WHILE THE THREE condemned Bantams waited to hear if Haig would commute their sentences, they had good reason for hope. Haig had, after all, commuted nearly nine out of every ten death sentences. After his arrest, Joseph Stones had shown no foreboding in a letter to his sister: "I am sending out a few lines to say I am going on all right. I've had no time to write before.... It will soon be Christmas and I hope you all enjoy yourselves. I only wish I had been at home to make you all happy."
However, Haig made it clear that he felt there were times when the supreme penalty was fully justified. In the first weeks of the Battle of the Somme, for instance, a private named Arthur Earp was tried for leaving his post in a front-line trench. The court-martial sentenced him to death, the prescribed penalty, but recommended mercy. When the verdict reached the general commanding Earp's division, he concurred, as did the general at the next level up, the corps commander. But when the case reached Haig, at a time of soaring casualties, he was in no mood to be merciful. He confirmed the sentence. The report of the court-martial said, "The court recommend the accused for mercy owing to the intense bombardments which the accused had been subjected to & the account of his good character," but Haig underlined the phrase about bombardment and wrote, "How can we ever win if this plea is allowed?" He then ordered that this opinion "be communicated to the Corps and Divisional commanders." In army protocol, this was a stinging rebuke; each general subsequently felt obliged to write "noted" under Haig's comments.
An undercurrent of rumor drifted back to England. "Reports of large numbers of executions at the Front came to us constantly," wrote Sylvia Pankhurst, who visited the grief-stricken family of one executed soldier from London's East End. "Men often told us sadly that they had been in firing parties which had been ordered out to shoot six or seven poor fellows." As the bloody deadlock in the trenches continued, discipline became steadily tougher and each year of the war so far had seen an ominous, sharp increase in the number of British military executions, mostly for desertion: four in 1914, 55 in 1915, 95 in 1916. (The actual total is somewhat higher, for records of executions among the more than 100,000 Indian soldiers on the Western Front have disappeared.) The considerably larger German army, which we usually think of as more draconian in discipline, sent only 48 men to the firing squad during the entire war.
The army's stringent disciplinary code took no account of what was then called shell shock. Simply put, after even the most obedient soldier had had enough shells rain down on him, without any means of fighting back, he often lost all self-control. This could take many forms: panic, flight, inability to sleep or—as with Joseph Stones—to walk. "Apart from the number of people ... blown to bits, the explosions were so terrific that anyone within a hundred yards' radius was liable to lose his reason after a few hours," wrote a British lieutenant after being under mortar fire at Ypres, "and the 7th battalion had to send down the line several men in a state of gibbering helplessness." So many officers and men suffered shell shock that, by the end of the war, the British had set up 19 military hospitals solely devoted to their treatment. Senior commanders like Haig, seldom under fire themselves, grasped little of this. They thought not in terms of mental illness but merely of soldiers doing or not doing their duty.
When the death sentences meted out to the Bantams worked their way up the chain of command to him, Haig commuted the great majority. But he held Stones, Goggins, and McDonald to a more severe standard, presumably because they were noncommissioned officers. "I confirmed the proceedings on three," he wrote in his diary, "namely 1 sergeant and 2 corporals."
On a freezing January night a few days later, heavy snow covered the ground, artillery boomed, and moonlight glinted off the bayonets of guards at the farm where the divisional military police had its headquarters. A staff car pulled into the barnyard and four officers stepped out. The three prisoners were brought outdoors in handcuffs. One officer unrolled a piece of paper and, by flashlight, read aloud Haig's confirmation of the death sentences. One prisoner gasped; the other two remained silent.
Just before dawn, an ambulance picked up the three men from the farm and took them to the execution site. Manacled and blindfolded, they were tied to the stakes for which Albert Rochester had dug holes. Rochester watched as an officer pinned a white envelope over each man's heart as a target. A separate 12-man firing squad aimed at each of the three; at an officer's command the crackle of 36 gunshots rang out. To be sure the job was done, the officer approached and fired a final revolver shot into each prisoner's body.
"As a military prisoner," wrote Rochester later, "I helped clear away the traces of that triple murder. I took the posts down—they were used to cook next morning's breakfast for the police; the ropes were used in the stables."
The ambulance conveyed the dead bodies back to the barn.... I helped carry those bodies towards their last resting place; I collected all the blood-soaked straw and burnt it.
