As DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION, John Buchan oversaw the expansion of the most sophisticated propaganda operation the world had yet seen. It produced a torrent of patriotic materials, including paintings and drawings by special war artists sent to the front, pictorial magazines, boys' adventure stories portraying the Germans as bloodthirsty barbarians, cards for cigarette packs, and a "German Crimes Calendar" with a new atrocity for each month. Telegrams put an upbeat twist on the latest war news for the press at home and abroad. One bureau turned out leaflets dropped from balloons over the German trenches. Lecturers were dispatched everywhere, from industrial districts in England threatened by the influence of antiwar radicals to the United States—where speakers were instructed to avoid the touchy subject of Ireland. Every American Catholic priest found himself receiving a monthly letter of war news from a supposedly independent committee of Catholics in Britain. American editors, reporters, and congressmen were welcomed on their arrival in London by a new Anglo-American Society Buchan started, and could enjoy VIP tours of the front in France while housed in a nearby château. Like his patron Milner, Buchan welcomed the colonies and dominions to the great struggle, and saw to it that films poured out with titles like Canadians on the Western Front and New Zealand Troops in France. One short film in 1917 even celebrated the black work battalions sent from South Africa; it showed Africans doing traditional dances and madly scrambling for a coin tossed to them by a laughing white officer. To reinvigorate popular support for the war, a fleet of 20 movie projector trucks, called "cinemotors," toured Britain showing films on the sides of buildings. Brass bands, celebrity speakers, and the occasional large artillery piece were all available to serve as attractions for rallies, while an airplane might swoop down and drop leaflets onto the crowd.
Buchan and his staff soon saw that despite the tank's embarrassingly ineffective battlefield debut the previous year, the public was hungry for a high-tech wonder weapon. The tracked behemoth was a huge success on the movie screen, attracting a total audience estimated at 20 million to a mid-1917 documentary on tank warfare. Paradoxically, it was only later that year that Britain fought the first real tank battle, at Cambrai, France, where the lumbering machines advanced several miles before the usual bungling set in and a German counterattack regained most of the captured ground.
The tank's greatest victory so far, however, was not on the battlefield but at home. While Cambrai was still raging, a "Trafalgar Square Tank Bank" began doing a booming business selling war bonds. The Cold-stream Guards band played as celebrities addressed the crowd from atop the tank, and hundreds of people lined up to buy bonds through an opening in a side turret. Ninety percent of the visitors, it was claimed, had never bought a war bond before, so tanks were dispatched by train to 168 towns and cities throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. "Tank Banks" altogether sold £300,000,000 (some $17 billion in today's dollars) worth of war bonds, the authorities declared. In impressive testimony to the importance of the new weapon on the home front, some tanks were even recalled from France for this mission.
Although no one could have told it from his work or his public persona, 1917 was a bad year for Buchan, for his younger brother and two close friends were killed in combat within days of one another. Yet his immense productivity never slackened; he seemed to write books with as little effort as other people make dinner-table conversation. His wide circle of readers, he learned, included Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, the oldest daughter of the recently deposed Tsar. The family was now imprisoned in a house in the remote Siberian city of Tobolsk, and from there she wrote to Buchan that she, her sisters, and their father had greatly enjoyed his latest spy novel.
A novel he began writing in mid-1917, Mr. Standfast, was full of the usual secret agents athletically foiling mysterious German plots. But, reflecting a year that had seen strikes, the upheaval in Russia, and a stronger antiwar movement, Buchan had his familiar hero Richard Hannay infiltrate radical trade union circles in Glasgow, where he finds most Scottish workingmen to be loyal imperial patriots. One character in the book is a conscientious objector who, in the end, takes a noncombatant role in the army, and swims a river under heavy fire to deliver a vital message before dying of his wounds.
