly," he replied, "and I regard it as quite favourable to us." After dining at the Ritz in Paris, Sir John noted in his diary, "The usual silly reports of French 'reverses' were going about. All quite untrue!"

In these early weeks he remained remarkably focused on the appearance of his troops—and little else. "I saw the 4th Brigade (Scott-Kerr) file by on the march," he recorded, "—they looked splendid." Among the soldiers marching past in that unit was George Cecil. His battalion had landed at Le Havre to cheers from local fishermen, marched through sunbaked cobblestone streets, then boarded a train for Belgium. Although George doubtless would have been deeply embarrassed, his mother had written to his commander, Brigadier General Robert Scott-Kerr. She was more fearful of her son's health, Violet Cecil told him, "than I am of the bullets," and asked that an older officer keep an eye on him. "At 18 to undergo such a strain as this campaign seems to me excessive," she complained. By August 23 his battalion had moved into position among the slag heaps and coal-mining machinery near Mons—sights that were surely as exotic to him as they were familiar to many of his unit's enlisted men. German observation planes could be seen in the sky and the roads were crowded with refugees. Charged with defending a bridge, George's company pulled up paving stones to build barriers against the German attack expected at any moment. In one of the weekly letters she dutifully wrote to his father, Edward, in Egypt, Violet passed on news from George: "He said that up to date it had all been the most glorious fun."

On the other side of the English Channel, a different sort of conflict loomed. Until now, England had known Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst as the most radical of firebrands. Some weeks after the war began, however, the two of them called a large WSPU rally at the London Opera House on "The Great Need of Vigorous National Defence Against the German Peril." The theater was decorated with the flags of the Allies, including that anathema to the left, the double-headed eagle of tsarist Russia. For Christabel, it was her first public appearance since fleeing the country several years before, and the enthusiastic crowd sang "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow." Sylvia, torn and dismayed by the widening political gulf between them, was in the audience: "The empty stage was hung with dark green velvet. She appeared there alone, lit by a shaft of lime-light, clad in her favourite pale green, graceful and slender. Her W.S.P.U. adorers filed up and presented her with wreaths. She laid them in a semicircle at her feet." Militant women, Christabel told the crowd, should now turn their energy to arousing the spirit of militance in men. When someone shouted "Votes for women!" she retorted, "We cannot discuss that now." She called on the government to mobilize women for the economy in order to free men for the front.

"I listened to her with grief," Sylvia wrote, "resolving to write and speak more urgently for peace." Afterward, she gingerly went backstage to see her sister, but it felt as if "an impenetrable barrier lay between us." When their mother joined them, Emmeline and Sylvia "exchanged a brief greeting, distant as through a veil," before parting ways. From the crowd waiting outside the opera house, as divided as the Pankhurst family, rose competing cheers of "Christabel!" or "Emmeline!" and "Sylvia!"

Before an audience in Glasgow a few weeks later, Sylvia became one of the first suffragettes to speak out against the war. She also published in Woman's Dreadnought, the newspaper she had been putting out in the East End in competition with Christabel's WSPU paper, a proposal for a thousand-strong "Women's Peace Expeditionary Force" that would march under a white banner with a dove on it into the no man's land between rival male armies. She also reprinted part of a speech by the antiwar German socialist Karl Liebknecht on how imperialist rivalry had caused the war. And she was one of more than 100 British women who signed an open letter, circulated by Emily Hobhouse, addressed to German and Austrian women. "Do not let us forget our very anguish unites us.... We must all urge that peace be made.... We are yours in this sisterhood of sorrow."

The other two Pankhursts took quite a different path. With the full blessing of the British government, Christabel set off on a six-month lecture tour of the United States, aimed at persuading Americans to join the war on the Allied side. Emmeline, meanwhile, took to the lecture circuit in England, putting the power of her commanding presence behind the war effort. "I want men to go to battle like the knight of old," she demanded, "who knelt before the altar and vowed that he would keep his sword stainless and with absolute honour to his nation." In Plymouth she told a cheering crowd, "If you go to this war and give your life, you could not end your life in a better way—for to give one's life for one's country, for a great cause, is a splendid thing."

For someone who, only two years before, had thrown rocks through the windows of 10 Downing Street and talked contemptuously of war as something male, this was the most dramatic of transformations. Scarcely less astonishing was the ferocity of the split within a family that for years had campaigned and gone to jail together and, in the case of Emmeline and Sylvia, shared the excruciating hardships of prison hunger strikes. What accounts for it?

Sylvia's antiwar stance was certainly of a piece with her socialist politics and with the beliefs of her former lover, Hardie, but her mother's newfound ardor as a British patriot was more mysterious—and, indeed, it shocked many of her WSPU followers. One reason for Emmeline's war fervor was undoubtedly personal: as a teenager, she had spent several years at a girls' school in Paris, gaining a lifelong love of all things French and a suspicion of Germany. But beyond any such feelings and the tribal allure of wartime patriotism lay another motive for her and Christabel's volte-face. To embrace the war wholeheartedly, and publicly place themselves at the service of the British government, was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leave the political fringe where their unpopular campaign of rock throwing and arson had put them and step into an honored position at national center stage. In this grave crisis, they knew, the government would be delighted to have the country's most conspicuous dissidents rally round the flag. And, to give them their due as political crusaders, they surely also knew that doing this could bring them closer to their great goal of winning women the vote.

