18. DROWNING ON LAND

IF THERE WERE ever a war that should have had an early, negotiated peace, it was this one. Before the conflict began, the major powers may have been in rival alliances, but they had all been getting along reasonably well, exchanging royal visits, not squabbling over borders, and trading heavily with one another, and their corporations were investing in joint business ventures together. Could there ever have been a more improbable chain of events than the one from the assassinations at Sarajevo to an entire continent in flames a mere six weeks later? And why, in that case, could it not be undone?

The tragedy was that no one could come up with a peace formula that satisfied both sides. "No indemnities" attracted the Germans—but not France or Belgium, which had seen thousands of square miles of their territory reduced to charred rubble and tens of thousands of their citizens rudely conscripted to work in German war factories. Withdrawal of troops from occupied land appealed to France, Russia, Italy, Serbia, and Belgium, all of which were partly, wholly (Serbia), or almost wholly (Belgium) occupied, but not to Germany or Austria-Hungary, whose troops were fighti ng almost exclusively on enemy territory, much of which German expansionists yearned to acquire permanently. Restoration of colonies to their prewar owners—another ingredient of some peace plans—appealed to Germany but not to Britain, France, Belgium, and South Africa, battling their way to control of Germany's potentially lucrative African possessions. On top of this, for the Allies the humiliation and suffering of being occupied, for the Central Powers the experience of being half starved by the blockade, and for both sides the unrelenting high-pitched propaganda that portrayed the enemy as unparalleled monsters, left the general public in all the warring countries—save Russia, now deep in revolutionary turmoil—so filled with rage at the other side that negotiations seemed politically unthinkable.

A further obstacle, one that accompanies many wars, also loomed. Men had been maimed and killed in such unimaginable numbers that any talk of a compromise peace risked seeming to dishonor them and render their sacrifices meaningless. Or this, at least, was the feeling when there still seemed hope of victory. But could that change if the Western Front deadlock continued and victory—for either side—came to seem impossible? Then, at last, might public opinion see the madness of the war? Especially in Britain, where they were most numerous, this was the hope that peace activists clung to.

The next attempt to break the stalemate on the Western Front came from France, which in April 1917 launched a major attack. It failed spectacularly: in the space of a few days, 30,000 French soldiers were killed and 100,000 wounded, gaining a few miles in one spot and in some places nothing at all. It was the Battle of the Somme all over again; the only thing different was the nationality of the troops being mowed down.

What followed, however, was something new: a rash of mutinies—the high command preferred the term "collective indiscipline"—that swept through the French army. Troops resting in reserve areas refused orders to return to the front, sang "The Internationale," and flaunted the red flag. One group of soldiers hijacked a train and tried to drive it to Paris. An infantry regiment took over a town and refused to move. Troops in a few units even elected soviets. Rebellions broke out in more than 30 divisions. It was not that troops deserted entirely, as in Russia; indeed, many of the mutineers stayed at their posts in the trenches, simply refusing to take part in suicidal new attacks. Clearly, though, the French army was almost paralyzed. The high command had to tell its British allies what was happening, in strictest confidence. Haig went to Paris, met with French leaders, and in his obdurate way insisted that attacks must continue. But he was worried: "Revolution is never very deep under the surface in France," he wrote to the secretary for war in London. "The crust is very thin just now."

The French general who ordered the ill-fated offensive lost his job, and a new commander, General Philippe Pétain, immediately set to work. He improved the rest billets behind the lines, upgraded the army's food, and increased leaves. Touring his front line, he spoke to every mutinous regiment, promising an end to attacks that needlessly wasted lives. And he was, by military standards of the time, very sparing in meting out punishment: although 3,427 men were convicted of mutiny, normally a capital offense, only 49 were shot. Despite hints of problems, the Germans never realized the extent of disarray in the army facing them—nor did readers of censored British and French newspapers. But Pétain's success at containing the upheaval came at a price: his still-restive army simply could not be ordered to undertake any major new attack. While he began the long work of rebuilding French military discipline and morale, he pressed his British allies hard to distract the Germans with a major assault of their own.