Acting upon police instructions I took all their belongings from the dead men's tunics.... A few letters, a pipe, some fags, a photo.
I could tell you of how the police guffawed at the loving terms of good cheer from the dead men's wives; of their silence after reading one letter from a little girl to "dear Daddy"; of the blood-stained snow that horrified the French peasants; of the chaplain's confession, that braver men he had never met than those three men he prayed with just before the fatal dawn; of the other cases of army "justice" I discovered.... But what's the use!
Back in Durham, Stones's wife, Lizzie, who had been supporting herself and their two young daughters on an army depen dents' allowance of 17 shillings and sixpence a week, was told that Joseph's execution meant the end of that money, and that she would not be eligible for a widow's pension. A fellow miner had promised Stones he would look after Lizzie and the girls if Stones did not return from the war. He married her, but because of the stigma of the execution, they moved away from Durham.
Never one to keep quiet, Rochester, still serving his own jail term for his unpublished letter to the Daily Mail, angrily told the military policemen guarding him that as far as he was concerned, the three men had been punished beyond all reason. He soon began to fear for his own safety. Once his sentence was up, he wondered, what if officers angry with him for denouncing their privileges assigned him to the most dangerous work, such as night patrols to repair barbed wire in no man's land?
One day in prison, however, a smuggled message reached him. "Dear Rochester," it said. "I was sorry to hear of your predicament. Don't worry, I'm taking steps to put things right." It was from the leader of the National Union of Railwaymen. A soldier from Rochester's platoon, home on leave, had got word to him that a union member was in prison, and why. Before long, news reached Rochester that his conviction had been overturned and he was to be released. His union chief had been to see the secretary for war, who was willing to do a favor for a union so crucial to the war effort.
Rochester was assigned to a new post in the crews running British military trains in France. This was not without its dangers, for railways were key targets for what he wryly called "pleasant little periods of shelling and bombing." But it was surely preferable to night patrols in no man's land. Rochester talked politics with French railway unionists, and scoffed at the grandly luxurious train of the director general of transport for the British forces: "Bath-rooms, smoke-rooms, dining-rooms; from pins to pile carpets, and libraries to slippers and champagne, it was a moving club ... of cooks, valets, sergeant-majors, and commissioned duds." He was grateful to be alive, but vowed that once he was free to do so, he would tell the story of his three fellow prisoners who had not been so lucky.
***
Befitting the unprecedented scope of the war, Lloyd George's War Cabinet was something new in British politics. It was not a subcommittee of the full cabinet, but five men entrusted with total responsibility for waging the war. Central to it was the working relationship that developed between Lloyd George and Milner, as strong as it was unlikely. The prime minister was a Liberal and his new minister without portfolio a Conservative; Lloyd George, whose impoverished father died young, had been brought up partly by his uncle, a shoemaker, while the Oxford-educated Milner moved easily among the country's elite; Lloyd George had one of the golden tongues of his era—in English and his native Welsh—while Milner was a poor public speaker, with a voice people found squeaky or reedy. A decade and a half earlier, the Boer War had bitterly divided them, but with Britain now in the battle of its life, the two men turned out to be superbly compatible. The somewhat eccentric prime minister began each morning by drinking a strange concoction of eggs, honey, cream, and port; then he, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Milner would meet at 11 A.M. with an aide taking notes; only at noon would the other members of the War Cabinet join them. Milner was in the inner circle within the inner circle.
Because Milner so lacked any common touch, Lloyd George knew that he could never become a political rival. Instead, the prime minister recognized in him a world-class administrator with an eye for talent and for cutting red tape. He gave him plenty of leeway, and Milner in short order became the second most powerful civilian in Britain. A photograph from this time shows him in a bowler hat, gloves in one hand, umbrella in the other, taking a long, purposeful stride along Downing Street, restored to power at last. As 1917 began, he drew members of his old South African Kindergarten of bright young Oxford graduates into government positions: an undersecretaryship here, a head of a bureau there; one Kindergarten member was even installed as a private secretary to the prime minister. "Milner men," as the press called them, soon filled many of the temporary huts built for an overflow of wartime office space in the backyard of 10 Downing Street, known as the Garden Suburb. The president of Milner's British Workers' League was promptly made minister of labor. Wanting to put a higher priority on propaganda, Milner promoted his longtime protégé John Buchan to a powerful new post, director of information, reporting to Lloyd George. Buchan was surely pleased, for, beneath his affable public exterior, his letters show him to have been a man of keen ambition for high office. As prodigious a worker as ever, he continued to write installments of his multivolume history of the war and his novels, naming a villain in one of them after the man who became his opposite number as propaganda chief in Berlin, Ferdinand Carl von Stumm.