The same year, another well-known literary protagonist returned to action: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, capitalizing on all the spy paranoia, brought Sherlock Holmes out of retirement. In "His Last Bow," Holmes skillfully infiltrates the spy ring of the sinister Von Bork, Germany's top clandestine agent in England on the eve of the war. Conan Doyle was another of those convinced that, for all its horrors, the conflict was a healthy purgative, a purification by fire. Looking ahead, Holmes says, "There's an east wind coming, Watson.... Some such wind as never blew in England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind, none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."
In Belgium, the wind was cold and bitter indeed. The total of British dead and wounded at Passchendaele, officially the Third Battle of Ypres, is in dispute, but a low estimate puts the number at 260,000; most reckonings are far higher. Haig ceaselessly trumpeted Passchendaele as a triumph, but few agreed. "We have won great victories," Lloyd George said as the battle ended, in a remarkably frank speech that hinted at his impotent frustration with Haig. "When I look at the appalling casualty lists I sometimes wish it had not been necessary to win so many."
On other fronts, the war was going even worse. In late October came disastrous news from northern Italy: German and Austrian troops had broken through at Caporetto, sweeping forward some 80 miles after a surprise attack in fog and rain. The demoralized Italians, choking in inadequate gas masks, lost more than half a million men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
Against all this, the capture of a muddy, ruined village or two in Flanders seemed little to brag about. "For the first time," the war correspondent and novelist Philip Gibbs later wrote, "the British Army lost its spirit of optimism, and there was a sense of deadly depression among many officers and men with whom I came in touch. They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except continuous slaughter." Men joked bitterly about where the front line would be in 1950. One officer calculated that if the British continued to gain ground at the pace so far, they would reach the Rhine in 180 years.
It was during the autumn of 1917 that the British army experienced the nearest thing to a mutiny on the Western Front: six days of intermittent rioting by several thousand troops at the big supply and training base in Étaples, France, in which a military policeman killed one soldier. Amid protest meetings the red flag briefly flew, and one rebel was later tried and executed. Rates of desertion and drunkenness rose, and the army increased the ratio of military police to other soldiers. "Reinforcements ... shambled up past the guns with dragging steps and the expressions of men who knew they were going to certain death," wrote one veteran about the mood around Ypres in October. "No words of greeting passed as they slouched along; in sullen silence they filed past one by one to the sacrifice." Haig, as usual, tolerated no dissent. When a brave colonel told him that further fruitless attacks would leave no resources for an offensive the next spring, Haig turned white with anger and said, "Col. Rawlins, leave the room."
As more rain fell in November, Haig's thoroughly undistinguished chief of staff, Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, made a rare trip forward. Approaching the battlefield at Passchendaele, he saw from his staff car for the first time the terrible expanse of mud, dotted with water-filled shell holes. Reportedly—although his defenders deny this—he said, "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?" and then burst into tears. Shortly afterward military doctors judged him to be suffering from nervous exhaustion. He was bundled off to a low-stress but dignified post as troop commander and lieutenant governor on the Isle of Guernsey.
***
In Russia, over the night of November 6–7, 1917, the moment that the Allied governments had been dreading for months finally arrived. The Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, occupying telegraph stations and key official buildings and storming the Provisional Government's headquarters—the Winter Palace, on whose balcony the Tsar and Tsarina had received the ecstatic cheers of patriotic crowds on the outbreak of war some three years before. Now the city's streets were filled with workers marching under triumphant red banners and jubilant revolutionary soldiers whose long greatcoats were crisscrossed with bandoliers.
Within days, to underline its commitment to peace instead of diplomatic business as usual, the new regime made public the secret treaties Russia had signed with the other Allied countries that it found in government files. These revealed the territorial gains all were hoping for. There were, for instance, detailed plans for dismembering the Ottoman Empire and parceling it out—either outright or as nominally independent states—among Russia, Italy, France, and Britain. As the Allied powers claimed they were fighting a war for freedom, these documents produced shock around the world—and, in some quarters, lasting fury. The Arabs Britain had urged to rebel against their Turkish masters had expected to rule themselves after the war, not to be the puppets of anyone.