Should there be another offensive at all? Of course! Haig had no doubts, believing that the Germans' "breaking point may be reached this year," as he told his generals, his confidence fueled by a new stream of reports from his relentlessly optimistic intelligence chief, General Charteris. Germany was riddled with strikes and unrest, Charteris assured him, troop morale was falling, the army was on its last legs. To be sure that both his boss and the British cabinet would share this impression, before Haig and Lloyd George paid visits to a compound of German POWs, Charteris ordered all able-bodied prisoners removed, so that only the wounded or sickly-looking remained.

The small Belgian city of Ypres was by now the most ravaged in Western Europe. It lay at the center of a bulge of British-held territory that for several years had been shelled by the Germans from three sides. Its famous Cloth Hall was a jagged shell; its brick and stone buildings and cobblestone streets were in ruins. Tens of thousands of troops from all corners of the British Empire found shelter where they could, often in cellars. The entire salient was honeycombed with narrow-gauge trolley tracks on which carts of bullets, shells, food, and bandages made their way to the front. It was from this battered wasteland that Haig planned to launch his next big assault.

The War Cabinet was uneasy. The Russian army, which the new Provisional Government could barely manage to supply with food, was so depleted, British planners calculated, that Germany could afford to move up to 30 divisions to the west. When Haig predicted success for his offensive, Milner wrote, in an acid memo to his colleagues, "The argument seems to be that, since we can't overcome the unreinforced Germans, ergo we can reasonably hope to overcome them when [they are] strengthened by 30 divisions. Really lunatic." Lloyd George was equally dubious, but Haig was so well entrenched politically that the prime minister was never really able to assert control over the army high command. He would rail at the generals in his memoirs, published long after the war: "Their brains were cluttered with useless lumber, packed in every niche and corner."

In the end, no matter how lunatic Haig's strategy, the War Cabinet could offer no realistic alternative. In mid-June the field marshal laid out his plans in London. "He spread on a table or desk a large map," Lloyd George remembered, "and made a dramatic use of both his hands to demonstrate how he proposed to sweep up the enemy—first the right hand brushing along the surface irresistibly, and then came the left, his outer finger ultimately touching the German frontier with the nail across." Vanished was last year's talk about attrition as success; Haig was once again dreaming of a breakthrough. After smashing open the German line, the long-waiting cavalry would stream through the gap, and British troops would swing to the left to seize the medieval Belgian city of Bruges. When cabinet members visited the front, Haig's officers took them up a specially built observation tower that looked out over the land he expected to capture.

Given the number of men being moved into position, there would be no surprise. "Everybody in my hotel knows the date of the offensive down to the lift boy," observed the chief of the Imperial General Staff on a visit to Paris. As the launch date grew near, Haig seemed to interpret everything around him in military terms of obedience and duty. When Lady Haig told him that she was expecting their third child, he wrote back, without any trace of jest or irony, "How proud you must feel that you are doing your duty at this time by having a baby and thereby setting a good example to all other females!" Convinced that the forthcoming battle would cement his place in history, he suggested to his wife that she write his biography.

In England, where German bombing raids and the sense that a great battle was in the offing kept chauvinist fervor boiling, many people with German names found it politic to change them—including the royal family. Because Queen Victoria had married a German prince, the British monarchy was officially the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. On July 17, 1917, two weeks before Haig's new offensive, a proclamation from Buckingham Palace announced that henceforth the family would be known as the House of Windsor.

When he heard the news, Kaiser Wilhelm II is said to have remarked that he was going to the theater to see a performance of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

As 1917 wore on, antiwar rallies drew larger crowds. Charlotte Despard and several other women formed a new organization, the Women's Peace Crusade. "I should like the words 'alien' and 'foreigner' to be banished from the language," she said in one speech. "We are all members of the same family." Despard traveled the country speaking and visiting the families of COs to keep their spirits up. One hundred thousand readers bought copies of a peace pamphlet she wrote.

Christabel Pankhurst was horrified. "I consider the Pacifists a disease ... a very deadly disease," she declared in Britannia this summer, "which you will find has afflicted every dead nation of the past." The spectacle of British labor unions daring to strike in wartime laid bare her authoritarianism: "Could you listen to an orchestra in which each person played according to his own ideas or the ideas of a committee instead of answering to the beat of the conductor?" she thundered in a speech. "Well, it is just the same in industry. There must be authority, control, discipline."