As the staggering scale of British losses at the Somme sank in, the new War Cabinet began questioning Haig's costly battering-ram strategy. Lloyd George suggested sending British arms and men elsewhere, anywhere they wouldn't run up against a solid wall of German barbed wire and machine guns—to Egypt, for instance, for a drive against the Turks. Or why not to Italy, for use against ramshackle Austria-Hungary? But Haig, a shrewd infighter, proved more powerful than his nominal superiors, and saw to it that little strength was diverted to other fronts from his armies in France and Belgium.
In this sub-rosa battle, Haig's cultivation of Lord Northcliffe was crucial, for Lloyd George partly owed his position to the press baron, whose papers had praised him and kept up a drumbeat of criticism that had helped force Asquith to step down. When Lloyd George and the War Cabinet began trying to intervene in military strategy in a way that the mild Asquith had never dared, Haig turned to Northcliffe and confided to his diary that the magnate was "fully alive to his responsibility for putting Lloyd George into power," as well as "determined to keep him in the right lines or force him to resign." Nor did Haig's widely known relationship with the royal family do him any harm. "It gives me great pleasure and satisfaction," King George V wrote to him, "to tell you that I have decided to appoint you a Field Marshal in my Army.... I hope you will look upon it as a New Year's gift from myself and the country."
Haig was safe, but the first major military development of 1917 would not take place on the Western Front—or even on land.
In the previous two years, despite the millions of soldiers killed and wounded, nowhere along its entire length of nearly 500 miles had the front line moved in either direction by more than a few hours' walk. Military history had not seen the likes of this before, and the Germans were no less frustrated than the Allies.
Furthermore, the German government was battling against opponents, east and west, whose combined armies were significantly larger, and on the home front the situation remained dire. In a country already desperately short of food, abnormally severe temperatures froze rivers and canals that usually delivered coal, and millions of city dwellers, as the historian David Stevenson has put it, "endured cold and hunger unknown since pre-industrial times."
Austria-Hungary was in even worse condition, and militarily was more of a burden to Germany than the ally it was supposed to be. Its comic-opera army, rich in splendid uniforms, was weak in everything else, and its government was so inept that for the first eight months of war it had not bothered to stop a Vienna trading firm from doing a booming business selling food and medicine—through neutral countries—to the Russian army. The failure to take Verdun dashed any hopes Germany had for new frontal assaults against either the French or the British. So what was to be done? Like Lloyd George, the Germans were looking for ways around the impasse of the Western Front. And this led them to take one of the great gambles of the war.
Since the conflict began, German submarines had been sinking Allied ships by the hundreds, notoriously torpedoing the British passenger liner Lusitania in 1915. The prime targets were ships crossing the Atlantic, delivering essential food and a wide array of arms and manufactured goods Britain and France were buying from American suppliers. The Germans were wary, however, of sinking American ships, which could provoke the neutral United States into joining the Allies.
Germany's gamble of early 1917 was to declare unlimited submarine warfare, making fair game almost any vessel headed for Allied ports—including those from a neutral country. Cutting off the Atlantic supply lines so crucial to the British and French war effort, the Germans hoped, would force the Allies to sue for peace. The danger of unlimited submarine warfare, of course, was that it was certain to sink American ships and kill American sailors, therefore sooner or later drawing the United States, the world's largest economy, into the war. As reckless as this might seem, the German high command calculated that, even if the United States declared war, severing the Atlantic lifeline would strangle Britain and France into surrender in less than six months, long before a substantial number of American troops could be trained and sent to Europe. Despite its size the United States had a standing army that ranked only seventeenth in the world. In any case, how would American soldiers cross the ocean? German naval commanders were confident that U.S. troopships and merchant vessels alike would fall victim to U-boats, because Allied technology for locating submarines underwater was still so primitive as to be almost useless.