An informal truce quickly made its way across much of the Eastern Front: photographs show German and Russian troops fraternizing in no man's land in their heavy winter coats, the Germans in brimmed army caps, the Russians in fur-lined shapkas, and larger groups of men from both sides together in rows, standing and kneeling as if members of a single sports team posing for a portrait. In a Europe exhausted by the war, who knew how easily the revolutionary example might spread?
Without Russia, Alfred Milner feared, the Allies might not be able to defeat Germany. And the spread of revolution could prove a more dangerous enemy to the established order than the Germans. Why, he wondered, should Britain and France not settle their differences with Germany—and then partition Russia among themselves? Britain's share, it hardly need be said, would include the central Asian parts of the Russian Empire that adjoined Persia and Afghanistan, strategic borderlands to India. If Germany was willing—and also willing, of course, to withdraw from France and Belgium—there were many interesting ways in which Russia could be divided. For a full year to come, Milner quietly but doggedly promoted this idea. There is no clear evidence that he or anyone else ever approached the Germans, and his proposal apparently never moved beyond the realm of confidential talk within the British government, but it bears a strange resemblance to the world of abruptly shifting superpower alliances that George Orwell would later imagine in 1984.
Meanwhile, socialists and pacifists everywhere rejoiced at the Bolshevik coup. For the first time, a major power had a regime committed to overthrowing capitalism—and to swiftly withdrawing from the war that for more than three years had been killing off Europe's young men by the millions. "Glorious News from Russia!" read the headline in lion tamer John S. Clarke's Socialist. "May they open the door," Sylvia Pankhurst wrote in her Workers' Dreadnought, "which leads to freedom for the people of all lands!"
No group in Britain received the news of the latest phase of the Russian Revolution with greater joy than the war resisters in prison. Serving his hard-labor sentence at Walton Gaol in Liverpool, the 29-year-old Fenner Brockway was an editor still. Despite the rule of silence, he passed on news of the momentous events in Petrograd to his fellow prisoners in the Walton Leader, one of at least nine clandestine CO prison newspapers. It was written with pencil lead that Brockway and other convicts had smuggled into prison attached to the bottoms of their feet with adhesive tape; each issue was published on forty squares of brown toilet paper. The subscription price was extra sheets of toilet paper from each prisoner's supply. Twice a week, until guards finally discovered it after a year, a new issue of the paper—only one copy, of course, could be "published"—was left in a toilet cubicle the CO prisoners shared. Thanks to information from an imprisoned army deserter, the Walton Leader published one of the few uncensored accounts in Britain of the slaughter at Passchendaele. By contrast, the coup in Russia, Brockway wrote later, made the COs imagine "our prison doors being opened by comrade workers and soldiers."
One event that might bring that great day a step closer, British peace activists hoped, was Siegfried Sassoon's imminent court-martial. But they waited in vain, for the last thing the government wanted was an upper-class war hero turned public martyr. "A breach of discipline has been committed," said a War Office spokesman about Sassoon's defiant open letter, "but no disciplinary action has been taken, since Second Lieutenant Sassoon has been reported by the medical board as not being responsible for his action, as he was suffering from nervous breakdown."
Far from being thrown in jail, Sassoon was ordered to wait in a hotel in Liverpool. While there, he angrily threw his Military Cross ribbon into the River Mersey—but with no audience, the gesture went unreported. Instead of the public stage he had hoped for, Sassoon was sent off to the comfortable surroundings of a rehabilitation hospital for shell-shocked officers in Scotland. His protest soon dropped out of the newspapers. His time in the hospital produced no dividend for the peace movement, but an enormous one for English literature. A fellow patient was the 24-year-old aspiring writer Wilfred Owen, recovering from wounds and shell shock, to whom the older Sassoon offered crucial encouragement. Owen became the greatest poet of the war.