Where Pankhurst could only bluster about control, Milner made sure action was taken. Every working-class gathering should be monitored, he wrote in August to the home secretary, who was in charge of police and prisons, lest it "turn into a pacifist and revolutionary meeting." Within the next several months, the police staged some 30 raids on pacifist and socialist groups, seizing files, printing equipment, and crates of pamphlets, and sabotaging those printing presses they left behind. The government opened the mail of antiwar dissidents and quietly made sure that prowar publications and the printers of officially approved propaganda received almost all of the tightening supply of newsprint.

With some exceptions, however, the authorities did not jail people speaking out against the war or ban meetings. Seldom, points out the historian Brock Millman, "did the government prohibit, where it could discourage, or discourage where it was safe or politic to ignore." When some officials were considering prosecuting George Bernard Shaw for an antiwar article he had written, the home secretary successfully argued against it: "Shaw will make the most [of it] both here and in America.... But the very fact that we allow such matter to emanate from England would be proof of the lightness of our censorship and an indication of ... strength."

And strength, in the end, was what the prowar forces had. Despite the heady resolutions at Leeds, efforts to organize workers' and soldiers' soviets came to naught. When Bertrand Russell led a meeting to form a soviet in London, Basil Thomson asked the jingoistic Daily Express to print the address. Several hundred hostile demonstrators, singing "Rule Britannia," stormed into the Congregational church where the "soviet" was meeting. The crowd broke down a door, shattered windows, ripped out the church's gas and water pipes, and left several delegates injured. It was only when someone told the police that Russell was the brother of an earl that they rushed to protect him from women waving boards studded with rusty nails. "The mob is a terrible thing when it wants blood," Russell wrote that day. Despard had no better luck with the workers' and soldiers' soviet she tried to convene at Newcastle. The only visible soldiers were rowdy off-duty ones who broke up the gathering with their fists.

Critics could point out, of course, that Despard and Russell were quite far from being either workers or soldiers. But the real cause of their failure was that Britain was a democracy, however imperfect a one. Unlike Russia, there was little pent-up popular hunger for revolution, and the government waging the war had been elected. The radical Leeds conference made the headlines, but a more accurate gauge of British working-class feeling was to be found at a meeting in Manchester this same year where delegates representing nearly two million union members voted by a margin of more than five to one that Britain should carry on the war until Germany was fully defeated.

Some of those prowar trade unionists flexed their muscles in a small but telling confrontation at the Scottish port of Aberdeen at the beginning of the summer of 1917. The Leeds conference had picked representatives to go to Russia as a show of solidarity, but when the delegates boarded a ship for the journey, they found an unexpected complication. On hand were two leaders of the right-leaning National Sailors' and Firemen's Union—one, its president, was a stalwart of Milner's British Workers' League—who informed them that the ship's crew would not sail unless they disembarked. With several thousand of its members dead from German U-boat attacks, the union was not in the antiwar camp. After a brief standoff, the delegates were escorted down the gangplank.

On the dock, however, these same union leaders warmly welcomed two passengers also heading for Russia: Jessie Kenney, a longtime suffragette, and Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst had asked Lloyd George for permission to "explain to the Russian people the opinions as to the war and the conditions of peace held by us as patriotic British women," and the prime minister enthusiastically agreed. The Russian army might be faltering, but it was still tying down hundreds of thousands of German troops who would otherwise be in France and Belgium. Pankhurst, he hoped, could buck up the spirits of war-minded Russians and woo some of those tempted by revolution, for she had indisputable credentials as a rebel and troublemaker and was well known in Russia, where her autobiography had been translated and widely read.

When Pankhurst arrived in Petrograd, the moderate Provisional Government was still in precarious control, but the Bolsheviks, bolstered by the arrival of their leaders from Switzerland after the trip in the sealed train, were gaining strength. Red flags flew everywhere, and even the staff of the deluxe hotel where she was staying, the Astoria, went on strike while she was there. "I came to Petrograd with a prayer from the English nation to the Russian nation," she told local journalists between speeches to patriotic women's groups, "that you may continue the war on which depends the fate of civilisation and freedom."

One Russian especially caught her attention—and was quickly given star treatment in Christabel's newspaper back in England: 25-year-old Maria Bochkareva. The Tsar had given her special permission to enlist in the army, where Bochkareva had fought in a combat unit, bayoneted a German soldier to death, and been wounded several times. She smoked, drank, and swore, punched back at anyone who harassed her, and in a language where many words change with the speaker's gender, used the male forms. One observer described her as "a big peasant woman, strong as a horse, rough of manner, eating with her fingers by choice, unlettered, but of much native intelligence."