In January 1917 the Germans sank 171 Allied and neutral ships; in February, after the new declaration, 234; in March, 281; and in April, 373. Measured in tonnage, the losses were even more catastrophic: the Germans sank more than 880,000 tons of merchant shipping in the month of April alone, a pace of destruction high enough to polish off every single cargo ship on the world's oceans in less than three years. And they were managing to inflict this deadly toll with, on average, only 30 submarines on station in the shipping lanes at any given time. One out of four ships leaving Britain to go overseas, the authorities calculated, would not survive to return. Faced with these odds, the captains of hundreds of neutral vessels in British ports refused to sail.
The Germans had finally found a way to hit Britain in its stomach. In the first six months of unlimited submarine warfare, 47,000 tons of meat ended up at the bottom of the ocean, and much larger quantities of other food. Gloom over these losses dominated meetings of the War Cabinet. The U-boats, it seemed, might starve Britain more quickly than the Royal Navy blockade could starve Germany. "In five months at this rate Britain would be forced to her knees," wrote Churchill, adding, "It seemed that Time, hitherto counted as an incorruptible Ally, was about to change sides."
Nothing breeds spy hysteria like a war that is not going well. If food is short and newspapers are filled with reports of ships lost at sea, if soldiers are dying by the thousands but the front line does not move, it is tempting to believe that all this is not just the fault of the enemy but also of unseen traitors at home. British paranoia was fed by many springs, from John Buchan's fast-paced espionage novels to Christabel Pankhurst's Britannia and its shrill denunciations of treacherous Germanophiles in high positions to the aptly named Horatio Bottomley, a demagogic orator and editor who called for conscientious objectors to be taken to the Tower of London and shot.
When panic fills the air, of course, there are careers to be made, high and low, by discovering hidden enemies. England did not lack for people eager to do so, among them Scotland Yard's debonair self-promoter Basil Thomson. Unfortunately for him, bona fide German agents were depressingly rare. Despite efforts to blame factory fires or accidents on them, not a single known act of enemy sabotage took place in Britain during the entire war. And so for the ambitious spycatcher, promotions and publicity meant ferreting out homegrown subversives: typically, at one trade union meeting in Southampton in the middle of the war, two embarrassed detectives were found hiding under a grand piano.
Various government departments rushed to create intelligence units. One such bureau had been set up in 1916 by officials at the new Ministry of Munitions, on edge about a wave of strikes that rippled through factories turning out guns, shells, and other crucial war equipment in the Midlands and along Scotland's River Clyde. There were also rent strikes by Scottish women munitions workers angry over rising prices and inadequate housing.
Unlike many in ruling circles, Alfred Milner acknowledged that workers had genuine problems, including "the bullying and unscrupulousness of some employers ... and profiteering." But once these were dealt with, he believed that the government should "go for the agitators. The removal of grievances alone will not disarm them. They are out for mischief." Soon after he joined the War Cabinet, a flurry of alarmist reports from the Ministry of Munitions intelligence unit landed on his desk. "It is impossible for anybody to say at present to what lengths the coming industrial troubles may be carried," read one. "The general strike may occur." Subversives in the workforce were more prominent than ever—"30 per cent are disloyal and confirmed slackers"—because "Army enlistments have depleted the patriotic element." Worse yet, the report warned, the flood of policemen entering the army had shrunk the forces that normally could keep labor under control at home.
As the historian Sheila Rowbotham points out, the agents who penned these reports were often ex—military men who viewed those they were spying on through the lens of their own experience. Accustomed to clear hierarchies of power and orders promptly obeyed, they saw any strike as provoked by a ringleader and not by high rents or low wages. When they looked at bedraggled, anarchic groups of pacifists they imagined a strict chain of command. FBI surveillance reports on the American antiwar movement of the Vietnam era reflect the same mindset.
The militants, the Ministry of Munitions agents claimed, had devised multiple ways of spreading the signal for a strike to start: "a quadruple line of communication was used, one man going by train, a second by motor car and a third by motor cycle," while a telegram was dispatched with the coded message "Come in Chambermaids." The situation, as the agents saw it, was dire: "We are undoubtedly up against a very dangerous and mischievous organisation ... which is, in reality, an industrial revolution."