The War Office had been extremely shrewd. After three months in the hospital whose services he did not need, Sassoon found himself increasingly restless. Finally he accepted a promotion to first lieutenant and returned to the front. He did so not because he had abandoned his former views, but because, as he put it in his diary when he was back with his regiment in France, "I am only here to look after some men." It was a haunting reminder of the fierce power of group loyalty over that of political conviction—and all the more so because it came from someone who had not in the slightest changed, nor ever in his life would change, his belief that his country's supposed war aims were fraudulent.
Late 1917 was a time of great nervousness for British ruling circles. The Times ran a series of articles on "The Ferment of Revolution," and government control of the press tightened, as a new regulation subjected all books and pamphlets about the war—or the prospects of peace—to censorship. More than 4,000 censors were at work monitoring both the press and the mail. For the first time, police suppressed two issues of the Workers' Dreadnought. Rumors flew that German money was somehow financing antiwar organizing, and Basil Thomson was asked to step up his surveillance operations. Knowing that stoking official paranoia would help him gain more influence, he half insinuated, in a report to the War Cabinet, that one of the leading antiwar voices, the intrepid investigative journalist E. D. Morel, might have German backing: "The probabilities are certainly strong that Mr Morel did not work out of pure altruism.... As his activities have certainly been in the German interest ... the public cannot be blamed for believing that Mr Morel has been financed by Germany in the past and may possibly be expecting financial reward for his peace activities in the future." In his diary, however, Thomson wrote the opposite, admitting that "I feel certain that there is no German money" going to the peace movement.
The government had long been wanting, as one Foreign Office official put it, to silence Morel and get him "safely lodged in gaol." Milner, in particular, pressed for action. "In no country but this," he complained in a note to Lloyd George, "would it be possible for him to carry on." Being beyond military age, Morel could not be prosecuted for refusing the draft, so in the end he was charged with violating an obscure regulation against sending pacifist materials out of the country and was sentenced to six months at hard labor.
He served his time at London's Pentonville Prison. In Morel's cellblock there were no other war opponents; in the cell next to him was a man who had raped a child; on the other side was someone who had stolen three bottles of whiskey. Even behind bars British attitudes toward class prevailed, and another prisoner, speaking to Morel in a whisper because of the rule of silence, called him "sir." Morel was able to exchange quick smiles with conscientious objectors from other parts of the prison only in chapel on Sundays. While a pastor preached on the righteousness of the war and officials announced battlefield "victories," warders sat on raised seats at the end of each row to ensure that prisoners did not talk.
Morel sewed canvas mailbags in a dust-filled room and wove rope into hammocks and mats for the navy. Sometimes he had to carry 100-pound slabs of jute to the workshop. The U-boat toll on Britain's food imports led to a cutback in prison rations, which, for hard-labor convicts, were minimal to begin with. With coal in short supply, little was diverted to heat prisons. Supper at Pentonville, eaten alone in one's cell, was, Morel wrote, "a piece of bread, half-a-pint of coldish porridge at the bottom of a tin which earlier in the day may have contained red-herrings and still bears traces of them, and a pint of hot, greasy cocoa which one learns to regard as a veritable nectar of the gods, especially in cold weather." At night you could expect only "the cold of a cold cell—like nothing on earth. Nothing seems proof against it."
Morel was a powerfully built man of 44, but prison broke his health. "I saw E. D. Morel yesterday for the first time since he came out," Bertrand Russell wrote to a friend the following year, "and was impressed by the seriousness of a six months sentence.... He collapsed completely, physically and mentally, largely as the result of insufficient food. He says one only gets three quarters of an hour for reading in the whole day—the rest of the time is spent on prison work."
Although the food and working conditions were no better for COs, they at least were imprisoned together and could furtively communicate. (The underground newspaper that circulated in Winchester Prison was called the Whisperer.) "My first experience of the prison technique for overcoming the silence rule was in chapel," Fenner Brockway wrote. "We were singing one of the chants. Instead of the words of the Prayer Book, I heard these:—
"Welcome, Fenner boy,
When did you get here?