In late 1914 it was easy enough for a reasonable person to support a war against Germany, which seemed bent on dominating Europe. Stopping Germany might seem a moral imperative, albeit a tragic and regrettable one, given the inevitable bloodshed. Millions of quite un-militaristic people in Britain felt this way. But now that Emmeline and Christabel had decided to back their country's war effort, to do so with the slightest ambivalence or nuance was for them unimaginable. Theirs was a world of good and evil, with neither subtleties nor paradox, and they had only withering scorn for anyone who didn't agree with them. In the next four years they would take their full-throated vehemence to lengths that would startle even their allies.

When the family divided, no one suffered more than Sylvia, for whom her mother's new patriotic zeal seemed a betrayal of everything the Pankhursts had once believed in. To Emmeline, of course, what was deplorable was Sylvia's position—which she shared with her exiled sister Adela in Australia: "I am ashamed to know where you and Adela stand," Emmeline wrote to her daughter. They would seldom communicate again.

For weeks after the war began, the British public read few details about the actual fighting. Many people simply went about their business as if it were peacetime; Charlotte Despard, for example, noted in her diary having "tea and conversation" with Mr. and Mrs. Gandhi at a London hotel. The first real news came like lightning flashes in a darkened sky on August 30. In a special Sunday edition of the Times, its correspondent wrote of

a retreating and a broken army.... Our losses are very great. I have seen the broken bits of many regiments.... Some [divisions] have lost nearly all their officers.... The German commanders in the north advance their men as if they had an inexhaustible supply.... So great was their superiority in numbers that they could no more be stopped than the waves of the sea....

To sum up, the first great German effort has succeeded. We have to face the fact that the British Expeditionary Force, which bore the great weight of the blow, has suffered terrible losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement. The British Expeditionary Force has won indeed imperishable glory, but it needs men, men, and yet more men.

That final paragraph had actually been written by the nation's chief press censor, and it had just the effect he intended: over the next two days alone, recruiters swore in 30,000 new volunteers.

British soldiers, George Cecil among them, first came under heavy German fire at Mons on August 23. Faced with infantry attacks and a colossal rain of artillery shells, Sir John French ordered his troops to withdraw after a day in which the British suffered 1,600 dead and wounded. Many a single hour later in the war would claim far more casualties than that, but to the newly arrived army, the toll was unexpected and staggering. Since transport was mostly horse-drawn, the battle also left fields and roads strewn with panicked, wounded horses. For the next 13 days, the British did little but retreat through the scorching summer heat—a chaotic, precipitous flight back across the Belgian border, through northern France, and finally to the southeastern outskirts of Paris. Soldiers slept a few hours a night, if at all, by the roadside or in farmers' barns. Desperate to get rid of anything that slowed them down, officers ordered the disheartened troops to abandon excess equipment and supplies; pursuing Germans were thrilled to come upon large piles of ammunition, new boots, canned food, clothing, sides of beef. The long retreat was one of the most drastic in British military annals.

While it was under way, French repeatedly squabbled with his subordinates. "Sir John as usual not understanding the situation in the least," wrote his deputy chief of staff in his diary. "A nice old man but absolutely no brains." He spent comparatively little time at his headquarters, leaving its officers frustrated as he dashed about by car or on horseback, seeking the personal contact with soldiers that he craved. "I met the men and talked to them as they were lying about resting," French recorded. "I told them how much I appreciated their work and what the country thought of them.... The wonderful spirit and bearing they showed was beyond all praise—½ a million of them would walk over Europe!" Nothing daunted the field marshal, not even news of new German divisions appearing nearby. He remained almost farcically ebullient in the face of disaster: "Perhaps the charm of war lies in its glorious uncertainty!"

No one on either side was prepared for the fighting's deadliness. Like the British, recent German and French experience of war had been of minor colonial conflicts with badly armed Africans and Asians: Erich von Falkenhayn, soon to be chief of the German general staff, had helped suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China, and Joseph Joffre, the French commander in chief, had led an expedition across the Sahara to conquer Timbuktu. Neither side had spent much time on the receiving end of fire by machine guns or other modern weaponry. The new generation of long-range, fast-loading artillery, for instance, could leave your troops under a downpour of shells from guns miles away and out of sight. "Louder and louder grew the sound of the guns," wrote one British officer of the German attack, "...under a sky of brass, shaking with the concussion of artillery, now a single heavy discharge, then a pulsation of the whole atmosphere, as if all the gods in heaven were beating on drums the size of lakes." Even as they rolled back the British, the Germans, too, seemed totally surprised by the effect of massed fire from clip-loading repeating rifles directed at them. The 15 rounds a minute these weapons could fire took a fearsome toll among dense rows of troops. "The Germans just fell down like logs," remembered a British soldier of one skirmish.