The reports that flowed to Milner and a few other officials were studded with cryptic mentions of undercover men: "F" and "B" were supplying useful information, and "V" had managed to befriend a particularly dangerous agitator. An agent code-named "George" reported on a meeting in Sheffield where one speaker said, "What the working classes will have to do, is to refuse to go on making tools for the prosecution of the war."
There were indeed many strikes in Britain at this time, but despite what Keir Hardie had hoped for, they were not directed at the war itself. Inflation was taking a toll on wages, and workers were angry at other ways employers were using the excuse of wartime to undo some of labor's hard-won gains. Still, Hardie's spirit was not dead. Even though many opponents of the war were writers and intellectuals, plenty of them came from the working class.
No Oxford or Cambridge or Bloomsbury lay in the background of John S. Clarke, for example, one man the agents were doing their best to keep an eye on. Born in poverty-stricken County Durham, home to the three executed Bantam soldiers in France, he was the thirteenth of fourteen children, only half of whom survived to adulthood. Clarke's family was in the circus. By the age of 10 he was in the ring, doing tricks while riding a horse bareback with no bridle. At 12 he went to sea, witnessing a murder on board a tramp steamer and getting knifed in a pub on the Antwerp waterfront. He jumped ship in South Africa and lived with Zulu villagers for two months before working his way home. Whenever there was no ship he felt like sailing on, he returned to the family trade. One evening, he had to fill in when a drunken fellow performer tripped over a rope and knocked himself out. That was how, at 17, he found himself in the circus ring as the youngest lion tamer in Britain.
The most dangerous thing about a lion, Clarke later wrote, was not its teeth but its claws. One ill-tempered lion seems not to have realized this, and early in Clarke's career it seized his thigh in its mouth. "I never moved, but talked gently until his jaws relaxed, and still talking, I edged away." Clarke's work with a variety of animals left many a scar on his body. Soon he was caught up in the radical movements of the day, getting arrested in 1906, at the age of 21, for taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle arms from Scotland to revolutionaries in Russia. He had little formal schooling, and essentially educated himself, giving fulsome voice to his politics in articles, pamphlets, and doggerel:
The landlord calls it rent and he winks the other eye,
The merchant calls it profit and he sighs a heavy sigh,
The banker calls it interest and puts it in the bag,
But our honest friend the burglar simply calls it swag.
After various adventures, including running a zoo, Clarke joined the small, militantly left-wing Socialist Labour Party and became an editor and writer for its newspaper, the Socialist. He and his party comrades were fiercely, uncompromisingly against the war. "You gave us war," the paper combatively declared. "We in return give you revolution." By the war's end, despite repeated raids and harassment of its printers, the paper would have a circulation of 20,000. It regularly published Clarke's attacks on the war and on industry profiteers, and also celebrated resistance in other countries, printing, for instance, the defiant speech the socialist Karl Liebknecht gave before a German army court-martial in 1916.
The newspaper's readers were concentrated in Scotland and the north of England, where party activists had led some of the strikes that left government intelligence agents so alarmed. After a friendly policeman tipped off Clarke that he was soon to be arrested, he fled Scotland and settled out of sight on a sympathizer's farm near Derby, earning his keep as a laborer while he and several others continued to edit the Socialist underground.
Derby was a center of labor militance, a city of railroad yards, coal smoke, and aging red-brick factories, with plants that made fuses and aircraft engines for the military, as well as parts for rifles and artillery pieces. Whether the spy hunters from the Ministry of Munitions were aware that the area was a clandestine base for Clarke and the Socialist we do not know. But in their hunt for subversives, they put under surveillance the very friend who almost certainly had helped arrange Clarke's hiding place. For undercover operatives looking for glory and advancement, she seemed the perfect target, combining several strands of left-wing activity in a single household.