How did you like the skilly [gruel] this morn?
Lord have mercy upon us!"
The key during chapel, Brockway learned, was to sing or chant a message to the person next to you without turning your head or giving any sign of recognition that could draw the guards' attention. Prisoners smuggled books to each other in the mailbags they sewed, and even played chess; at one point more than half the COs in Maidstone Prison took part in a chess tournament. When a move might be whispered to your opponent only once a day, games could last a month or more. But punishment for infractions was severe: Brockway was put on bread and water for six days when the authorities discovered his toilet-paper newspaper. (He had by then managed to publish more than 100 issues, including a special memorial number on the second anniversary of the death of his mentor, Keir Hardie.) In one prison he was in, there were periodic executions of common criminals. "The place was deadly silent, each man listening for the opening of the door of the condemned cell, for the sound of the steps to the gallows, and then for the striking of the fatal hour on neighbouring clocks and the sound of the tolling bell which told that it was all over."
Also behind bars this grim autumn were Alice Wheeldon and her daughter and son-in-law. Alice was doing her hard-labor sentence in the Aylesbury Gaol, where the peephole on every cell door was at the center of a painted eye, complete with lash, brow, and pupil, eternally staring at the prisoner. The prospect of ten years in such conditions made her furious; she swore at the guards and disobeyed orders not to talk to other prisoners. She was also indignant at being strip-searched, and at the way Winnie's prison work assignment, as well as her own, was changed from the garden to the laundry, to avoid what officials called "undesirable association" with other prisoners. She called the prison governor, a guard dutifully noted, a "flaming vampire." Several times she went on hunger strikes, as did Winnie and Alf Mason; Alice knocked a cup out of a doctor's hand and broke it when he tried to feed her. But beneath the anger and defiance was despair: warders heard her weeping at night.
On December 21, 1917, she embarked on yet another hunger strike. Weakening, she was moved to the prison hospital four days later. "Christmas morning," a matron heard her say, "how the devil must laugh." Prison staff had been told from the beginning to watch her behavior closely, and a stream of messages from them flowed to the Home Office. "She says," reported one jailer, "she is determined to get out of prison 'in a box or otherwise.'"
Of course all correspondence was monitored. But only 80 years later, when these letters were finally opened for public view, could the desperate voice of Winnie Mason be heard, frantic that her mother was doomed to die in the hands of the state.
Having failed to talk Alice out of her hunger strike, Winnie grew alarmed when the authorities moved her steadily fading mother to another prison. At Aylesbury they had at least had some chance to "associate" with each other. "Oh Mam I don't know what to write to you," Winnie scrawled, "—when I think of all the opportunities Ive had of giving you a kiss or saying something to you & I've restrained myself rather than imperil our chance of association.... This last fortnight's been like a year every day ... Ive been sending you thought waves every minute of the time. I knew you were ill ... I simply cant bear to think of what you are going through.... You were always a fighter but this fight isn't worth your death.... I cant write it hardly.... Live for us all again.
"Oh Mam," Winnie's letter pleaded, "—please don't die."
Could the radicalism of people like the Wheeldons spread to the troops? Haig was concerned and had intelligence officers and mail censors keep him abreast of the soldiers' mood. "Sometimes advanced socialistic and even anarchical views are expressed" by the men, he noted. He also worried that British troops would be infected with subversive ideas by, of all people, Australians. Their army was far more egalitarian than Britain's, soldiers' pay was higher, and many officers had served in the ranks before being commissioned, since the country lacked a class of landowners who had been officers for generations. ("Look smart," one Australian officer is said to have told his men before an inspection by British commanders. "...And look here, for the love of Heaven, don't call me Alf.") British and Australian soldiers already served in separate units, but Haig ordered them kept apart in hospitals and base camps as well. "They were giving so much trouble when along with our men," he wrote, "and put such revolutionary ideas into their heads."