Worrying about her brother, Charlotte Despard tried to see the news from France in the best possible light: "It is with keen admiration but a constriction of heart that I read of my Jack's splendid despatch of the retreat," she wrote in her diary. British cabinet members, on the other hand, saw nothing splendid and felt that French had retreated farther and faster than necessary. They were shocked to find that the field marshal now wanted to pull back more than a hundred miles from the line of battle, to refit and reorganize his battered divisions. French's compassion for his bloodied and exhausted men had overwhelmed his already limited sense of military strategy. To withdraw from the front now would leave a desperate France feeling abandoned by its ally at its moment of greatest danger. Kitchener hastily boarded a British cruiser

for an urgent meeting with his erratic commander at the British embassy in Paris.

Kitchener's post as secretary for war had traditionally been occupied by a civilian. But in this time of need, Alfred Milner and other influential figures had quietly maneuvered a reluctant prime minister into giving the job to the hero of Omdurman, regarded as the country's greatest living military man. It was the first time a serving soldier had been in the cabinet in more than 250 years. French felt threatened by Kitchener, with whom he had never been close, and was insulted that Kitchener wore his field marshal's uniform to Paris—undermining, as French saw it, his own authority as field commander. During a contentious meeting, Kitchener bluntly forbade French to remove his troops from the battlefront.

As dismayed Britons tried to absorb the disastrous news from France, a curious rumor swept the country. This retreat would not matter, because Russians—hundreds of thousands of them, millions of them—were coming to Britain's aid. They had been seen, in vast hordes, pouring off ships at night, filling hundreds of trains which secretly whisked them through England to the Channel ports. They sang, played balalaikas, sported fierce beards, wore fur hats, and called out for vodka in deep voices; their rubles had jammed the slots of railway station vending machines built for pennies; they still had the snow of Russia on their boots. The rumors were so persistent and convincing that a German spy in Scotland urgently reported to Berlin that Russian soldiers had landed at Aberdeen; he himself had seen them heading south in high-speed trains with window blinds drawn.^*

The British reverses were especially painful for those who felt their country should not be fighting at all. None of them wanted a German victory; but, few as they were, they felt the war would not be worth the high casualty counts that seemed certain to come. One distinguished dissenter was 42-year-old Bertrand Russell, a Cambridge logician and mathematician. Not only was the pipe-smoking Russell his country's best-known philosopher, but his broad forehead, aquiline nose, piercing blue eyes, ramrod posture, and arresting shock of hair, now turning gray, made him one of the most striking-looking philosophers of all time. A young woman who fell in love with him wrote to him about "your heathery hair ... looking robustious and revolutionary"; decades later, in her memoirs, she recalled that Russell's hair "seemed almost to give off sparks like a heath fire."

The grandson of a prime minister, whose earldom he would eventually inherit, Russell explored the abstruse heights of theory—his greatest work, the co-written Principia Mathematica, takes 347 pages before reaching a definition of the number 1—but he also wrote fluently and widely for the general public. Over his long life dozens of books flowed from his pen as easily as letters: a popular history of philosophy still read today, collections of essays, a sprinkling of fiction, volumes about China, happiness, politics, socialism, and educational reform. He denounced conventional marriage but had an irresistible attraction for women (one came all the way from the United States to pound on the door of his flat); he hated organized religion but felt moments of spiritual ecstasy; he came from the ruling class yet spent most of his life on the political left. During this greatest crisis of his generation, he loved his country deeply but believed from the start that the war was a tragic mistake.

Part of Russell's intellectual bravery lay in his willingness to confront that last set of conflicting loyalties. He described himself poignantly in the autumn of 1914 as being "tortured by patriotism.... I desired the defeat of Germany as ardently as any retired colonel. Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess, and in appearing to set it aside at such a moment, I was making a very difficult renunciation." What left him even more anguished was realizing that "anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population.... As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling [he as yet had no children], the massacre of the young wrung my heart."

Over the more than four years of fighting to come, he never yielded in his belief that "this war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side.... The English and French say they are fighting in defence of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta." He was dismayed to see two-thirds of Cambridge and Oxford undergraduates enlist in the war's opening months, their powers of reasoning "swept away in a red blast of hate." These convictions, expressed in an unceasing blizzard of articles and speeches, would soon land him in the forefront of a slowly growing antiwar movement, while losing him old friendships, his Cambridge lectureship, and his passport. Eventually, they would put him behind bars.

Antiwar beliefs were severely tested by the mass patriotic hysteria of the war's first months. "One by one, the people with whom one had been in the habit of agreeing politically went over to the side of the war," as Russell put it, "and as yet the exceptional people ... had not yet found each other." How hard it was, he wrote, to resist "when the whole nation is in a state of violent collective excitement. As much effort was required to avoid sharing this excitement as would have been needed to stand out against the extreme of hunger or sexual passion, and there was the same feeling of going against instinct."

While dissenters like him tried to make their voices heard against the torrent, generals and cabinet ministers feverishly debated strategy, and men thronged recruiting stations, messages from the War Office were reaching thousands of British homes. On September 8, 1914, Violet Cecil received the news that, following an infantry battle in a French forest, her son George was reported wounded and missing.