A staunch proponent of fighting the Germans, Bochkareva had recently formed a "Women's Battalion of Death." Its recruits shaved their heads, slept on bare boards during training, endured the same corporal punishment as male Russian soldiers, and sported a skull-and-crossbones insignia. She enforced strict discipline and succeeded in inspiring the battalion to overrun some German trenches, a rare act in this year of Russian military collapse. For Russians determined to stay in the war she was—like Emmeline Pankhurst in England—an unexpected poster girl, for her patriotism trumped her role as a militantly assertive woman. To right-wingers in a country riven by class conflict, she was that always treasured rarity: a working-class hero who was on their side.

As Bochkareva led her troops on parade in Petrograd's St. Isaac's Square, supporters threw flowers, an army band played, and a Russian Orthodox bishop blessed the skull-and-crossbones flag. The battalion marched in review, cheering robustly, past Pankhurst, who was dressed in an immaculate white linen suit, black bonnet, and gloves. "The creation of the Women's Battalion of Death is the greatest page written in the history of women," she told the unit's soldiers, "since the time of Joan of Arc."

Word came from the suburban palace where they were under house arrest that the Tsar and Tsarina would like to meet the famous visiting women's suffrage leader. The message was surprising, for the imperial couple had never been known as fans of suffrage for anyone, male or female. Pankhurst had to decline, since Britain was anxious for her not to hold any meetings that might unnecessarily antagonize the Provisional Government.

The summer of 1917 was a chaotic one. Russian troops were killing their officers or replacing them with soldiers' soviets, and by the hundreds of thousands they kept on leaving the front; history had never before seen an army dissolve on such a scale. There were more strikes and stormy meetings as the Provisional Government tried to corral the Bolsheviks and other radical sects into continuing the war. Pankhurst ignored suggestions that she and Jessie Kenney wear less stylish clothes, so as not to attract attention as members of the bourgeoisie, and also turned down an offer of bodyguards from a group of sympathetic army officers. From her hotel window in Petrograd she watched radical soldiers on parade, shouting "Down with capitalism!" and "Stop the war!" After Bolsheviks barged into the hotel itself and arrested 40 officers, she yielded to advice that it was best to leave for England, and quickly. By then it was obvious: a Bolshevik takeover was on the way.

And that was exactly what her daughter Sylvia fervently hoped for. She changed her newspaper's name from Woman's Dreadnought to Workers' Dreadnought as she awaited the class war that would end the war of nations. Testing the limits of censorship, she openly began to urge British troops to lay down their weapons, and published critical letters from soldiers at the front. In midsummer, while her mother was still in Russia, Sylvia scored an editorial coup. Her newspaper was the first to publish a statement unlike any the war had yet seen—an eloquent avowal from a front-line officer, and a highly decorated one at that, declaring his intention to stop fighting:

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a War of defence, has now become a War of aggression and conquest.

The letter writer, Second Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon, had just published a much-praised book of war poems. Nicknamed Mad Jack, he had been awarded the Military Cross in France for carrying a wounded soldier to safety under heavy fire. Later, he was recommended for the Victoria Cross, though he did not receive it, for single-handedly capturing a German trench. Not only did Sassoon have impeccable military credentials, but he came from an eminent family: his cousin Sir Philip Sassoon, a baronet and a member of Parliament, was Haig's private secretary.

Sent back to England after being shot through the throat, and convalescing in a London hospital, he read a volume of Bertrand Russell's collected writings against the war, Justice in Wartime, and was inspired to act. Russell, whom he met, encouraged him to speak out, helped him draft his statement, and passed it on to a sympathetic ME Two days after Sylvia Pankhurst published it, Sassoon's letter of defiance was read aloud in the House of Commons. Basil Thomson's agents raided the offices of both the Workers' Dreadnought and the No-Conscription Fellowship, where they seized 100 copies of the letter. Sassoon expected that he would be sent before a court-martial, where he could denounce the war in a forum that would gain wide attention. For peace activists, this promised an unparalleled opportunity to reach the public: a high-profile trial of a decorated officer who had seen his men die.