Haig enthusiasts were fewer now. The newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, too, had lost patience with him. Following the chain of command, Lloyd George asked the secretary for war, Lord Derby, to fire Haig; the influential Derby, a Haig loyalist who had protected the field marshal's back on other occasions, refused, on threat of resignation, and the prime minister backed down. The problem was that earlier efforts of Northcliffe's own newspapers plus John Buchan's skillful propaganda apparatus had helped put Haig on a pedestal from which it was politically impossible to remove him. Lloyd George, Milner, and their colleagues feared the reaction from the army and the public if they tried.
Should it be possible to replace Haig, they favored the apple-cheeked, potbellied Sir Herbert Plumer, several inches shorter than his fellow generals but a cut above them in intelligence, perhaps the best British general of the war. Compared with other commanders, he was known for using careful planning and shrewdly positioned artillery and underground mines to capture ground without extravagantly spending soldiers' lives. He was definitely not one of those who gauged success by the number of his own casualties. But the senior generals against whom Plumer could be measured were not exactly a brilliant array, and, comments one military historian, "during the war the main point in his favour was often that he was not someone else."
All that Haig's enemies at home were able to do was to leak damaging information about a few of his subordinates to the newspapers—with the prime minister himself accused of doing some of the leaking. Although it was only small potatoes, with these tactics they were able to claim the head of Haig's intelligence chief General Charteris, who was kicked upstairs to a face-saving new position. Always well informed by his London supporters, Haig knew that his own job was safe and confidently soldiered on. And not only did his critics lack the political clout to put another general in his place, they had no better ideas for how to win the war. Even today, with all the power of hindsight, it is hard to see what military strategy could have led to a swift Allied victory. The very nature of trench warfare doomed it to continue until one side or the other was so exhausted, bloodied, and depleted that it could simply fight no more. For all his blind spots, Haig understood this in a way that politicians hoping for a shortcut to victory did not.
The public began to sense that this would be a war of attrition, and the mood in England turned bleaker than at any moment since Napoleon had threatened to invade more than a century before. Hundreds of thousands of people were wearing black armbands. Flower-strewn homemade shrines to men who had died appeared on the streets. Efforts by Buchan's propaganda staff to buck up morale by repeating the great success of the films on the Somme and the tank fell flat: new documentaries drew only small audiences.
Word of the enormous bloodletting at Passchendaele came back to England with the legions of wounded soldiers, a macabre counterpoint to the parade of triumphal headlines. Some of the survivors were in wheelchairs or hobbled along with crutches or on wooden legs. Here and there groups of them took to the cricket field as an "arms and legs side," with the other team agreeing to bowl gently. One spectator wrote of watching such a match at Piltdown, near the south coast, where the artillery barrages were often audible: "All the time the big guns were roaring in Flanders so we could hear the War & see the sad results of it."
Air raids increased and ever more deaths occurred in the munitions factories where millions of women now worked. Artillery shell plants were particularly prone to explosions: 26 women died in one in 1916; 134 workers would be killed in one in Nottingham in 1918. And women who loaded explosives into shells found the chemicals turned their skin yellow—they called themselves canaries—contamination that proved not only disfiguring but sometimes led to early death.
The war sapped daily life in countless ways. With enormous quantities of coal and 370 locomotives diverted to France, some 400 smaller British railway stations closed. Buses, trolleys, and trains were always overcrowded. As another unusually cold winter set in, coal rationing was imposed in London, and people lined up with everything from baskets to baby carriages to buy it. With paper scarce, newspapers shrank and raised their prices. Bacon, butter, margarine, matches, and tea were in short supply and long food lines appeared, filled with women, children, and the elderly. Wheat husks and potatoes were used as filler in bread, and throwing rice at weddings was made a criminal offense. By late 1917, one city after another began rationing food. Here and there workers staged one-day strikes to protest the shortages. In November, COs in prison saw their bread ration cut in half, to 11 ounces a day.