Matronly and determined-looking, 52-year-old Alice Wheeldon supported herself by selling secondhand clothes out of the front room of a house on Derby's Pear Tree Road. She was known as a woman who brooked no nonsense: when someone once heckled her as she gave a po litical speech, she tapped him on the head with her umbrella. A railway locomotive driver's daughter, she had worked as a house servant when young and was now estranged from her alcoholic husband, a mechanic. One daughter, Nellie, helped Alice in the old-clothes shop; two others, Hettie and Winnie, in their twenties, were schoolteachers, as was Alice's son, Willie, until he was drafted in 1916. Refused status as a conscientious objector, he was now in hiding, hoping to flee the country. The whole family were longtime leftists: Alice and her two teacher daughters had belonged to the Pankhursts' WSPU until it backed the war, and, along with their friend John S. Clarke, they were members of the Socialist Labour Party. Hettie Wheeldon was also secretary of the Derby branch of the No-Conscription Fellowship. Although Winnie was married, she was, the Ministry of Munitions agents eagerly reported, a believer in free love and at one point had been an atheist.
The crucial thing, in the eyes of the agents, was that the Wheeldon family had been sheltering young men fleeing the call-up—the "flying corps," as they were known. Some draft evaders were principled left-wingers, others simply very young and very scared. "Many comrades kept an open door for men on the run," remembered one radical who knew the family well. "In Derby, the house of Mrs. Wheeldon was a haven for anyone who was opposed to the war." At the start of 1917, the Wheeldons were keeping a young socialist in the house, who, Hettie wrote to her sister, "is terrified. Sticks in all day and only emerges at night." A frequent visitor who put a gleam in the secret agents' eyes was a suitor of Hettie's, a labor agitator working as a mechanic for the Cunard shipping line in Liverpool and using contacts with radical seamen and Irish nationalists to smuggle deserters and war resisters out of England.
To a spycatcher's mind, finding a pretext to arrest the entire household would be a coup indeed. The agents began monitoring the Wheeldon family's mail. The contents of one package that Alice sent to Winnie, who lived with her husband in Southampton, included, they carefully noted, four mince pies, two pairs of socks, and a stuffed chicken. Thanks to the closely watched correspondence, we have a touchingly detailed portrait of life inside this beleaguered family, ranging from everyday human concerns (Winnie wrote to her mother fretting that her menstrual period was late) to what they read, which included socialist newspapers, the NCF's Tribunal, and George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession. Even in wartime, life for committed socialists was a life of constant reading.*
One day a Ministry of Munitions secret agent using the name of Alex Gordon turned up at the Wheeldon house claiming to be a "conchie," or conscientious objector, on the run. Ever trusting, Alice put him up for the night and confided in him her worries about the dangers facing her fugitive son. She was trying to arrange covert passage out of the country, she said, for Willie, another draft evader, and Winnie's husband, who also feared being called up. Delighted, Gordon swiftly brought in his immediate superior, Herbert Booth, introducing him as "Comrade Bert," supposedly an army deserter. Although Hettie was suspicious, Alice seems to have believed both men, who then sprang their trap.
On January 30, 1917, Alice, her daughters Hettie and Winnie, and Winnie's husband, Alf Mason, were all arrested, Winnie and Hettie at the schools where they taught. Hettie's astonished pupils watched from a classroom window as plainclothesmen in bowler hats took their teacher away. The family had always known they ran a risk for helping antiwar fugitives, but the charge now made against them left them astounded. It was that all four "did amongst themselves unlawfully and wickedly conspire, confederate and agree together ... willfully and of their malice aforethought to kill and murder." And whom were they accused of conspiring to murder? Headlines on both sides of the Atlantic screamed the shocking news: their targets were Arthur Henderson, a member of the War Cabinet, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
For a government eager to disgrace the antiwar movement, there could be no more dramatic charge. The country's attorney general himself went all the way to Derby to lay out the case against the accused at a preliminary hearing. Stunned, the four family members waited in jail for their trial to begin.
The same month the Wheeldons were arrested, the passenger liner Kildonan Castle, in better days a luxury steamer on the run to Cape Town, quietly slipped out of the Scottish port of Oban, escorted by a Royal Navy destroyer. No announcement was made in the press. On board the ship was a high-ranking delegation of British, French, and Italian military and civilian officials, 51 strong. Heading the British contingent, on his first overseas assignment since joining the War Cabinet, was Alfred Milner.
The delegation was on its way to Russia. That country had so far suffered a staggering six million war casualties, Milner estimated. Its huge, clumsy army had been repeatedly and embarrassingly beaten by far smaller numbers of German troops, who now held a wide swath of Russian territory, its grain, coal, iron, and other riches feeding the German war effort. British and French leaders were increasingly exasperated by the sluggishness of their ally. What could be done?