Surprisingly, in between haranguing antiwar crowds on Glasgow Green and attempting to start soviets, Charlotte Despard still treasured her infrequent meetings with her brother. "He is, I think, dearer to me than anyone else," she wrote, and every time they met was "a day to be written in red letters." John French's diary for 1917 records a drop-in visit to the Despard Arms, her teetotal pub for soldiers, perhaps the only one of her manifold activities uncontroversial enough for him, as commander in chief of the Home Forces, to be seen visiting. As always, money flowed through French's hands too easily, so Charlotte once again gave him a loan. The two shared a loss this year when one of their sisters, a volunteer nurse on the Balkan front, was killed by a piece of shrapnel.

The field marshal was still frustrated, as he later put it to a friend, that "I was driven out of France ... at the instigation of Haig.... Nothing that can ever happen to me could compensate for the loss of 1916 and 1917 and half of 1918 in the field." Instead, he had to content himself with traveling up and down Britain inspecting troops, training bases, coastal defenses, and antiaircraft batteries, pinning medals on chests and visiting wounded soldiers in their bright blue hospital garb. Gradually he managed to insinuate himself as a confidential military adviser to Lloyd George—a position that allowed him to spread any anti-Haig gossip that came his way. This he did so energetically that the King summoned him to Buckingham Palace for a dressing-down. When French made a visit to the Western Front, Haig refused to receive him, and when the secretary for war invited both men to dinner in London, French refused to come. To his mistress, Winifred Bennett, he wrote plaintively, "I do so want to hear the guns again!"

There were plenty of guns to be heard, more than 3,000 of them firing off more than four million shells, as Haig's artillery began the customary bombardment before the battle that today is usually known by the name of the tiny village that was one of its first objectives, Passchendaele. At each major British attack on the Western Front, some new element had fed the perennial hope of a breakthrough. At Loos it was the unprecedented size of the attacking force and the first British use of poison gas. At the Somme it was the weeklong artillery bombardment that was supposed to pulverize the German trenches. At Passchendaele? No new strategy or weapon of any sort distinguished this attack. In the end, what separated Passchendaele from the great paroxysms of bloodshed that preceded it was one gruesome fact no one had planned for: in addition to falling victim to German fire, thousands of British soldiers, nowhere near the sea, drowned.

It was for good reason that this corner of Europe had long been known as the Low Countries; the water table is less than two feet below ground in much of Belgium. Haig seems to have given no thought to the way his bombardment would wreck canals and drainage ditches and leave tens of thousands of craters that soon filled with water. "Haig's plans required a drought of Ethiopian proportions to ensure success," comments his biographer Gerard De Groot. The landscape in which the battle unfolded bore no resemblance to the dry, neatly sandbagged replica of a trench that had been constructed in London's Ken-sington Gardens. (A similar trench, no less unrealistic, drew many visitors to a park in Berlin.)

The area around Ypres was covered by mist when the British infantry assault began in the early morning of July 31, 1917. The mist soon turned into almost nonstop rain, the heaviest in some 30 years. Observation aircraft could not take to the sky, weapons jammed, and the clay soil of the watery moonscape of craters became sticky; one officer likened its consistency to cheesecake, another to porridge. Guns could barely be moved, and mules and horses pulling ammunition wagons sank up to their stomachs and had to be dug out. Ambulances carrying wounded soldiers skidded off slippery roads. As summer turned to autumn, the men were reminded that the British soldier's cold-weather greatcoat was not waterproof. It absorbed mud and water like a relentless sponge, adding up to 34 pounds to its weight. As the battle continued, one single day saw 26,000 British casualties. Still Haig pushed on.

"I cannot attempt to describe the conditions under which we are fighting," wrote John Mortimer Wheeler, later a well-known archaeologist. "Anything I could write about them would seem an exaggeration but would, in reality, be miles below the truth.... The mud is not so much mud as a fathomless, sticky morass. The shell holes, where they do not actually merge into one another, are divided only by a few inches of this glutinous mud.... The gunners work thigh-deep in water." Some British artillery pieces dug themselves so deeply into the mud with their recoils that they dropped below the surface; the crew would then put up a flag to mark the spot.

Private Charlie Miles of the Royal Fusiliers carried messages as a runner—a misnomer in this season: "The moment you set off you felt that dreadful suction.... In a way, it was worse when the mud didn't suck you down...[then] you knew that it was a body you were treading on. It was terrifying. You'd tread on one on the stomach, perhaps, and it would grunt all the air out.... The smell could make you vomit." And when shells landed, they blasted waterlogged, putrefying corpses into the air, showering pieces of them down on the soldiers who were still alive.