Could the war ever be won? Flashes of cynicism and helplessness could be heard even among the country's elite. "We're telling lies," the newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere (who had already lost one son to the war and would soon lose another) said in a spontaneous outburst to a journalist in November 1917. "We daren't tell the public the truth, that we're losing more officers than the Germans, and that it's impossible to get through on the Western Front. You've seen the correspondents ... they don't speak the truth and we know they don't."
Officers continued to die at a higher rate than enlisted men, junior officers especially. Although after the first six months of the war they ceased to carry swords, British infantry officers were still easily identified by German snipers from their Sam Browne belts of polished leather and swagger sticks or pistols. It was also young officers who flew the rickety fighter aircraft that were lost to crashes as well as German fire. By 1917, a British fighter pilot arriving at the front had an average life expectancy of less than three months.
Up until now, those who questioned whether the war was worth the human cost had almost all come from the left end of the political spectrum. But as 1917 approached its close, such a voice unexpectedly rang out from the highest reaches of the country's hierarchy. Lord Lansdowne, a great landowner, former viceroy of India and secretary for war, had as foreign secretary years earlier forged the understanding with France that virtually ensured Britain's participation in the war. Early in the fighting he had lost a son. His doubts about battling to an unconditional victory began after the Somme. Very much a man of his class, he was particularly appalled by the number of British officers slain. "We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands...," he had written to Asquith, then prime minister. "Generations will have to come and go before the country recovers from the loss."
His misgivings only grew, and Passchendaele made him decide to go public. After the shocked Times refused to publish it, an open letter from him appeared in the Daily Telegraph on November 29, 1917. "We are not going to lose this War," Lansdowne wrote, "but its prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it." He prophetically sensed something about the future the great conflict was leading to: "Just as this war has been more dreadful than any war in history, so, we may be sure, would the next war be even more dreadful than this. The prostitution of science for purposes of pure destruction is not likely to stop short." He then laid out some proposals for a negotiated peace, including future compulsory arbitration of international disputes. Lansdowne was privy to government intelligence reports that many influential Germans and Austrians favored negotiations. He believed that Lloyd George's rhetoric about a "knock-out blow" only provided ammunition to German die-hards determined to fight to the bitter end. The Allies should strengthen the hand of "the peace party in Germany," he wrote, by offering assurances that they "do not desire the annihilation of Germany as a Great Power."
Attacked by many former colleagues and by right-wing patriots, Lansdowne was, to his bewilderment, greeted with great warmth by the socialists whom he had always found an anathema. Bertrand Russell praised his courage and, noting the fury toward Lansdowne in the mainstream press, wryly remarked, "Before long, it will probably be discovered that his great aunt was born in Kiel, or that his grandfather was an admirer of Goethe." Kipling thought Lansdowne an "old imbecile" who had taken such a cowardly position only because some woman must have "worked upon" him.
In their confidential reports on the public mood, undercover intelligence agents began speaking darkly of "Lansdownism." Many soldiers, however, wrote to Lansdowne congratulating him on his bravery. But he represented no mass of followers and sparked no new peace movement. Indeed, not long after his letter appeared, Britain and France issued a hard-line declaration explicitly shutting the door on any negotiations, something that decisively undermined moderates hoping to gain influence in Germany. And by now there was another barrier to any chance of a compromise peace: the British and French governments were counting on the millions of fresh troops promised by the United States to at last bring about an Allied victory.
Margaret Hobhouse, still campaigning for the release of her son, managed to get 26 bishops and more than 200 other clergymen to sign a statement arguing for more lenient treatment of COs. With Milner pulling strings behind the scenes, in December 1917 some 300 of the more than 1,300 COs in prison were ordered released on grounds of ill health. Stephen Hobhouse accepted his freedom, knowing it was not for him alone. Opposition to the mass release was quelled when it was agreed that Parliament would be asked to disenfranchise, for five years, conscientious objectors who had gone to jail. Milner seems to have deftly engineered this particular bargain, getting his former Kindergarten member who was editor of the Times to produce an editorial on the subject at the right moment.