Running a gauntlet of German submarines, Allied ships had been delivering large amounts of equipment and supplies to Russia's Arctic Ocean ports. In two years, for instance, Britain had sold Russia 2.5 million rounds of ammunition, a million rifles, 27,000 machine guns, 8 million hand grenades, and almost 1,000 fighter planes or aircraft engines. But British military attachés saw few signs of any of these actually reaching Russia's armies in the field. Why? It was difficult to get information out of the secretive authorities, yet Russian envoys kept asking for more supplies, as well as huge loans to cover their cost. What could really be expected from Russia as a partner in the war? This group of notables was on a mission to find out.
As the ship and its escort skirted the northern edge of the European continent, lookouts watched constantly for German U-boats. All on board knew that no one could survive more than a few minutes in these icy waters. The first shock for the Allied delegation only came, however, when the Kildonan Castle arrived at Port Romanov, today's Murmansk, the single ice-free port in the Russian Arctic. Thousands of boxes of British and French munitions lay piled up on the town's docks and in vacant lots. Crates of dismantled Sopwith and Nieuport fighter planes, awaiting reassembly, sat covered with snow. While ships were delivering a daily average of 1,500 tons of supplies, it turned out that the rail line leaving the port, hobbled by equipment shortages and official corruption, could carry away only 200 tons a day.
The delegation had to take that same line to the imperial capital. Traffic crept so slowly that even this VIP train of cabinet ministers and generals, met midway by special emissaries from Tsar Nicholas II, took three days and nights to huff and wheeze the 700 miles to the city now called Petrograd. (In a fit of patriotism, Russia had rid itself of the German-sounding "St. Petersburg.") At the royal palace in Tsarskoe Selo, outside the city, escorted by court officers in full dress uniforms, the Allied delegation was presented to the Tsar. Milner delivered several letters from the Tsar's cousin King George V and two days later talked with him privately for nearly two hours. After a lunch that included the Tsarina and several of their children, Milner told his friend General Henry Wilson, the senior British military official in the delegation, that the imperial couple, "although very pleasant," had "made it quite clear that they would not tolerate any discussion of Russian internal politics."
An endless succession of silver-plate banquets, gala receptions, opera performances, and medal-awarding ceremonies exasperated the always efficient Milner. At one event, an observer noticed that he "kept throwing himself back in his chair and groaned audibly," muttering "We are wasting time!" To his dismay, toasts and long-winded speeches about friendship between the two great allies stretched one Anglo-Russian luncheon into an agonizing five hours. Some of the other delegates, however, thoroughly enjoyed themselves.*
Milner felt he got straight talk only when he met some reform-minded officials in Moscow, who spoke frankly of Russia's precarious state. Wilson, meanwhile, made a quick visit to the front lines, where he learned that, after two and a half years of war, Russian soldiers still did not have wire cutters. Expected to tear down German barbed wire entanglements by hand, some asked him whether British troops did the same. While the delegation was in Moscow, bread riots broke out in the streets. Inflation was out of control, and the government was printing new banknotes so fast they did not even have serial numbers.
So great was their fear of German spies gathering information from Russia's eminently bribable officialdom that, on their departure for home, the Allied delegates left Petrograd in the middle of the night, each person sacrificing a pair of shoes. These were left outside their hotel room doors to be polished, as if they expected to be in their rooms the next morning, rather than heading for their ship. After another slow-motion train journey, Milner sailed for England plunged into gloom. On the streets of the Petrograd he had left behind, there was an antiwar demonstration, and the British military attaché estimated that a full million Russian soldiers had deserted the army, most slipping quietly back to their villages.
Once home, however, in a most uncharacteristic burst of wishful thinking, Milner told the War Cabinet that "there is a great deal of exaggeration in the talk of revolution and especially about the alleged disloyalty of the army." Despite the railway bottleneck he had seen, he urged his colleagues to do all they could to bolster Russia with more military aid, perhaps accompanied by Allied technicians who could make sure the supplies reached the front and were used. He saw no alternative. An inept ally in the east was better than none, and if the Tsar's army did not have the weapons to keep on fighting the Germans, he reasoned, the danger of revolution would be far greater. "If an upheaval were to take place," he wrote, "its effect on the course of the war might be disastrous."