British, Australian, and Canadian troops inched ever closer to the little village of Passchendaele as newspaper headlines triumphally announced, "Our Position Improved; Heroism in the New Advance" (the Times); "Complete Success in Battle of the Pill Boxes; Haig's Smashing Blow" (the Daily Mirror). But water had filled some shell holes to a depth of over a man's head, and troops joked that it was time to call in the Royal Navy. If a soldier with a heavy pack trudging around a crater slipped or stumbled, or jumped to avoid an incoming artillery round, the muddy water, often already fouled with the rotting bodies of men or horses, might claim him for good.

"From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men," recorded Edwin Vaughn, a 19-year-old lieutenant, in his diary on a rainy night, "faint, long, sobbing moans of agony, and despairing shrieks.... Dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell-holes, and now the water was rising about them.... We could do nothing to help them; Dunham was crying quietly beside me, and all the men were affected by the piteous cries." After hours of rain, "the cries of the wounded had much diminished ... the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes." Of the more than 88,000 British Empire casualties in the Ypres sector listed on memorials as "missing," no one knows how many drowned. Belgian farmers' plows still uncover their skeletons today.

To the fear of drowning was added a new horror. The Germans had begun using mustard gas. Aside from its faint smell and the yellow color of the blisters it raised on a man's skin, this powerful toxin had nothing to do with mustard. Extremely concentrated, it did not require cumbersome canisters; a small amount was merely added to a high-explosive shell. Moreover, soldiers could fall victim without breathing it, for the chemical easily penetrated clothing, producing bloody blisters up to a foot wide. Troops who unknowingly sat on contaminated ground later found the huge blisters all over their buttocks and genitals. Since the compound was slow-acting, it might be six or eight hours before a man realized he had been stricken. The worst off were soldiers who had breathed droplets in the air, for their blisters were internal, gradually swelling to seal throats and bronchial tubes fatally shut, a process that might take as long as four or five weeks. Writhing, gagging patients sometimes had to be strapped to their beds. Horses and mules also succumbed to mustard gas by the thousands, but for them at least, death, by a handler's bullet, was mercifully quick.

Haig finally called a halt to the fighting in November 1917 after his soldiers seized a last piece of ground less than five miles from where they had started in July. More than 15,000 Canadians were killed or wounded in the concluding spasm of combat to capture the village of Passchendaele—which had been scheduled to be taken on the fourth day of the offensive, months before. It was such a patently meaningless sacrifice that, raging about it afterward at a meeting in London, Canadian Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden strode up to Lloyd George, seized his lapels, and shook him.

In the sanitizing language of newspapers and memorial services, these Canadians, and all the British Empire troops who lost their lives in the three-and-a-half-month battle, were referred to as the "fallen." But in the mud of Passchendaele, falling dead from a bullet wound was only for the lucky: "A party of 'A' Company men passing up to the front line found ... a man bogged to above the knees," remembered Major C. A. Bill of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. "The united efforts of four of them, with rifles beneath his armpits, made not the slightest impression, and to dig, even if shovels had been available, would be impossible, for there was no foothold. Duty compelled them to move on up to the line, and when two days later they passed down that way the wretched fellow was still there; but only his head was now visible and he was raving mad."

Early gas masks, here worn by Russian officers.

Practicing for the great cavalry charge that never came.

The British government's 1914–1918 propaganda campaign, much of it secretly financed and the work of supposedly independent civic groups, was the largest and most sophisticated the world had yet seen.

A still from the documentary film The Battle of
the Somme: a soldier carries a dying comrade.

Passchendaele, the battle that cost British forces more than
260,000 dead and wounded: the first day, July 31, 1917 (below),
September (opposite top), October (opposite bottom).

Stephen Hobhouse: from Eton and
Oxford to solitary confinement.

Joseph Stones: shot at dawn.

Albert Rochester, radical in uniform: Why
should each officer have a personal servant?

A family of show-trial martyrs. From right: Alice Wheeldon,
her daughters Winnie and Hettie, a prison wardress.

John S. Clark: from circus animal tamer
to underground antiwar activist.

What generals on both sides feared: pacifists (at Dartmoor, Devon, above) and
fraternizing soldiers (Russians and Germans on the Eastern Front, below).