The Hobhouses were a family in which, Stephen wrote, "differences of outlook were put aside." (And yet, he added, "my father could never quite forget the disgrace that his eldest son had brought upon himself.") His two brothers in the army were both home on leave, and they, Stephen, and his wife spent Christmas together in their parents' house. Paul Hobhouse, although recovered from his wounds, seemed to feel some foreboding. "I thought P. changed in tone—had lost his buoyancy," wrote a relative who saw him just before he departed for the front, "...and was more grave and silent."
Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, the Christmas season of 1917 saw a landmark in the war. To negotiate an end to hostilities between Russia and the Central Powers, a Bolshevik delegation passed through the Eastern Front under a white flag, near the ancient riverside city of Brest-Litovsk, in Russian territory now occupied by the Germans. Awaiting them in the city's sprawling red-brick fortress was a group of generals in dress-uniform spiked helmets and other officials prepared to negotiate for Germany and its allies. The Bolsheviks ushered into the fortress were unlike any other group of diplomats and negotiators in European history. The Germans and Austrians, the upper reaches of whose diplomatic services were the almost exclusive preserve of the aristocracy, were hard put to contain their astonishment.
Facing the foreign ministers of the two countries across the long negotiating table was a Bolshevik delegation headed by a bearded Jewish intellectual. Educated as a doctor, Adolph Joffe had spent part of his life in exile and, in Vienna, had undergone Freudian psychoanalysis. Another Jew high in the revolutionary movement, Lev Kamenev, was his chief associate. And to even more dramatically show the world that this was not diplomacy as usual, the remainder of the Bolshevik delegation included a worker, a soldier, a sailor, a peasant, and a woman, Anastasia Bitsenko, who had spent 17 years in Siberia for assassinating the Tsar's former minister of war. The elderly peasant, Roman Stashkov, had been included at the very last minute. Joffe and Kamenev, driving to the Petrograd railway station, had suddenly realized that, for political reasons, their delegation had to include a representative of the class that constituted the vast majority of Russia's people. They noticed the unmistakably peasant-like Stashkov walking along the street, stopped their car, found that he belonged to a left-wing party, and invited him along. The bewildered Stashkov, his enormous gray beard untrimmed, sat through the meetings at Brest-Litovsk beneath glittering chandeliers, but could not rid himself of the habit of addressing his fellow delegates, in the prerevolutionary manner, as barin, or master.
On December 15, 1917, the two delegations announced an armistice. The war between the Central Powers and Russia, which had left millions of dead and wounded and tens of thousands of square miles of devastated land, was over. The news reverberated around the world.
Russia and its former enemies immediately began protracted negotiations toward a permanent peace treaty. Hoping to speed the process along, the Germans gave a banquet, one of the more unusual on record. While the diplomats wore their high-collared formal attire and the chests of the German and Austrian generals glittered with medals, the Russian worker delegate, in everyday clothes, used his fork as a toothpick. The bearded old peasant Stashkov, unfamiliar with wine, asked which was stronger, the red or the white—and then proceeded to get cheerfully drunk. The Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, kept a close eye on Bitsenko, the assassin. "All that is taking place around her here she seems to regard with indifference," he observed. "Only when mention is made of the great principle of the International Revolution does she suddenly awake, her whole expression alters; she reminds one of a beast of prey seeing its victim at hand and preparing to fall upon it and rend it."
The Germans and Austrians had no doubt they were the prey, but were polite conversationalists nonetheless. The mild-mannered Joffe sat between Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria, the German commander in chief on the Eastern Front, and Count Czernin, who found his tone "kindly." To Czernin, Joffe said, "I hope we may be able to raise the revolution in your country too." If the entire war did not end soon, Czernin noted wryly in his diary that night, "we shall hardly need any assistance from the good Joffe, I fancy, in bringing about a revolution among ourselves; the people will manage that."